Autumn Fundraiser 2013, Day 5
Everything is relative, isn’t it? For Gates of Vienna, it’s the fifth day of our Autumn 2013 Fundraiser, one of the most successful to date. Frankly, it’s puzzling: GoV is a dot in the blogosphere, times are hard, etc., so the robust response is a startling (though welcome) surprise.
Actually, every quarter we’re surprised at our donors’ generosity, but recently there’s been a new trend leading up to our Week Octave of Blegging. Before we can even get things together to announce the fundraiser, donations begin coming in, notes attached. Some folks are concerned they might have missed the whole thing so they send amends and money; others say they want to nudge us to get it going before some date interferes that might interfere with our success. In this case, several people mentioned the approach of both Thanksgiving and Hanukkah as possible obstacles to our success.
That proves y’all know us very well by now; “late” is part and parcel of our modus operandi… not purposely, but simply because life keeps interfering. Thus, our blog life is but a logical extension of real life, that place where we’re notoriously late for most events. Heck even our posts about “current” events are behind the curve.
But now we pause at this intersection where real life crosses paths with our stated mission of cultural remembrances.
Today America — and to some extent the larger world — observes the anniversary of the assassination of our 35th president. Every American who had reached the age of reason in 1963 can tell you where he was when life came to a shuddering halt. Our gaze was fixed on those endlessly repeated images of John Kennedy’s body, flung back from the force of the bullet smashing his skull on that Dallas roadway, of what appeared to be Mrs. Kennedy’s pathetic, horrified attempts to retrieve fragments of her husband’s head, of the endless wait at the hospital for word.
That was a place, that was a time, that was an event which sent our country spiraling in a new direction on the Garden of Forking Paths. In a moment we were all changed. Those changes were central to our sense of our selves and of our nation. Our participation in Kennedy’s death and interment took place outside of time. Television, an extension of Self by that point, permitted a national ‘sacred’ space where everyone could participate and mourn together.
As Lincoln’s assassination had done a century before, one of the consequences of Kennedy’s sudden death was a severe course correction in our national life. There was a radical change in both the process and the content of domestic affairs and of foreign events. The former led to a massively Newer Deal, a huge potlatch of entitlement programs that set the Democratic party on the road to dominance by voting for benefits that de Tocqueville warned would be our undoing. It also led to the destruction of black culture and the black family. Johnson was a wily politician; he knew at least partially what he did in buying those votes. Could he have foreseen the endgame of his policies, i.e., our unmanageable debt and deficit? Those are the questions which haunt our “what-might-have-beens”.
In foreign affairs we made a thorough mess of Vietnam. Kennedy was a World War II man who inherited the situation in Vietnam from a World War II heavyweight. Eisenhower was preceding cautiously; he knew the real story of what had happened in Berlin and in Korea. He was unlikely to have upped the stakes in Southeast Asia.
Kennedy might have made an adequate commander-in-chief in a conventional war. But in a small civil war where we fought Russia by proxy? That wasn’t in his skill set. His generals, too, understood conventional wars. Despite the post-dated “conflict” in Korea’s civil war in the 1950s, Kennedy’s military had no feel nor understanding of next-generation warfare as it first flared in Vietnam. We had neither China’s thousands of years of intrigue, nor an adequate understanding of guerilla warfare.
And we certainly had little understanding of our allies in South Vietnam. Kennedy was never prepared for the convoluted layers of the French-Catholic culture embedded in the colonial experience of that country. He was naïve in the same way he had been in allowing himself and our military to be pulled into the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. With the Cubans in exile egging him on — and who knows what dreams of glory — Kennedy simply wasn’t seasoned enough to manage the contingencies of a poorly-planned and even more poorly executed “invasion” to bring down Castro’s Communist regime at the Playa Giron:
Decision for Disaster: Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs
In both situations he was saddled with the help of the CIA’s covert activities. Dealing in black ops far over his head, Kennedy was swimming in the deeps with those sharks. These were their home waters and they all knew the shoals and hiding places much better than any president ever learns. In short, they swam circles around Kennedy. In 1961, the debacle at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba should have served to inform him of two basic facts: (1) He was out of his league in covert operations against other sovereign states, and (2) our CIA is often filled with rogue actors who can foul the best of plans. Given what transpired in November 1963 with the killings of the Diem brothers, it may have been he’d learned something. We’ll never know.
America has never been skilled at statecraft in the old European tradition and we never will be. Our form of government isn’t geared for that, nor is our character suited to those ancient games. Had we stayed true to the King, we could’ve been like Canada, with no need to make it on our own. But that is not in our character either, so we stumble through as best we can. In the beginning we paid for our costly mistakes and we learned. However, it has been the case for at least a hundred years that we are big enough to do as we please and let the devil take the hindmost. Under the tutelage of our current president, that is beginning to change. His huge mistakes and misadventures have soured his subjects on his many excellent, expensive, and seemingly random failures adventures.
In domestic affairs, Kennedy left us with another killing legacy that has limped on after him, destroying countless lives and reducing many to an existence as homeless prey for the underclass criminals who steal from them or simply beat them up “for fun”.
In 1963, with the best of big government Democrat intentions, Kennedy signed a national mental health care bill that would see the ruin of a system of state mental hospitals. They were to be replaced with a ambitious, idealistic community-based program where mental patients could be treated closer to home, out of “institutions” and in what would be called Community Mental Health Care Centers.
This grandiose idea was as ill-conceived and poorly funded as the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.
Previous to federal interference, states ran their own mental health care systems. Some were better than others, but probably none were as bad as what has replaced them, certainly not as far as the families of the mentally ill are concerned.
I have worked with two of these Community Service Boards in two separate federal catchment areas, which are designated by number. If you live in the United States, you live within a “catchment area”, and if you need services you must receive them there.
For cities and towns that have the money, some of these Centers aren’t bad. Some areas, not so wealthy, provide bare-bones dismal facilities. In all of them, psychiatric outpatient services are scant: brief medication reviews lasting fifteen minutes at most. Social workers with case loads that would burden Sisyphus do the best they can. By caseload I mean a hundred moderately to severely mentally ill “consumers” (all people who access federally-funded ‘entitlement’ programs are aptly termed “consumers”. That word replaced “clients” as previously it had replaced “patients”, this last deemed too ‘medical’’ and not a positive designation. And “consumer” is better? Well, at least the latest is the most accurate, for these folks do not produce anything; they’re too ill to do so. But they do consume a lot of services and the time of hapless, burned-out workers).
The Heritage Foundation recently ran a report — a plea — to end this charade. Here is the abstract:
Fifty years ago, America began a grand experiment by transferring to the federal government the fiscal responsibility for individuals with mental illnesses. During that half-century, it has become increasingly clear that the experiment has been a costly failure, both in terms of human lives and in terms of dollars. The outcome was, in fact, clear as early as 1984, when the chief architect of the federal community mental health centers program proclaimed it to be a failure: “The result is not what we intended, and perhaps we didn’t ask the questions that should have been asked when developing a new concept….” Bringing sanity to our present mental health system is dependent on one essential change: Return the primary responsibility for such services to the states.
For those of us who understand the growing problem we face with the legion of mentally ill youngsters, please read the bullet points at the link above.
This is a vitally important problem, one that needs immediate remediation if we want to see the random mass murder totals go down. They are not a function of our gun laws. Almost without exception these random killings are carried out by mentally ill young males. These fellows “fall through the cracks” because, thanks to our miserably inadequate federal mental health care system, all we have left are cracks.
Here in Virginia this week, we witnessed the suicide of a young man after he (probably) thought he’d killed his father by stabbing him repeatedly. The father, Creigh Deeds, is a well-known and respected state politician. As other pols were interviewed they sent coded messages about Austin, the son, saying things like “Creigh Deeds is a good man. He worked hard for years to help his son, Gus. We send our prayers and condolences, blah blah…”
The initial story was that Mr. Deeds and his wife tried to have his mentally ill twenty-four year-old son admitted to a psychiatric facility the day before his suicide/stabbing. Legally, a person can only be held for six hours with a temporary detaining order (it used to be 24 hours. Perhaps that has changed?). At any rate, they couldn’t find a psychiatric bed for this man/child, and so he was brought home. The next day he stabbed his father repeatedly and in a fashion he probably thought fatal before he shot himself, dying a little while later. The father was air-lifted to the University of Virginia Hospital. Initially his condition was listed as “critical” but it has since been downgraded to “fair”. Now The Washington Post has a report that several area treatment facilities did have beds but were never contacted. And the big guns are hot on the trail, after the fact:
“We’re going to investigate the circumstances that led up to Austin Deeds’s release at the expiration of the emergency custody order,” said G. Douglas Bevelacqua of the Office of the Inspector General.
That sad family story is one of thousands of unintended consequences set in motion by President Kennedy’s radical shift in federalizing mental health care.
Except in Democrat circles, the myth of the Kennedys’ Camelot, created out of whole cloth by the family with the help of the mainstream media, has long since been reduced to rubble. Bill Clinton tried to resurrect it, but too many bimbo eruptions — more than even the press could contain — sank that project early on. It might have helped had his wife been a more sympathetic figure. At any rate, it’s mostly gone and that’s a good thing. We ought always to prefer reality to gauzy myth. Reality is actually far more interesting.
What started me on this road in American culture was my realization that we’d come to the golden anniversary of the Kennedy Remembrance Machine. The statues are tarnished now. Well, they always were, once the press stopped spit-shining the haloes.
It came together for me with a brief essay at the Diplomad, sent in an email by one of our subscribers.
The Diplomad says of the New Kennedy:
The current disaster we have in the White House is the child of the Kennedy era. He is the rebirth of the demand for coolness and hipness as the primary qualifications for the most important job in the world. As was discovered by the abandoned Cuban freedom fighters on Playa Giron; by our veterans of Vietnam as well as by the people of South Vietnam; by our people in Benghazi; by our friends and allies around the world; and now by millions of ordinary Americans watching as their health insurance plans collapse and their jobs go away, there is a real world price to be paid for making hipness and coolness the requirements for the presidency. That is the legacy of JFK and the modern day liberals who so admire him.
Obama is not only the child of the Kennedy era, he is its logical successor. Incompetent, rewarded by life for looking the part, impulsive and lazy, all he has in his favor is that he’s not on drugs. However, at least Kennedy left us the well-meaning Peace Corps, through which thousands of idealistic young Americans have passed. The only thing Obama is going to leave behind are thousands of resentful and murderously rageful ‘sons’ plus a medical care program even more destructive and ill-conceived than our mental illness program. If anything, ObamaCare will drive many of us to the Poor House and the Funny Farm.
Oh…except Kennedy got rid of the latter. How convenient for BHO.
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Dymphna, you have just posted one very thought provoking post! Of all the years I have been able to visit here I have to say that this is probably the most interesting and emotional topic that I have been able to personally involve myself in, because I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing the day that JFK was eliminated, or to be more precise, terminated!
I say that, because to assassinate a figurehead is invariably a political motive. JFK was not eliminated due to his political persuasion or perceived ambitions, but due to his decision to expose what he found out when he became president in January 1961.
Was he naïve to the ways of the world? I would say very much so!
But we shouldn’t confuse or denigrate his naivety for what he considered was right! And we may see his naivety as a warning of his intentions to his enemies that he inadvertently gave at a conference of the American Newspaper Association in April 1961 that he expected as President to what they, the media should adhere to.
People forget that he was under a lot of pressure by the alphabet soup of spy agencies to legislate for some form of control over the freedoms of the press. He chose not to enforce any limits! That in itself should be an understanding of what he meant when he mentioned ‘secret societies’ in his speech on that day.
I don’t have a link here, but his speech on that day is very enlightening, especially if taken in the previous context of the speech that President Eisenhower gave only three months before at his farewell which warned of the dangers of letting loose the military/industrial complex.
In simple terms, he could not tolerate the status quo that promoted governmental secrecy above that of public awareness and the encroachment of communistic ideals that was making itself manifest to those who lived by the American Constitution. In short, he was convinced that America was being white-anted from within and this thinking included his brother, who as his then attorney general, would be terminated at a later time.
I believe Kennedy, for all his failings as a human being, was still a patriotic American who has been systematically and politically maligned by those who know the real reason for why he was killed.
I also believe that the day Kennedy was killed is the day that America, as to what is was originally envisioned to be, alas it to say, died!
America has never been skilled at statecraft in the old European tradition and we never will be. Our form of government isn’t geared for that, nor is our character suited to those ancient games.
How long before the clash between European subtlety and American sophistication in the geopolitical simulator?
Your comment is too subtle for me.
Where has this “American sophistication” shown itself? In the stereotype of the Ugly American perhaps?
That we were powerful for a while was simply the result of serendipity: having gathered onto our shores the cream of Europe’s restless adventurers, we hadn’t yet ossified ourselves with endlessly byzantine government regulations of commerce. Those newcomers and their descendants were free here to give rein to the entreprenurial genius, incubated in Europe’s rich culture, but suppressed in those same countries. We were the fortunate inheritors. However, once our government created a new Europe, we ran into the same walls those immigrants had experienced at home.
Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future
Again, pardon my failure to understand your message, but what is a “geopolitical simulator”?
I believe Rouge may have misused the phrase. It’s a game people play instead of dealing with reality.
http://www.geopolitical-simulator.com/
I borrowed a copy of “Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future”. I live in Europe I disagreed with some points it made. Actually I thought it was the other way around, that Europe was becoming more like America, our insurance is becoming more expensive and we are getting less for it – the American model. We now have license-plate readers positioned everywhere in the country, courtesy of American companies, spy cameras everywhere, Monsanto trying to move in to the gmo markets, American style police state characteristics also moving in, etc
“Had we stayed true to the King, we could’ve been like Canada, with no need to make it on our own”.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Canada, Australia, New Zealand and others are not independent self governing countries?
The mindset that gave the US the Vietnam debacle, and the Iraq/Afghanistan debacles is the mindset of thuggery. US politicians and State Dept. bureaucrats don’t care to understand these places because they feel innately superior, because they have enough military to push people around, to impose their will. It is exactly the same mentality as the bully and the wife beater; I beat her because I can!
If you want to be terrified look at some of the military think tank type blogs and what they say about the coming conflict with China. We are on path to get a major ass kicking, and we will deserve it!
“Had we stayed true to the King, we could’ve been like Canada, with no need to make it on our own”.
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
You failed to add the second part of that equation.
However, that crucial omission aside, IF we had been able to maintain ourselves as a Commonwealth in the same ways that Canada, Australia, and New Zealand did, we would have been a very different entity, and that was my point. If you see any denigration of the British commonwealths in my observation, that is your editing, not my intention.
Actually, there would be no Canada in and of itself, the North American Commonwealth would have taken the whole continent … and no doubt even more of Mexico than America did.
On the other hand, the Louisana Purchase probably would never have occurred as France would have been very much opposed giving that much territory to a real country like England rather than to the fledgling U.S.A., for which it hadn’t much respect. Thus, much of the Mississippi would’ve been far more French than it is. Think Quebec, only much larger and even more sensitive, whole swaths would now be more clearly Francophone rather than the very small Cajun area’s patois.
Spain couldn’t have retained Florida, not faced with the continental might of England. Had we stayed with England – and there was strong, robust Loyalist dissent against the Rebellion even after we succeeded in the break away – we would’ve become an even more successful commerical enterprise since we’d have had the protection of England on the seas. There would’ve been no need to divert monies into building a navy. If King George had ruled with a lighter hand, if they’d permitted representation in Parliament, it would’ve been a very different history.
That history might have included the prolongation of slavery since it was England who insisted on the practice being imported to American plantations. Those plantations were ‘owned’ originally by second sons with huge debts both in the colonies and the old country. Initially their workers were drawn from the indentured class; their conditions were little better than slaves, but they retained the rights of persons and their enslavement had a finite term. Eventually, the plantations simply ran out of those folks as they worked their way to freedom.
England’s leading role in slavery in America, Africa, and the Carribean has been an undercurrent in the New World’s history.
No, I don’t want to be terrified so I’ll skip your suggested reading. Our conflict with China will be complicated by a number of things:
1. the up-and-coming Chinese rule of blue water, esp. as it pertains to the Silk Route. China’s current shipbuilding is almost on a war footing as it is. Pity the poor Somalis who ever try piracy on a Chinese commerce ship;
2. China is investing in North and South America real estate. This isn’t alarming in and of itself. It simply means China’s wealth has to go somewhere;
3. How much of our debt is owned by China (and Japan). Of course the US still retains most of our own debt as our government continues with its grease-factory template – i.e., buying up our own securities;
4. The rate at which the military is being decimated by the Obama administration will soon have us at banana republic levels of response. And the extent to which he is emptying out the top ranks would make you think he was concerned about a coup. Very strange.
5. China needs the American market to take in the drek their slave factories make. The fact that they were induced by us to do this as we outsourced our own industries is beside the point for the moment. But it was and remains a Faustian bargain,though nowhere near the levels that led to the Opium Wars.
———————————–
No country “deserves” an ass-kicking, though some of their leaders need to have their heads make an impact with the asphalt of reality. That needful experience became vastly less likely with the advent of universal electoral suffrage. But since our lo-fo voters are opting for our eventual oblivion, it is anyone’s guess how that all plays out.
The hard attitude taken by the London authorities to the Colonists demands was widely recognized in Britain at the time as a disastrous mistake, one which was never repeated until the almost equally disastrous Boer war. Had the British Govt. negotiated a “Dominion” type of settlement, essentially conceding all the Colonists demands then of course Canada would not exist, instead an Anglo based country from the Caribbean to the North Pole would today be the colossus of countries. Certainly England/Britain played a major role in the abominable slave trade during the 1700’s but the major slave trading nation was Portugal. The trade itself had been outlawed in the British Empire when finally in the 1830’s slavery as an institution was outlawed. Queen Victoria was famously opposed to slavery, but surprisingly quiet about the appalling conditions many of her home subjects lived in. The white British indentured servants who were the first laborers on the agricultural estates were a poor lot physically, in no way comparable to the negroes who replaced them.
Interesting to ponder what effect that might have had on the American Nation; no Civil War? The North American Nation now 650 million white people?
You are right that there would never have been a Louisiana Purchase, Britain would have just confiscated French property and driven them out as they did in Canada and India.
Personally I do not believe that the US and China will ever come to serious blows, for one thing the US population will not stand for it, the recent outcry against military action (of no significance) in Syria would be dwarfed by the reaction against risking all out nuclear war (which is what a US-China conflict would very quickly become) over a few uninhabited rocks in the East China Sea.
You use the derogatory term “drek” to describe the output of Chinese factories, don’t be fooled, Chinese factories are among the most modern on Earth. They are manufacturing extremely advanced machinery and other products of all types. The infrastructure projects promoted by China are quite astounding; such as the railway/roadway/pipeline complex planned across Asia, the railway part starting in Shanghai and ending in Hamburg, Germany, that is imagination and confidence!
Here in Tampa we have extensive highway projects going on with incredible elevated roadways, the road building machinery used seems to be all Chinese.
Dymphna,
Interesting speculation.
Perhaps the capital of the Empire would now be in North America, an American “Constantinople”.
Roger,
Agreed, despite the beliefs of some Americans, the Empire is long dead and the Commonwealth is little more than a club. Actually is was the British themselves who destroyed the Commonwealth by joining the EU, now some of them want to leave. LOL.
Old Man (from fellow Old Man),
Yes, the Empire is long dead, and just as well. Other European Nations fought long and disastrous wars trying to defy history and maintain supremacy over their former subjects, very silly and very sad.
The British did have a chance though to turn the remnants of their empire into a meaningful organization. You are right that the Commonwealth is little more than a club, but it could have been much more: Some imagination and hard work from London could have made the Commonwealth into a force for good in the World. Surprisingly The Commonwealth is attracting new members; Mozambique joined although it has no historical link with Britain or the British Empire, perhaps it is just a cynical plot to get some free investment cash, but perhaps also they see that joining with other nations across the World may deliver some benefits less tangible than just the cash. Unfortunately asking for imagination and hard work from the British political and bureaucratic elite is very much a losing proposition.
As for the EU, it defies analysis, or parody.
There is, in the American psyche, a juvenile, even infantile, belief in celebrity. Nowhere is this more damaging than in politics. There is a reverence for Presidents that defies common sense, but is deepening as a result of the failure of individuals to manage their own lives and expectations. It is nurtured by the continual expansion of the welfare state and the consequent diminution of individual initiative and responsibility, this is not accidental, it favors the creation of the “Emperor” class . Among the many errors committed by the Founding Fathers was the assumption that politicians could be trusted to vet each other; they cannot, they need each other, all politicians are in symbiosis with each other, for funding, for favors, for protection, this is particularly true at the Presidential level.
JFK was a very smart man, but then at that level they all are. He was also cynical and manipulative, but he has been portrayed by the Emperor’s courtiers (the press) as some kind of saint. Almost certainly he would have won re-election, and his presidency would have been a success, not the best, but far from the worst (we are probably experiencing that now).
What is clear is that our political elite now are incapable of addressing the Structural problems of the US economy and that we are therefore destined for accelerating decline.
There is, in the American psyche, a juvenile, even infantile, belief in celebrity…
That drive is part of the human psyche. It is neither inherently American nor necessarily infantile. Its expression has produced objects that partake of that Greek triumvirate: the Good, the True and the Beautiful. The fact is, the degradation (which began to show in the 19th century Romantic period and picked up pace in the 20th) has transpired to give us an emperor’s-new-clothes tumor of Evil. So now we get the Bad, the False, and the Ugly.
Show me a culture where the desire for fame in some form is absent. Just one will do.
We are mortal beings painfully aware of that mortalilty. The knowledge that we all, even the wealthiest and most famous, eventually must end as Ozymandius doesn’t stop us from frenetic attempts to divert ourselves from this realization.
More compassion, please.
How wrong. Kennedy was the amateur in black ops, but that was the problem, he did not know how to win them.
To wit, he denied the Cuban exiles air cover at the Bay of Pigs. And in Viet Nam he was the one who allowed the coup to proceed. Both were his decisions and both were bad decisions. It was not being outmaneuvered by shadowy CIA operators, but just his own incompetance, or the malicious influence of his leftist advisors.
I think the real Kennedy, the man who liked hijinks and adventure would have gone naturally to win one of those events, air cover for the Cuban exiles. The Viet Nam failure was his inability to back a proven leader with a plan rather than a disgruntled bunch of Vietnamese generals and politcial operatives in Viet Nam who had no plan to win the war. They just hated Diem for his power and ability. Viet Nam would have been much better off without a coup against Diem. 10 years of counter-insurgency was lost after the coup and the resulting endless coups that followed, leading directly to the Tet Offensive.
Kennedy was very shaken by the deaths of the Diem brothers. As he said at the time, they were devoutly Catholic and would never have committed suicide. He had promised them safe exit in return for their resignation. What he hadn’t counted on was the South Vietnamese military’s hatred of the Diem ‘dynasty’…
…our own military leaders, stuck in WWII strategy, couldn’t cope with guerilla conflict. They didn’t have a template or the resiliency.
It would be interesting to ascertain who was responsible for the lame coverage of those 1400 Cuban exiles returning to re-take Cuba. The fact that Castro himself was there shows there was a lethal security leak. Whose?
One of JFK’s legacy achievments was NASA (National Aeronautic Space Administration ). NASA’s overall human spaceflight efforts were guided by Kennedy’s ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon.
Begs the question, how has Obama’s push for NASA to focus on Outreach to Muslims affected NASA’s attrition rate since 2008?
The closure of mental health facilities and substitution by inadequate “community care” has its echoes here in the UK- I could mention a neighbour here in my local authority sheltered accommodation (ie for people who are mostly older and frailer than me) who will soon be removed, but should not have been housed here in the first place as he’s obviously delusional and mildly aggressive.
Regarding Vietnam, while I hold no brief for communism, the Viet Minh wanted all colonial occupiers out: the Japanese, the French (after the British handed it back to them) and the Americans who backed a corrupt dictatorship in the South. Communism then, like Islamism now, thrived where it could appear to claim the moral high ground- look at Pakistan or Nigeria today.
I was fifteen when JFK was killed, and remember when I heard- he seemed special, and people need heroes.
I need to comment on the following portions of your text:
********************************
In foreign affairs we made a thorough mess of Vietnam. Kennedy was a World War II man who inherited the situation in Vietnam from a World War II heavyweight. Eisenhower was preceding cautiously; he knew the real story of what had happened in Berlin and in Korea. He was unlikely to have upped the stakes in Southeast Asia.
Kennedy might have made an adequate commander-in-chief in a conventional war. But in a small civil war where we fought Russia by proxy? That wasn’t in his skill set. His generals, too, understood conventional wars. Despite the post-dated “conflict” in Korea’s civil war in the 1950s, Kennedy’s military had no feel nor understanding of next-generation warfare as it first flared in Vietnam. We had neither China’s thousands of years of intrigue, nor an adequate understanding of guerilla warfare.
And we certainly had little understanding of our allies in South Vietnam. Kennedy was never prepared for the convoluted layers of the French-Catholic culture embedded in the colonial experience of that country. He was naïve in the same way he had been in allowing himself and our military to be pulled into the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. With the Cubans in exile egging him on — and who knows what dreams of glory — Kennedy simply wasn’t seasoned enough to manage the contingencies of a poorly-planned and even more poorly executed “invasion” to bring down Castro’s Communist regime at the Playa Giron.
***********************************************
First of all, South Viet Nam did not have “convoluted layers of French Catholic culture”. That was mistake number one we made there, to think that we were dealing with a Gallified nation, and we could deal with the Vietnamese by speaking French (a language understood by only a thin layer of the country’s elite). In fact, Vietnamese culture is a convoluted thing made of both the most ancient tribal traditions of Monsoon Southeast Asia overlain with literally millennia of Confucian, Daoist, and Mahayana Buddhist culture inherited from China (never forget that the Vietnamese state began as a peripheral province of Han Dynasty china). Indeed, China’s involvement in Viet Nam goes back to before the time of Christ. The French episode was a brief overlay in Southeast Asia’s history. Even Vietnamese names are Chinese: Nguyen/Ruan(阮），Tran/Chen （陈）, Ngo/Wu （吴），Truong/Zhang （张）, Trieu/Zhao （赵) etc. Even the name of the country is Chinese–Viet Nam/ Yue Nan (越南），or, South of Yue (Guangxi). And, as a scion of an Annamite mandarin family, Nguyen Sinh Cung/Nguyen That Thanh (Ho Chi Minh) knew his Classical Chinese as a written language every bit as well as he knew French (although Vietnamese, of course, was his native vernacular), perhaps better.
If you mean that France was the WWII “heavyweight” from whom we inherited the Viet Nam problem, fuggedaboudit. France folded in two weeks before the German Blitzkrieg. South Viet Nam, cut off by our conscientious Congress in 1973, held on against a determined North Vietnamese conventional assault until 1975. Says something about the relative worth of the former colonizers and colonized.
Further, Kennedy did not commit our forces to backing the Cuban exiles in the Bay of Pigs incident. He had our military abandon the Cuban exiles on the beach. Had we supported with our navy and air force, we might have been able to politely remind the Soviets and their amen corner in the UN that we had only done in Cuba what the Soviets had done in Hungary a few years earlier.
I freely admit to being no admirer of either Kennedy or his family. Had he survived, his political career would’ve been destroyed by the Silly ‘Sixties and Sillier ‘Seventies, and he, rather than Johnson, probably would’ve gone on to an embittered retirement; while his family would never have risen into the political limelight.
In retrospect, the thing I remember about 11/22/63 was that our fifth-grade teacher, Mr. B., got called to the school office to be told the news, gave us some busy work, and left a room full of pre-teens untended for several minutes before returning ashen-faced with the news (to a room full of kids who, from either quietly working or quietly speculating, dropped their pencils in shock). Today, no classroom teacher or administrator in America can trust their charges that far. My second brother, just out of high school, had been in a marksmen’s club in his school, and carried a .22 on the days when it met, with absolutely zero kids or school staff dying of gunshot wounds in those days, when now, we can’t even let our kids bring a penknife to sharpen their pencils. I fault the Kennedy era best and brightest and their acolytes for the degeneration in American culture that followed.