I hate to countersignal a fringe publication that I generally appreciate for their unique and contrarian views.
But I’m going to do it anyway.
On the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Chronicles Magazine published this article from academic Alan J. Levine, “John F. Kennedy Remembered Without Tears”
In it, Levine complains about conservative misappropriation of Kennedy’s legacy while also noting that much of the JFK adulation is misplaced and overall mistaken. That thesis seems entirely true and accurate. What I take umbrage at are specific examples and interpretations that Levine makes while supporting that thesis.
Though Levine does not explicitly lay it out this way, I think the conservative claim to Kennedy rests on these few hinges:
The idea that Kennedy was a proto free-trader, because of his experience in graduate school in England and because he was generally in favor of tax cuts, and supposedly said a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ when referring to across-the-board tax cuts.
The idea Kennedy, from a supposedly Catholic family with ties to conservative Catholics, anti-Communists like McCarthy and Nixon, and not comfortably within the hard-left coalition, were ‘good Democrats’ unlike the modern day insane anti-American left-wing zealots.
The Kennedy family lost the eldest brother John Jr. to wartime service, and Jack himself nearly died while captaining PT-109. Both incidents are mired in a bit of mystery and a few intriguing historical controversies.
Levine is a historian teaching as an adjunct at Manhattan Community College, living in Queens. He’s the author of 11 history books.
Here are his more prominent works:
D-Day to Berlin: The Northwest Europe Campaign, 1944-45 (Stackpole, 2007);
The War Against Rommel's Supply Lines, 1942-43 (Stackpole, 2008);
The Strategic Bombing of Germany, 1940-45 (Praeger, 1992);
Captivity, Flight, and Survival in World War II (Praeger, 2000).
I have not read the man’s works. Their titles at least make it appear that he is a serious historian of the era. That he’s relegated to adjunct life at a Community College is probably just as easily a reflection of being contrarian or politically incorrect as it is a question as to his scholarship. To be blunt he seems to be somewhat ignored by his historian colleagues, but he has serious topics of choice. The WW2 field is a bit oversaturated after all.
Academics are supposed to be evaluated on the basis of whether they are:
Objective
Thorough
Even-handed and fair
Cited by their peers
In practice, most historians and academics generally, are simply evaluated by whether they are well-known. Citations come from fame. Perceived greatness comes from groupthink adulation of those who advance the dominant narratives. Most academics toil in obscurity regardless though.
So it’s hard to glean whether or not one should take Levine seriously as an academic. He doesn’t have status or stature, but those are rigged games in favor of neoliberal garbage academics.
There are redeeming things about this JFK article, points made by Levine. I don’t mind identifying a few:
Kennedy’s military decisions were horrible and frankly, indefensible.
Kennedy had a cadre of advisors who have helped shape a false public impression of the man.
Many of the impressions have been distilled down to stupid and simplistic memes about Kennedy: he was a war hero, a great orator, author, family man, a peacemaker, he was a serious liberal, he was a ladies’ man, he was glamourous.
The simple facts about the Cuban Missile Crisis are usually tracked back by modern liberals to simply be a statement of his supposed leadership. “Kennedy refused to listen to the militaristic Generals who would have started WW3!” is the dominant meme here, and a complete fabrication of the actual record.
Kennedy got America to the moon.
Kennedy would never have gotten mired in unwinnable Vietnam.
Now all this is good and true. Levine is right to identify these as false memes about Kennedy, but he also employs false memes when combatting the Kennedy mythos.
As well, Levine conspicuously leaves out several other controversies that deserve special identification and condemnation.
While Levine briefly mentions Kennedy’s cynical advancement of the “missile gap” thesis, he does not give it the attention it deserves. Not only was it a major lie to the public, it clearly steered policy in a way that was diplomatically, financially and politically disadvantageous to the country.
Kennedy’s lie wasn’t just about winning re-election to the Senate, or beating Nixon for the Presidency, he just kept going with the lie and let it ruin lives, finances, and run up major risks for the country.
The entire strategic policy concept of the “nuclear triad” came about as a result of this Kennedy lie. The concept of building major missile systems and underground bunkers were derived from this political lie. The Titan II systems, just to put this into perspective, cost $8.3 million for each missile site and $2.2 million for each missile, in 1963 dollars. 54 sites were built, and 54 missiles were inside those silos.
So that’s $567 million just to build and put a Titan missile on those 4 dozenish sites, and ignores a great deal of associated costs. In current dollars that’s a 10x inflation increase, so a wasted sum of $5.67 billion. The program lasted from 1963-1987.
There’s a lot of depth to the article that Levine misses altogether. He’s dealing in mere meta-memes about Kennedy. Now perhaps that’s all that’s appropriate given his limited thesis. But it also just feels lazy. A few vivid examples illustrates the point.
Those could be style differences. Frankly I don’t think so, but it’s at least a viable excuse. Detailed writing necessarily takes longer. The modern reader desires brevity anyway.
But here’s where the Levine article substantively goes astray:
I don’t think Levine properly contextualizes Kennedy within the Democrat post-war coalition. One of the reasons for Kennedy’s lionization, I suspect among the left, is to effectively limit the Kennedy faction to being faint copies of the original. The left lacks any inspiring figure like Kennedy, the closest it ever came was Obama, and even he by comparison was an empty suit. Much has been speculated about why Ted Kennedy or any of the other Kennedys can’t quite live up to JFK’s manufactured image, but then again neither can any Democrat.
There seems to be two dominant 20th century coalitions on the left: one is the establishment Democrats who are personified by FDR and the true managerial elite, and the other are the upstarts who will say anything in an attempt to displace the establishment. As with any population around a power structure, there are the insiders and the outsiders. By 1960, the Democrats were only in power in Congress, and those were primarily holdovers from the Roosevelt era. So there emerged two general factions: FDR loyalists and the upstarts. As Joe Kennedy was definitely not an FDR loyalist, he makes a lot of sense as the titular leader of the out-of-power not-FDR faction.
I think these factions are exhibited in Kennedy’s choice of FDR loyalist Lyndon Johnson as the VP pick after the somewhat contentious 1960 primaries. But after Johnson resigns from the race in ‘68, there aren’t more Kennedy loyalists who take his place other than Bobby who is of course assassinated. These are two half of the post-war Democrat coalition and one would prevail: the Rooseveltians.
Left wing politics becomes so obsessed with individual identity and also leader identity, that the concept of divergent ideas and debate and intellectual diversity becomes non-existent. This is a major and radical change in a short period of time. And for what it’s worth, I think the political assassinations of the 60s and early 70s likely represent that FDR faction of Democrats purging the left of its malcontents, and also taking some cheap shots at people on the political right. Who else has the power and clout to ensure the FBI and DOJ would never pursue them?
This statement, equating Kennedy with FDR in the mind of supportive liberals, is not accurate. Here’s what Levine said in his article: “Not that Kennedy really cared about these things; but the image he projected fitted the emotional need of the time. For many liberals, he represented a reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” I think the liberal mindset at the time is hard to capture in such a statement. Certainly it would be better to define the exact moment he means: is this the view in the late 50s, or during the 1960 election, or right before JFK’s assassination in 1963? This might seem like a throwaway line, a form of historian puffery as it were, but it sits wrong with me and seems like a misread of the then-zeitgeist. It’s difficult to compare FDR and JFK because on many levels they are so fundamentally different in how they are seen and how they campaigned.
Levine lists out an odd list of JFK complaints that come off as petty. Here’s what Levine says: “But the image obscured difficult truths about the man. It is true that Kennedy was a real war hero who saved a wounded man; though he escaped responsibility for the loss of his PT boat in very odd circumstances. He got a Pulitzer Prize for a book he did not write. He cheated on his wife on an epic scale. And he recklessly abused dangerous drugs. This last fact has curiously gone almost unnoticed, though it would be seem to be more serious than his adultery, which has become so well-known that even his adoring biographers have had to acknowledge it.”
These are all, frankly, petty personal complaints. These aren’t substantive ones.
There’s reasonable dispute about whether Kennedy slept with Marilyn Monroe. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but they’re both dead. Does it really matter? It’s an interesting part of Kennedy’s history and character, but ultimately it’s somewhat base and trashy to dwell on the personal failings. JFK’s generic cheating is bad of course, but it’s the sordid details of what was happening with some of the individual women he was cheating with that illustrates how bad it all really was and what a risk it presented to his entire administration.
Frankly I think it’s a lot more indefensible that JFK slept with an 19 year old virgin intern Mimi Alford than Monroe. JFK slept with this teen after taking her swimming and then walked around on a late night White House tour that ended with her in bed. The affair continued after Alford became engaged and continued through to Kennedy’s death. Did he or didn’t he with Marilyn is the topic everyone cares about, but the fact he’s preying on interns and engaged in predator behavior is a reflection of a serious perversion.Kennedy carried on a long-term affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer, allegedly taking LSD with her. Meyer kept a detailed diary about their exploits. A diary that was seized immediately after by CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James Angleton within an hour of her suspicious mid-day murder in Georgetown.
This level of sex-obsession is not amusing or admiring for its virility but plainly it’s just amazingly reckless and dangerous. It’s bad for the women involved, everyone in social orbit around them and the President, and reckless with the nation’s security. But both the political right and left seems to kind of blithely excuse the matter. It’s the unfortunate cost of liberal policies on the left, and evidence of the natural desires between men and women for the right. It’s a cope for liberals who don’t want to admit the amazing personal hypocrisy, and a cope for conservatives who have zero political agency and thus can’t dent the memory or conversation on the topic.
Levine mischaracterizes and misstates the ‘biggest myths of the era.’ Here is what Levine writes: “He swallowed whole the biggest myths of the era, all of which favored increased government control—Keynesianism in economics, guerrilla war and counterinsurgency in foreign policy, and the managerial mystique in domestic policy—in other words, that “a good manager can manage anything, ” that crises and the use of force could be “fine-tuned.””
The complaint about Kennedy’s economic policies is an invocation of a boogeyman. The actual Kennedy policies: preferring growth, pushing tax cuts to spur growth, a concern for inflation, are the normal and typical concerns of even more right-leaning economists today.
The Levine complaint about guerrilla war and counterinsurgency is similarly misplaced. In the wake of the Vietnam debacle, any kind of strategic thinking short of major continental set piece armed conflict is somehow impossible for the United States. It’s a kind of know-nothing attitude towards what William Lind and others have labeled ‘fourth-generation warfare.’ There are smart and winning strategies to be had, but they have to be drawn out and discussed beyond just a simple soundbite. Several people who worked towards such theories, such as General Edward Lansdale, are treated with almost arrogant ignorance. I suspect that much of this is because only neoliberals have had political and thus military control, so there’s never been a practical need to develop a true center-right position about how to use the military or even, what a coherent foreign policy would look like. This is the way neoconservatives dug into the right for real power: keep any conservative foreign policy essentially held captive to the goals and ideals of former Communists.The Levine complaint about managerialism is a little more complex because, of course, managerialism has proven awful in America. But it also exists in any system, and as with all political systems the question is less about ‘how’ and more about ‘whom.’ It’s a difficult question to answer to determine whether the failures of managerialism is derived from the nature of the philosophy, and thusly Kennedy’s embrace of it, or whether the people chosen were simply not up to the task. Simplistic assessments of Robert McNamara, as an example, reduce him to a meme of the manager who tried to manage a war with spreadsheets and production quotas. No one has the time, temerity, and patience to examine the actual decisions and decide which ones were correct and which were wrong. Simply bemoaning managers is a short-circuit that precludes understanding what happened. Complaining that Kennedy bought too much into ‘managerialism’ is an almost pointless argument.
Levine ignores LBJ’s Massive Corruption, Overstating his Political Skill. Here is how Levine describes Lyndon Johnson: “…for when Lyndon Johnson, a far more skillful politician…” This is just part of the LBJ meme that he was the supreme politician and legislator extraordinaire. Yet what he really was, was a corrupt moneyman who steered illegal campaign contributions and sexual hook-ups for politicians through his protege Bobby Baker. To be a lawless corrupt powerbroker is not the same as being a wise and smart legislator. Johnson had power because he was unprincipled, not because he was a “Master of the Senate.”
Misstating the Liberal Understanding of Policy Failure. Here is what Levine says as it relates to liberals understanding where their policy failures came from: “…when Lyndon Johnson, a far more skillful politician, got his version of Kennedy’s liberal program passed into law, it led to failures and disasters. Johnson’s reward was to be blamed by liberals for a generation’s worth of their grotesque misunderstandings and bad planning.” And while I think this matches a certain amount of center-right wishful thinking, I don’t think there’s any cogent or coherent understanding on the left of any policy failures. The left is content to relegate their policy decisions to failures of implementation or management, but never of their underlying policy or attempted solution. Take any left-wing policy that has been a proven failure: even things as unnecessary as conscription, a variety of healthcare policies, foreign policy and wars, the left never surrenders an inch. There’s no understanding that any of those were failures. Let’s take something as simple and plain as the national speed limits from the Carter years. Even though this policy was a failure, it didn’t save gas, it didn’t reduce crash fatalities, it achieved no purpose and then upon its repeal, none of the predicted terrible consequences appeared. Yet the left still pushes and advances the theory of speed kills to justify a national speed limit again without shame, with zero reflection that anything was ever wrong with their original theory. The left never blamed LBJ for liberal failure, if anything it suppresses any memory of Johnson in order to avoid his unpopularity. They simply blame him for inheriting an unpopular war.
Levine Advances the Left-Dominant Memes about the Cold War. The academic left has spent two generations advancing the idea that fighting Communist insurgencies in small countries was impossible. They do this to advance the inevitability meme around Communist theory, to advance Marx’s flawed ideas that Communism is the inevitable end-result of historical progress. Left academics make this argument by appealing to a variety of complaints about policy towards these countries without any specifics, their complaints are shorn of any substantive analysis. Levine parrots those same complaints. Now, he may do this somewhat inadvertently as many working and writing in these realms lack the confidence and competence to challenge these dominant memes. But it’s worth noting that Levine uncritically advances them in lieu of challenging them. Here’s how Levine puts it: “His policies toward the last category of enemy—the small Communist countries— were, as usual, incompetent. In the case of Cuba he was poorly served by the CIA, but he shared many of that agency’s worst ideas. Those included totally unrealistic estimates of Cuban public opinion, of Castro’s military strength and political controls, and of the chances of a popular uprising.”
The policy of America towards small Communist insurgencies should have been to combat and counter them during the Cold War. Kennedy was right to push against the inroads of international Communism. Where he was wrong was to entrust the effort to military leaders who were unwilling to fight and win. It’s difficult to retrospectively assess policies and separate out the impact of individual leaders, from the merits of the policy, from the unique concomitant characteristics of the respective situation.
It seems odd to even make this point: of course stopping Communism was a good use of American power. It led to a variety of secondary problems, but facing a world dominated by Marxism would be worse than not.
Kennedy and that mindset was able to largely defeat political Marxism, not appreciating the virus’s evolution into cultural Marxism.
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Part of what’s going on is that I don’t think there’s a very coherent objective narrative about what the legacy of the Kennedy administration was, without invoking LBJ’s later legislative triumphs and the Vietnam War. The debate and discussion about JFK is contained by those two items, and the rest is really noise, pomp and circumstance to give glamour to the Executive.
And so, unable to really define the legacy of Kennedy, represents a failure to recognize that time period in the Presidency’s common characteristics. The actual Presidency period itself is largely unknown because people are busy either lionizing the fallen leader, debating his successor’s policies made in his memory, or talking about Vietnam. There’s very little examination of the actual period and policies between January 20, 1961 and November 22, 1963.
From what I know, have read, and seen in archives, this is my answer to my own question about the real nature of the Kennedy administration. These are the common traits of the Kennedy administration:
Kennedy was primarily reactionary. He was not someone focused on strategy.
Kennedy delegated domestic policy away to advisors as he was unconcerned about the policies or the results.
Kennedy did not trust his own intelligence community. Kennedy did not believe in the then-structure of government as performing adequate results and repeatedly sought to ‘cut through’ the bureaucracy rather than work within it or to get it to work for him.
Kennedy’s preference was to avoid all-out war, and he preferred to fight small-scale insurgencies.
Kennedy had an almost immature understanding of power. He ran things like a family business. RFK as Attorney General, and appointing him to a variety of panels that put him out of his depth.
Kennedy didn’t hesitate to take bold moves that might even be seen as contradictory or inconsistent with prior policy.
Kennedy was in the model of the perpetual campaigner, thus his management was focused on big results and actions. He wanted political ‘wins’ to show off.
As I write this, generally, it occurs to me that this is the perfect recipe for the mishandling of the Vietnam War. These problems, amplified over a decade, come to almost define the problems in prosecuting the Vietnam War.
A decent amount of scholarship exists on the question of how Presidents organized and managed the government during their terms. Here is one small example. I have not seen that legacy piece of the analysis combined with the management side of the analysis, and then extrapolate that to the major problems and crises that arise from that period of time.
Let me put it this way: Kennedy had every opportunity to take out Cuba easily, and instead chose to punt on the easy routes and instead go the hard way. He chose the hard way because he was scared of utilizing military power and politically afraid of how it would play out. As he distrusted the intelligence community, he lacked the ability to make it and the rest of the bureaucracy bend to his will during this period of time. He could not get the results he wanted, so he appointed special groups that would oversee certain goals and then just expected them to figure out how to get the results he, the President, was unable to achieve. That’s not leadership, it’s laziness.
As well, the clarity to see the conflict in Vietnam for the drawn-out affair it would turn into, and clearly answer the question of how to fight and win was well within his purview. Instead, Kennedy sought simple political solutions to short-term political problems, such as the Buddhist revolt against Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem. It was simpler to take out Diem than it was to muddle through the mess of short-term politics. Again that’s not leadership, it’s laziness that set the stage for the nation’s collapse 12 years later.
Kennedy deserves a lot of scrutiny, but Alan Levine is just giving small petty arguments on the margins, and then using his own memes to poke small holes in the Kennedy mythos. It’s frustrating, but sadly it’s still perhaps the most substance one can find online on the topic this week.
It’s a necessary historical discussion and relevant observation as America and our Presidents and potential Presidents so blithely talk about enrolling America’s young men in another generation’s worth of wars.
But hey all people want to talk about is Jack making the sexy to Marilyn.