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deadpresidents · 8 days

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Road Trip

On November 8, 1960, millions of Americans went to the polls in what would become one of the closest Presidential elections in American History: John Fitzgerald Kennedy versus Richard Milhous Nixon.

That morning, Kennedy voted in Boston and Nixon voted in Whittier, California. The candidates had spent months canvassing the nation, working to get every last vote – and every last vote was needed. For the past several weeks, Kennedy and Nixon had criss-crossed the country, debated one another, and been working non-stop to be elected the 35th President of the United States.

After they voted that day, there were results to monitor, precincts to watch, election day problems to take care of, and many other things to worry about. Imagine being on the cusp of the Presidency – with a 50/50 chance of being elected the next President of a superpower in the grip of the Cold War, with the threat of Communism and nuclear weapons hanging over your head, and the hopes of hundreds of millions of people pinned on either your victory or defeat. Imagine being in the position of John F. Kennedy or Richard Nixon on November 8, 1960. What would you do?

John F. Kennedy put the control of his campaign in the hands of his younger brother, Bobby, and then took a nap.

And Richard Nixon took a road trip to Mexico.

Once Nixon voted that morning at a private home in a quiet Whittier neighborhood, he had been scheduled to head to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles (where Bobby Kennedy would be assassinated eight years later) for the Election Day vigil and the long wait for the returns which would indicate whether he would be moving into the White House or facing an early retirement.

Nixon was finished voting by 8:00 AM and hopped into his black Cadillac limousine to be driven to the Ambassador. Several blocks away from the polling place, Nixon ordered the limousine to stop. Along with a military aide and a Secret Service agent, Nixon jumped out of the limo and into a white convertible follow-up car driven by an officer from the Los Angeles Police Department. Nixon took the LAPD officer’s place, got behind the wheel and ditched the press which had been following him.

Driving to La Habra, California, Nixon made a quick visit with his mother, making sure she had voted for her son in the Presidential election. Nixon drove south along the Pacific Coast Highway, with no specific destination. He stopped for gasoline in Oceanside and told a gas station attendant – startled to see the Vice President of the United States on a joyride on the very day that he stood for election as President – “I’m just out for a little ride." Nixon confided that it was his only source of relaxation.

As the group of four men, with Nixon in the driver’s seat, reached San Diego – over two hours away from Nixon’s campaign headquarters at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel – Nixon pointed out that he hadn’t been to Tijuana in at least 25 years.

As David Pietrusza wrote in his recap of Nixon’s road trip, "Richard Nixon – the ultimate control freak – was winging it on the most important day of his life." Not only that, but the sitting Vice President of the United States and the man who many Americans were choosing to become the next President, impulsively decided to leave the entire country while those voters were still at the polls.

In Tijuana, Nixon and his party headed to a restaurant called Old Heidelberg. Despite the fact it was owned by a German, Border Patrol agents told Nixon that it was the best place in Tijuana for Mexican food. Joined at the last moment by Tijuana’s Mayor, Xicotencati Leyva Aleman, Nixon, his military aide, a Secret Service agent, and an average LAPD officer ate enchiladas in Mexico while John F. Kennedy took a nap in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.

When Nixon’s press secretary Herb Klein was asked about the missing candidate, he had to tell reporters that Nixon often took some private moments on hectic days such as Election Day. Really, though, Klein had no clue where Nixon was, eventually admitting that the Vice President was "driving around without any destination”.

After lunch in Tijuana, Nixon and his companions headed back north towards the United States border crossing. The LAPD officer took over driving duties as Nixon sat in the convertible’s passenger seat. A shocked Border Patrol guard shook hands with the Vice President and asked the man who was currently on the ballot for the Presidency, “Are you all citizens of the United States?”.

Nixon and company drove to the Mission of San Juan Capistrano, which Nixon called “one of my favorite Catholic places” on the day he faced the first successful Catholic candidate for the Presidency in American History. Nixon took his three companions on a quick, informal tour of the Mission. “For a few minutes, we sat in the empty pews for an interlude of complete escape,” Nixon later recalled.

The missing candidate and his three road trip buddies arrived back in Los Angeles before the election results started rolling in. Nixon had to explain his trip to reporters who had been searching for him all day. “It wasn’t planned. We just started driving and that’s where we wound up.”

In his Memoirs, Nixon didn’t go too far into explaining why he escaped on Election Day, but a paragraph about that day is pretty illuminating:

“After one last frenetic week, it was over. Since the convention in August I had traveled over 65,000 miles and visited all fifty states. I had made 180 scheduled speeches and delivered scores of impromptu talks and informal press conferences. There was nothing more I could have done.”

Except escape to Mexico while JFK slept.

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truthnado · 13 days

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youtube

It's time for a Truthnado! This one about the 2024 Presidential Debate. Now, you may be thinking, "Oh, have they scheduled a time for this 2024 Presidential Debate?" Well, at the time of filming, they have not. That's my first little Truthnado. There's no scheduled. presidential debate this year. And I think there should be for several reasons.

#2024 presidential debates #2024 presidential election #john f kennedy #richard nixon #Kennedy vs Nixon debate #1960 Presidential debate #Youtube

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petar1989 · 4 months

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Kennedy for president

https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/56362881-john-f-kennedy-for-president?store_id=2705515

#john f kennedy #kennedy #kennedy for president #us presidential election #us politics #2024 elections #1960s #american history #john f. kennedy #John Fitzgerald Kennedy #jfk

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anexperimentallife · 3 months

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The US far right has been working on their plan since AT LEAST the 1960s, when I was a kid listening to evangelicals talking about their plan to take over the US, and eventually the world. It's called "Christian Dominionism," and it's a fascist ideology which goes hand in glove with the GOP's plans.

Although it was not expressed so much to the world at large, this plan was OPENLY and FREQUENTLY discussed in far right circles. We kids, if we asked about it, were told that it was "God's Will." Ask any exvangelical about it, and they'll confirm. (Part of why I know so much about these dangerous and deluded folks is I WAS ONE OF THEM in my youth.)

And where has that plan gotten them? Well, the GOP recently released a hundreds of pages long document filled with their intentions if they win--including a nationwide abortion ban and a repeal of anti-discrimination laws, among other things.

Trump has already signaled his intent to create a military dictatorship if elected, by repealing laws against using the military against US citizens on US soil sp he can deploy them against dissenters, etc., and if the GOP pick up a few more congressional seats, he can do it. The GOP has already pushed to repeal presidential term limits, and Trump has indicated he'd like to be president for life.

So I'm amazed at all the people who think withholding their vote and letting the GOP win is going to somehow fix things and "push the Dems left."

You wanna know how to push US politics leftward? You're not gonna like it, because it takes actual work beyond stomping your foot and pouting and performatively showing everyone how "pure" you are by refusing to vote.

You have to start the same way the far right did (and again, they've been OPENLY talking about and pursuing this plan since I was a kid in the 1960s, AT LEAST)--they started by getting the most extreme right wingers they possibly could into any position they could. Positions like school board member, police chief, sherrif, city prosecuter, city council member, municipal judge, mayor, governor, hell, fucking dog catcher.

They encouraged far right extremists to become police officers and military personnel and work their way up the ranks to the point at which even the famously-racist FBI reported that major city police departments across the nation were pretty much taken over by members of white supremacist organizations.

In formerly reasonable churches, right wingers pushed for the hiring and training of more and more right wing pastors and mire right-wing theology.

More affluent right-wingers bought local papers and broadcasters, and as their political power grew, they changed laws to make it easier for a single entity to control the news--until now a mere handful of entities own nearly every major media outlet in the US.

And then they used every victory as leverage for the next one, and worked their way up. I mean, there's more, like the capitalization on economic and social anxiety and their inentional exacerbation of same so they could take advantage of it, but that's intertwined with the rest.

Essentially, they got this far because they put the work in.

If the US left is going to turn things around (and if it's not already too late), we've got to do the same, but it takes RESEARCHING and PROMOTING your local and state candidates, attending city council and school board meetings, and shit like that. It's actual fucking work to fix a country.

And then, after you've done all that--and after you've shown up to primaries to try to get any non-authoritarian leftist candidate you can nominated--then you vote for the leftest folks you're able to in the general. If there are no remotely leftist candidates, you vote for the centrist or right winger who will do the least damage.

Again, that's what the US far right has been doing for decades. Taking action. Wherever possible, taking new ground, but when they couldn't do that, ceding as little ground as possible. If they couldn't win, they made damn sure to do everything in their power to try to keep actual decent human beings from winning.

Actually doing the work doesn't have the emotional satisfaction of a grand gesture, but it definitely shows who is serious about making a difference and who would rather let everything burn than sully their imagined purity by voting for anything less than perfection.

Listen, Trump is not going to end the genocide in Gaza--in fact he increased tensions between the Israeli occupation and Palestine. And the GOP will never be persuaded. Hell, they want to let Russia take Ukraine and declare open season on asylum seekers.

The Dems suck. But the GOP is far, far worse, and will do MORE damage, and kill FAR MORE innocents. And if allowed to do so, will make it even harder to change the system than it is now. They've already PUBLICLY ADMITTED that their only chance of victory is keeping people from voting. Don't play into their hands.

Under current circumstances, you know what the Dems are going to do if Biden and a bunch of other Dems lose for not being pure enough? You think they'll be all like, "Oh, no! The left sure taught us a lesson by handing the country to the GOP! We'd better shift to the left!"

No. They're going to sip champagne in their multi-million dollar mansions and have meetings about how they need to move FURTHER RIGHT to win elections, because the left doesn't vote.

And if the US becomes a military dictatorship, most of the high ranking ones will simply take their fortunes and leave.

Yup, it'd sure teach ol' Joe a lesson to force him to spend the rest of his days sipping cocktails on the Riviera.

Look beyond the single battle and think strategically. That's how the GOP keeps gaining power. And refusing to act strategically is why the left is losing. We cannot take the hill we want right now. But if we lose the hills we've already taken, we risk losing the entire goddamn war.

So fucking vote. Work to get every leftist you can in any office you can. And if you can't do that, support the one who will do the least harm.

And if it takes voting for that shitbag Biden to keep Trump and the GOP out, hold your fucking nose and pull the goddamn lever.

#rob gets political

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zvaigzdelasas · 2 years

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On october 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers—a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid resolve and prudent crisis management—thanks to what Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world”—the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted.

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.

Scholars, however, have long known a very different story: since 1997, they have had access to recordings that Kennedy secretly made of meetings with his top advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the “ExComm”). Sheldon M. Stern—who was the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library for 23 years and the first scholar to evaluate the ExComm tapes—is among the numerous historians who have tried to set the record straight. His new book marshals irrefutable evidence to succinctly demolish the mythic version of the crisis. Although there’s little reason to believe his effort will be to any avail, it should nevertheless be applauded.

Reached through sober analysis, Stern’s conclusion that “John F. Kennedy and his administration, without question, bore a substantial share of the responsibility for the onset of the Cuban missile crisis” would have shocked the American people in 1962, for the simple reason that Kennedy’s administration had misled them about the military imbalance between the superpowers and had concealed its campaign of threats, assassination plots, and sabotage designed to overthrow the government in Cuba—an effort well known to Soviet and Cuban officials.

In the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy had cynically attacked Richard Nixon from the right, claiming that the Eisenhower-Nixon administration had allowed a dangerous “missile gap” to grow in the U.S.S.R.’s favor. But in fact, just as Eisenhower and Nixon had suggested—and just as the classified briefings that Kennedy received as a presidential candidate indicated—the missile gap, and the nuclear balance generally, was overwhelmingly to America’s advantage. At the time of the missile crisis, the Soviets had 36 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 138 long-range bombers with 392 nuclear warheads, and 72 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warheads (SLBMs). These forces were arrayed against a vastly more powerful U.S. nuclear arsenal of 203 ICBMs, 1,306 long-range bombers with 3,104 nuclear warheads, and 144 SLBMs—all told, about nine times as many nuclear weapons as the U.S.S.R. Nikita Khrushchev was acutely aware of America’s huge advantage not just in the number of weapons but in their quality and deployment as well.

Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance.

Moreover, despite America’s overwhelming nuclear preponderance, JFK, in keeping with his avowed aim to pursue a foreign policy characterized by “vigor,” had ordered the largest peacetime expansion of America’s military power, and specifically the colossal growth of its strategic nuclear forces. This included deploying, beginning in 1961, intermediate-range “Jupiter” nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey—adjacent to the Soviet Union. From there, the missiles could reach all of the western U.S.S.R., including Moscow and Leningrad (and that doesn’t count the nuclear-armed “Thor” missiles that the U.S. already had aimed at the Soviet Union from bases in Britain).

The Jupiter missiles were an exceptionally vexing component of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Because they sat aboveground, were immobile, and required a long time to prepare for launch, they were extremely vulnerable. Of no value as a deterrent, they appeared to be weapons meant for a disarming first strike—and thus greatly undermined deterrence, because they encouraged a preemptive Soviet strike against them. The Jupiters’ destabilizing effect was widely recognized among defense experts within and outside the U.S. government and even by congressional leaders. For instance, Senator Albert Gore Sr., an ally of the administration, told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that they were a “provocation” in a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1961 (more than a year and a half before the missile crisis), adding, “I wonder what our attitude would be” if the Soviets deployed nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba. Senator Claiborne Pell raised an identical argument in a memo passed on to Kennedy in May 1961.

Given America’s powerful nuclear superiority, as well as the deployment of the Jupiter missiles, Moscow suspected that Washington viewed a nuclear first strike as an attractive option. They were right to be suspicious. The archives reveal that in fact the Kennedy administration had strongly considered this option during the Berlin crisis in 1961.

It’s little wonder, then, that, as Stern asserts—drawing on a plethora of scholarship including, most convincingly, the historian Philip Nash’s elegant 1997 study, The Other Missiles of October—Kennedy’s deployment of the Jupiter missiles “was a key reason for Khrushchev’s decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba.” Khrushchev reportedly made that decision in May 1962, declaring to a confidant that the Americans “have surrounded us with bases on all sides” and that missiles in Cuba would help to counter an “intolerable provocation.” Keeping the deployment secret in order to present the U.S. with a fait accompli, Khrushchev may very well have assumed America’s response would be similar to his reaction to the Jupiter missiles—rhetorical denouncement but no threat or action to thwart the deployment with a military attack, nuclear or otherwise. (In retirement, Khrushchev explained his reasoning to the American journalist Strobe Talbott: Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.”)

Khrushchev was also motivated by his entirely justifiable belief that the Kennedy administration wanted to destroy the Castro regime. After all, the administration had launched an invasion of Cuba; had followed that with sabotage, paramilitary assaults, and assassination attempts—the largest clandestine operation in the history of the CIA—and had organized large-scale military exercises in the Caribbean clearly meant to rattle the Soviets and their Cuban client. Those actions, as Stern and other scholars have demonstrated, helped compel the Soviets to install the missiles so as to deter “covert or overt US attacks”—in much the same way that the United States had shielded its allies under a nuclear umbrella to deter Soviet subversion or aggression against them.

The Soviets were entirely justified in their belief that Kennedy wanted to destroy the Castro regime.

Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance. Although Kennedy asserted in his October 22 televised address that the missiles were “an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas,” he in fact appreciated, as he told the ExComm on the first day of the crisis, that “it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was 90 miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.” America’s European allies, Kennedy continued, “will argue that taken at its worst the presence of these missiles really doesn’t change” the nuclear balance. [...]

Moreover, unlike Soviet ICBMs, the missiles in Cuba required several hours to be prepared for launch. Given the effectiveness of America’s aerial and satellite reconnaissance (amply demonstrated by the images of missiles in the U.S.S.R. and Cuba that they yielded), the U.S. almost certainly would have had far more time to detect and respond to an imminent Soviet missile strike from Cuba than to attacks from Soviet bombers, ICBMs, or SLBMs. [...]

On that first day of the ExComm meetings, Bundy asked directly, “What is the strategic impact on the position of the United States of MRBMs in Cuba? How gravely does this change the strategic balance?” McNamara answered, “Not at all”—a verdict that Bundy then said he fully supported. The following day, Special Counsel Theodore Sorensen summarized the views of the ExComm in a memorandum to Kennedy. “It is generally agreed,” he noted, “that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power—i.e., they do not significantly increase the potential megatonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil, even after a surprise American nuclear strike.”

Sorensen’s comment about a surprise attack reminds us that while the missiles in Cuba did not add appreciably to the nuclear menace, they could have somewhat complicated America’s planning for a successful first strike—which may well have been part of Khrushchev’s rationale for deploying them. If so, the missiles paradoxically could have enhanced deterrence between the superpowers, and thereby reduced the risk of nuclear war.

Yet, although the missiles’ military significance was negligible, the Kennedy administration advanced on a perilous course to force their removal. The president issued an ultimatum to a nuclear power—an astonishingly provocative move, which immediately created a crisis that could have led to catastrophe. He ordered a blockade on Cuba, an act of war that we now know brought the superpowers within a hair’s breadth of nuclear confrontation. The beleaguered Cubans willingly accepted their ally’s weapons, so the Soviet’s deployment of the missiles was fully in accord with international law. But the blockade, even if the administration euphemistically called it a “quarantine,” was, the ExComm members acknowledged, illegal. As the State Department’s legal adviser recalled, “Our legal problem was that their action wasn’t illegal.” Kennedy and his lieutenants intently contemplated an invasion of Cuba and an aerial assault on the Soviet missiles there—acts extremely likely to have provoked a nuclear war. In light of the extreme measures they executed or earnestly entertained to resolve a crisis they had largely created, the American reaction to the missiles requires, in retrospect, as much explanation as the Soviet decision to deploy them—or more.

The Soviets suspected that the U.S. viewed a nuclear first strike as an attractive option. They were right to be suspicious. [...]

What largely made the missiles politically unacceptable was Kennedy’s conspicuous and fervent hostility toward the Castro regime—a stance, Kennedy admitted at an ExComm meeting, that America’s European allies thought was “a fixation” and “slightly demented.”

In his presidential bid, Kennedy had red-baited the Eisenhower-Nixon administration, charging that its policies had “helped make Communism’s first Caribbean base.” Given that he had defined a tough stance toward Cuba as an important election issue, and given the humiliation he had suffered with the Bay of Pigs debacle, the missiles posed a great [electoral] hazard to Kennedy. [...]

But even weightier than the domestic political catastrophe likely to befall the administration if it appeared to be soft on Cuba was what Assistant Secretary of State Edwin Martin called “the psychological factor” that we “sat back and let ’em do it to us.” He asserted that this was “more important than the direct threat,” and Kennedy and his other advisers energetically concurred. Even as Sorensen, in his memorandum to the president, noted the ExComm’s consensus that the Cuban missiles didn’t alter the nuclear balance, he also observed that the ExComm nevertheless believed that “the United States cannot tolerate the known presence” of missiles in Cuba “if our courage and commitments are ever to be believed by either allies or adversaries” (emphasis added). [...]

The risks of such a cave-in, Kennedy and his advisers held, were distinct but related. The first was that America’s foes would see Washington as pusillanimous; the known presence of the missiles, Kennedy said, “makes them look like they’re coequal with us and that”—here Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon interrupted: “We’re scared of the Cubans.” The second risk was that America’s friends would suddenly doubt that a country given to appeasement could be relied on to fulfill its obligations.

In fact, America’s allies, as Bundy acknowledged, were aghast that the U.S. was threatening nuclear war over a strategically insignificant condition—the presence of intermediate-range missiles in a neighboring country—that those allies (and, for that matter, the Soviets) had been living with for years. In the tense days of October 1962, being allied with the United States potentially amounted to, as Charles de Gaulle had warned, “annihilation without representation.” It seems never to have occurred to Kennedy and the ExComm that whatever Washington gained by demonstrating the steadfastness of its commitments, it lost in an erosion of confidence in its judgment.

This approach to foreign policy was guided—and remains guided—by an elaborate theorizing rooted in a school-playground view of world politics rather than the cool appraisal of strategic realities. It put—and still puts—America in the curious position of having to go to war to uphold the very credibility that is supposed to obviate war in the first place.

If the administration’s domestic political priorities alone dictated the removal of the Cuban missiles, a solution to Kennedy’s problem would have seemed pretty obvious: instead of a public ultimatum demanding that the Soviets withdraw their missiles from Cuba, a private agreement between the superpowers to remove both Moscow’s missiles in Cuba and Washington’s missiles in Turkey. (Recall that the Kennedy administration discovered the missiles on October 16, but only announced its discovery to the American public and the Soviets and issued its ultimatum on the 22nd.)

The administration, however, did not make such an overture to the Soviets. Instead, by publicly demanding a unilateral Soviet withdrawal and imposing a blockade on Cuba, it precipitated what remains to this day the most dangerous nuclear crisis in history. In the midst of that crisis, the sanest and most sensible observers—among them diplomats at the United Nations and in Europe, the editorial writers for the Manchester Guardian, Walter Lippmann, and Adlai Stevenson—saw a missile trade as a fairly simple solution. In an effort to resolve the impasse, Khrushchev himself openly made this proposal on October 27. According to the version of events propagated by the Kennedy administration (and long accepted as historical fact), Washington unequivocally rebuffed Moscow’s offer and instead, thanks to Kennedy’s resolve, forced a unilateral Soviet withdrawal.

Beginning in the late 1980s, however, the opening of previously classified archives and the decision by a number of participants to finally tell the truth revealed that the crisis was indeed resolved by an explicit but concealed deal to remove both the Jupiter and the Cuban missiles. Kennedy in fact threatened to abrogate if the Soviets disclosed it. He did so for the same reasons that had largely engendered the crisis in the first place—domestic politics and the maintenance of America’s image as the indispensable nation. A declassified Soviet cable reveals that Robert Kennedy—whom the president assigned to work out the secret swap with the U.S.S.R.’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin—insisted on returning to Dobrynin the formal Soviet letter affirming the agreement, explaining that the letter “could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future.”

Only a handful of administration officials knew about the trade; most members of the ExComm, including Vice President Lyndon Johnson, did not. And in their effort to maintain the cover-up, a number of those who did, including McNamara and Rusk, lied to Congress. JFK and others tacitly encouraged the character assassination of Stevenson, allowing him to be portrayed as an appeaser who “wanted a Munich” for suggesting the trade—a deal that they vociferously maintained the administration would never have permitted.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts.”

The patient spadework of Stern and other scholars has since led to further revelations. Stern demonstrates that Robert Kennedy hardly inhabited the conciliatory and statesmanlike role during the crisis that his allies described in their hagiographic chronicles and memoirs and that he himself advanced in his posthumously published book, Thirteen Days. In fact, he was among the most consistently and recklessly hawkish of the president’s advisers, pushing not for a blockade or even air strikes against Cuba but for a full-scale invasion as “the last chance we will have to destroy Castro.” Stern authoritatively concludes that “if RFK had been president, and the views he expressed during the ExComm meetings had prevailed, nuclear war would have been the nearly certain outcome.” He justifiably excoriates the sycophantic courtier Schlesinger, whose histories “repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts” and whose accounts—“profoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive”—were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys.

Although Stern and other scholars have upended the panegyrical version of events advanced by Schlesinger and other Kennedy acolytes, the revised chronicle shows that JFK’s actions in resolving the crisis—again, a crisis he had largely created—were reasonable, responsible, and courageous. Plainly shaken by the apocalyptic potentialities of the situation, Kennedy advocated, in the face of the bellicose and near-unanimous opposition of his pseudo-tough-guy advisers, accepting the missile swap that Khrushchev had proposed. “To any man at the United Nations, or any other rational man, it will look like a very fair trade,” he levelheadedly told the ExComm. “Most people think that if you’re allowed an even trade you ought to take advantage of it.” He clearly understood that history and world opinion would condemn him and his country for going to war—a war almost certain to escalate to a nuclear exchange—after the U.S.S.R. had publicly offered such a reasonable quid pro quo. Khrushchev’s proposal, the historian Ronald Steel has noted, “filled the White House advisors with consternation—not least of all because it appeared perfectly fair.” [...]

By successfully hiding the deal from the vice president, from a generation of foreign-policy makers and strategists, and from the American public, Kennedy and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, and the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, makes for a successful national-security strategy—really, all but defines it.

The president and his advisers also reinforced the concomitant view that America should define a threat not merely as circumstances and forces that directly jeopardize the safety of the country, but as circumstances and forces that might indirectly compel potential allies or enemies to question America’s resolve.[...]

This notion that standing up to aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) will deter future aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) fails to weather historical scrutiny. [...]

Moreover, the idea that a foreign power’s effort to counter the overwhelming strategic supremacy of the United States—a country that spends nearly as much on defense as does the rest of the world combined—ipso facto imperils America’s security is profoundly misguided. Just as Kennedy and his advisers perceived a threat in Soviet efforts to offset what was in fact a destabilizing U.S. nuclear hegemony, so today, both liberals and conservatives oxymoronically assert that the safety of the United States demands that the country must “balance” China by maintaining its strategically dominant position in East Asia and the western Pacific—that is, in China’s backyard. This means that Washington views as a hazard Beijing’s attempts to remedy the weakness of its own position, even though policy makers acknowledge that the U.S. has a crushing superiority right up to the edge of the Asian mainland. America’s posture, however, reveals more about its own ambitions than it does about China’s. Imagine that the situation were reversed, and China’s air and naval forces were a dominant and potentially menacing presence on the coastal shelf of North America. Surely the U.S. would want to counteract that preponderance. In a vast part of the globe, stretching from the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego and from Greenland to Guam, the U.S. will not tolerate another great power’s interference. Certainly America’s security wouldn’t be jeopardized if other great powers enjoy their own (and for that matter, smaller) spheres of influence.

This esoteric strategizing—this misplaced obsession with credibility, this dangerously expansive concept of what constitutes security—which has afflicted both Democratic and Republican administrations, and both liberals and conservatives, is the antithesis of statecraft, which requires discernment based on power, interest, and circumstance. It is a stance toward the world that can easily doom the United States to military commitments and interventions in strategically insignificant places over intrinsically trivial issues. It is a stance that can engender a foreign policy approximating paranoia in an obdurately chaotic world abounding in states, personalities, and ideologies that are unsavory and uncongenial—but not necessarily mortally hazardous.

2013

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anamericangirl · 7 months

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1. You're delusional. No one is forcing kids to be LGBTQ

2. The party switch was a real thing that did happen. In the 1960s, the parties switched on the issue of civil rights. This is evident from that fact that republicans gained political control of the south, the kkk becoming majority republican, the kkk support every republican presidential candidate in every election since 1960, and the lost cause ideology being purported and repeated by southern republicans.

Wow so basically you just believe whatever you’re told to believe regardless of what reality is. Unfortunately for you it takes more than “that’s not true” to convince me of something but I know that’s the strongest argument you’ve got because you know you’re wrong.

The big switch didn’t happen and if you actually looked at history and didn’t just believe whatever the tv tells you then you would know that.

Voter base changed, platforms and values did not.

The democrats have always been the racist party. They were at their founding and they remain so today. Every racist policy and law you’ve ever heard of was a democrat policy and you can’t erase that by pretending the parties just swapped sides and now everything the democrats did is the republicans fault. I know a lot of people like to say that happened but looking at history proves it wrong.

So stop trying to excuse racism and blame it on the party that isn’t responsible for it.

But I do love how you tried to prove the big switch by only having the KKK as an example as if they are a prominent group in the US and how they vote and their history is all that matters when talking about the history of the two party system lol.

#anon #answered

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dykeseesgod · 18 days

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#🫀

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thenewdemocratus · 8 months

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The Jack Paar Show: Senator John F. Kennedy (1960)

Source:The New Democrat Jack Kennedy running for president in 1960 because he thought it was the most important job in the world. And that if he was going to be able to do the most for his country, serving in Congress even both in the House and Senate that he did for a total of fourteen-years in Congress was not going to be good enough. That he needed to be President of the United States and…

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jstor · 7 months

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On this day in 1960, the first televised U.S. presidential debate occurred between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon–impacting United States presidential election cycles for decades into the future.

This article by David Greenberg describes the ritual of presidential debates and their role (or lack thereof) in the selection of United States presidents.

Image: Students watch the 1960 Presidential debates in Mather Hall Student Center (Trinity College, Hartford Connecticut). From the Trinity College Archival Images collection on JSTOR.

#this is the kind of stuff i studied in college so forgive the special interest #JSTOR #american government #american history #presidential elections #presidential debates #open access #research #media studies

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deadpresidents · 5 months

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Jackie Kennedy Responds to Richard Nixon

In my essay, Waking Up In Dallas, I noted that John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who faced off in the 1960 Presidential election, had once been close friends dating back to when they were freshmen in Congress in 1947. Although their relationship was changed by the 1960 Presidential campaign, Nixon was deeply troubled by Kennedy's assassination and wrote Jacqueline Kennedy this letter hours after President Kennedy's death:

Dear Jackie, In this tragic hour Pat and I want you to know that our thoughts and prayers are with you. While the hand of fate made Jack and me political opponents I always cherished the fact that we were personal friends from the time we came to the Congress together in 1947. That friendship evidenced itself in many ways including the invitation we received to attend your wedding. Nothing I could say now could add to the splendid tributes which have come from throughout the world to him. But I want you to know that the nation will also be forever grateful for your service as First Lady. You brought to the White House charm, beauty and elegance as the official hostess of America, and the mystique of the young in heart which was uniquely yours made an indelible impression on the American consciousness. If in the days ahead we could be helpful in any way we shall be honored to be at your command. Sincerely, Dick Nixon

Several weeks later, the widowed former First Lady responded to Nixon's letter. Jackie's response was handwritten, featuring the odd punctuation she often used in her handwritten notes, and remarkably prophetic. A year earlier, Nixon had announced that he was leaving politics after a disastrous loss in a bid to become Governor of California. Coming just two years after his narrow defeat to JFK, Nixon's political career looked to be finished. He and his family moved to New York where Nixon joined a prestigious law firm and seemed to be removing himself from the political world.

Even in the midst of her mourning, Jackie recognized that JFK's death might be the opening Nixon would need to make a political comeback and finally realize his goal of becoming President. Jackie might have recognized this before Nixon did himself. Her political instincts were sharp and her foresight was incredible, but her letter was also heartbreaking as she warned of the dangers that could come with the Presidential prize:

(Punctuation, phrasing, and spelling is as it was in Jackie's original handwritten letter.)

Dear Mr. Vice President -- I do thank you for your most thoughtful letter -- You two young men -- colleagues in Congress -- adversaries in 1960 -- and now look what has happened -- Whoever thought such a hideous thing could happen in this country -- I know how you must feel -- so long on the path -- so closely missing the greatest prize -- and now for you, all the question comes up again -- and you must commit all you and your family's hopes and efforts again -- Just one thing I would say to you --if it does not work out as you have hoped for so long -- please be consoled by what you already have -- your life and your family -- We never value life enough when we have it -- and I would not have had Jack live his life any other way -- thought I know his death could have been prevented, and I will never cease to torture myself with that -- But if you do not win -- please think of all that you have -- With my appreciation -- and my regards to your family. I hope your daughters love Chapin School as much as I did -- Sincerely Jacqueline Kennedy

Jackie Kennedy's predictions in her heart-wrenching letter were correct. In 1968, Nixon was elected President.

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radiofreederry · 11 months

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Happy birthday, Jose Mujica! (May 20, 1935)

President of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015, Jose "Pepe" Mujica was born in the capital city of Montevideo, and became active in radical politics in the 1960s when, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, he joined the Tupamaros – National Liberation Movement, a left-wing guerilla group. Engaging in protracted insurgency against the government, Mujica was captured and escaped prison multiple times throughout the 1970s and 1980s, before being released on amnesty in 1985. Soon after, Mujica entered the electoral arena under the banner of the Broad Front coalition, and the charismatic Mujica quickly became a leader of the left in Uruguay. Mujica's election in 2010 was part of a "pink tide" of left-wing electoral success in Latin America, and as President he pursued progressive policies such as the legalization of marijuana and raising the minimum wage. He also became known for his thrifty and simple lifestyle while in office, declining to live in the presidential palace and using a 1987 Volkswagen Beetle as his transportation.

"It is a mistake to think that power comes from above, when it comes from within the hearts of the masses."

#birthdays #pepe mujica

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directdogman · 1 year

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I needed to ask this because i couldnt sleep

is Norm conservative?

because on one side it would make sense due to his patriotism and his age. But on the other hand if he was i think he would have acted way diffrent and atleast after the thirdchapter it seems out of place.

So please answer the question so i can sleep

The detailed answer to this question is very long, so I'll put it behind a 'read more' line so this doesn't clog up anyone's timeline.

The shorter answer to this question is: Norm's political beliefs cannot be summarized using any single commonly understood word from our 21st century vocabularies because his stances, alongside what Norm considers political/apolitical topics, don't align entirely with 21st century definitions/standards as Norm is a time traveler from the mid 20th century.

He isn’t a 21st century conservative as much as perhaps an early 20th century one, with a few stances that were considered progressive/radical for that time. Many aspects of the character that we’d consider conservative weren’t in his time, and were only regularly politicized by one side of the political aisle years after he warped. If you want a longer answer where I point out where exactly this blurs the line, read more:

The problem with this question (and most political discussions) in general is that most people don't read up on political history for fun and so, they naturally associate words like 'conservative', 'liberal', 'socialist' with the rhetoric/stances of whoever is currently using those labels in their society. Most people reading this would look at, for instance, the modern Republican party in America and say "oh, that's a Conservative."

Now, here's the problem: Norm grew up largely in the 1930′s and warped in the 1960's, society as a whole was radically different. One big difference is, for example, religion. Norm believes in God, and this is something that’s considered old-fashioned by many. It's pretty unfashionable to be religious nowadays in many places, but in most of 20th century America, it was a far bigger deal not to be. Nowadays, religion is something that's associated with the right more than the left, but in the early to mid 20th century, both parties were extremely religious.

Democratic political machines were dominated by Catholics in the early 20th century. Democratic presidential candidates Al Smith and JFK (the latter of whom was elected in the decade Norm came from) were Catholics, and it actually mattered to many voters. William Jennings Bryan (3 times Democratic nominee) was also immensely religious. Even the far-left fringe elements of the party had religious thought leaders, with Father Coughlin (a priest with a radio show) influencing far-left 30's Democrats. I could go on. Republican party also produced quite a few deeply religious presidents, with Garfield and Eisenhower coming to mind. A large portion of the population was deeply religious for most of the nation’s history, after all, and the religious beliefs of candidates mattered far more than today. So, for his time, Norm's religion is something that wasn't politically partisan, but rather, broadly essential, and as such, Norm would find it strange that anyone would assume that his religious beliefs correlate with his political beliefs at all.

Economically, America has changed so much in the 20th century that the issues at the start of the century are unrecognizable to us now. In 1900, the core economic issues were whether to back the dollar with just gold, or with gold and silver... oh, and the tariff. Exciting. No welfare net existed because income taxes largely didn't exist. The Federal Reserve didn't even exist yet! Tariffs (taxes on foreign goods) were the main source of federal income. What we consider to be normal governmental function was considered radical by many back then.

Similarly, it's important to note that the modern welfare state as we know it today was created in the 1940's with the advent of Social Security (AKA, in Norm’s lifetime) and only expanded to something resembling what we have today very incrementally, with many large developments happening under president Johnson in the mid 1960's... After Norm jumped.

Gun control (especially in sparsely populated states like Arizona) was basically a non-topic, and the only major federal gun control legislation that I know of being passed in the first half of the 20th century was a 30's crime bill that outlawed heavy machine guns + sawed offs, specifically related to organized crime tied to prohibition era organized crime. Norm loves guns, but he’d be profoundly disturbed to learn about how many mass shootings America has had in the last 20 years and wouldn’t just be able to hand-wave it away as normal, as our society has... because outside of the fucked up racist mass shootings of the 20′s (like Tulsa, but there were many also more smaller ones the same decade too), mass shooting weren’t a constant occurrence! NUTS, RIGHT??

Next, there’s Norm's patriotism, which your question implied pointed towards him being a conservative, but like his religion, this is an apolitical trait from Norm's time. Norm lived through World War II and the Red Scare, times when patriotism wasn't just popular, hell, not acting like Donald Duck in a 40's WWII propaganda cartoon meant you could go to PRISON. Media was also heavily controlled by governmental/anti-communist entities at this time, with the government financing pro-American/anti-communist films in the 50′s and Ronald Reagan serving as leader of the Actor’s Guild. Communists were rooted out systematically and to Norm, keeping a loaded firearm next to your bed in case a ‘communist’ breaks into your home is entirely normal and he refuses to cut it out. Poor guy’s scared shitless.

Norm does have a distaste for 'big government' and wasteful spending, partially explained by the time he came from, where taking taxes for public spending was still considered a more radical idea, but also, Norm's extras sheet gives even more essential context to this mentality with the explanation that he was raised in the middle of bumfuck nowhere by a single mother. Growing up, self-reliance was a necessity, not a virtue. His attitude towards governments basically amounts to "Leave me the FUCK alone." He values resilience, charity and discipline because these values are what enabled him to survive growing up.

Norm also grew up in the wilderness, so he enjoyed a lot of freedom growing up that is arguably impossible in urban areas, in his own time and especially today. Most of his stances come from the belief that the common person is inherently good (a belief that he temporarily abandoned after the warp, and Gingi managed to restore), and that political power structures solely exist so those who are already rich can stuff their pockets at the expense of taxpayers. Norm considered both of the two parties of his time to be corrupt and self-serving, and would say the same of them today, which is why Callum Crown’s third party populist rhetoric, and returning control of the US economy to working class people really resonated with Norm.

When asking why someone like Norm would support Crown’s movement, it’s important to note that Callum softened his socialist rhetoric as a national candidate. Norm also didn’t know all of Callum’s stances/beliefs (and realistically lied to himself slightly about some of them.) Norm also missed the end of Crown’s presidency, having to educate himself with revisionist sources after the warp. But, it would be dishonest not to mention in a complete answer to this question that Norm supported the single least conservative candidate in US history (in DT’s universe) for president because he felt it was the right thing to do.

Norm’s beliefs largely boil down to believing that individuals know best how to live their own lives and that as long as you aren’t hurting yourself or others, it’s none of his business. It’s his core tenet, really. He gets very modest when intimate subjects are brought up around him and the last thing he wants is to know what anyone does in the bedroom. Norm isn’t a homophobe or against gay marriage because... well, why would he be? There’s plenty of modern behaviour that is prohibited in the bible and the idea of legislating based on selectively chosen religious beliefs is abhorrent to Norm because he was raised in a secular America and values personal freedom. Norm would be profoundly disturbed that the conservative party of today considers this an issue at all. Christian or not, the guy hates any and all unnecessary governmental restrictions. All references to God were only added to the pledge of allegiance/onto money when he was an adult, a move that was done for exclusively political reasons, since it was the height of the cold war, and Marxism opposes organized religion.

Norm is also vehemently opposed to any form of elitism, never forgetting where he came from. His main desire is for others to just coexist and be understanding, without cheating/wronging each other. Norm downplays it, but a trait many forget is that Norm is very well educated. He was in NASA and has a background with mathematics and physics. Occasionally, big words slip out when Norm speaks. Norm was bullied somewhat in academia for how he speaks, fostering a deep distaste for the environment. Norm enjoys debate, discussion of topics. He would broadly support the causes of social movements today that aim to secure rights for minority groups, believing everyone has a right to be free/happy, but would have fundamental issues with the lack of accountability of most of them due to their lack of organization. His distaste for academia would absolutely foster hatred for activists who overuse ideological language.

When I was building Norm’s political profile in my head, I actually looked to Mark Twain for inspiration, who was quoted as saying: “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.“ This sums up Norm’s patriotism, really. He, too, believed in the wisdom of the common man. Twain is also someone you can’t really put into a political box, describing himself as both ‘conservative’ (by the definition he had at the time) but also ‘radical’. Twain was racially progressive for his time and tended to support the Republican party (the racially progressive party of the two in his time), but split with the party in 1884 over the political corruption of their candidate that year, and outspokenly spoke out against McKinley + Roosevelt’s imperialist foreign policy.

So, with all of that context out of the way, here’s the final answer to your question: Norm would’ve broadly been considered a conservative by the definition/standards of his own time for his economic views (which are more conservative now), progressive for his social views (which are just kinda normal now), and has fundamental enough differences with the beliefs/aims of the conservative movement in America today that he would not want to be lumped in with modern day conservatives. If he was in politics today, he’d be trying to start a populist grassroots movement and support breaking down the two party system. Hope this was informative! I know a lot of people like Norm, so the last thing I’d want is people thinking Norm was something he wasn’t.

#dialtown

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