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Cuando Estados Unidos odiaba y temía a los católicos

Posted in Anticatolicismo, Historia de Estados Unidos, John F. Kennedy, Know Nothing, tagged Al Smith, Catolicismo, Intoleracia religiosa, JFK, Joe Biden, Prohibición on 11 febrero 2021| Leave a Comment »

En este interesante artículo, el periodista especializado en Estados Unidos, Carlos Hernández-Echevarría, analiza la historia del sentimiento anti-católico en la nación estadounidense.

Cuando Estados Unidos odiaba y temía a los católicos

Carlos Hernández-Echevarría

La Vanguardia 4 de febrero de 2021

Cuando John Kennedy se presentó a la presidencia en 1960, tuvo que aclarar que, si ganaba, no dejaría que el papa Juan XXIII le dictara desde el Vaticano cómo gobernar. Joe Biden, desde hace unos días el segundo presidente católico de la historia de Estados Unidos, no ha pasado por nada parecido. Hoy ese discurso parecería ridículo, y eso es todo un signo del progreso de un país con una larga tradición de maltrato y discriminación hacia los católicos.

El anticatolicismo estaba presente en EE. UU. desde antes incluso de que se fundara el país. Hasta hace no mucho, los libros de historia de los niños estadounidenses empezaban con el relato de cómo los primeros colonos llegaron desde Inglaterra a las costas de Massachusetts para poder practicar su religión en libertad. Sin embargo, esos mismos libros olvidaban contar que los que habían huido de la opresión religiosa no tardaron mucho en convertirse en opresores.

Los colonos transportaron al “nuevo mundo” los prejuicios que en Inglaterra eran comunes contra la minoría católica. En 1700, la colonia de Massachusetts aprobó una “Ley contra los Jesuitas y los Curas Papistas” que los declaraba “incendiarios y perturbadores de la paz y la seguridad pública” y también “enemigos de la verdadera religión cristiana”. Por eso daba a esos sacerdotes un corto plazo para abandonar el territorio o serían condenados a cadena perpetua. Si a alguno se le ocurría escapar de prisión, recibiría la pena de muerte.

No es un caso único. El futuro estado de Rhode Island fue fundado por un hombre que había escapado de Massachusetts buscando más libertad religiosa, pero la colonia también acabó prohibiendo a los católicos ocupar cargos públicos.

En Maryland, fundada por un aristócrata católico para refugiar a los que compartían su fe, la ley pasó en unas décadas de reconocerles la libertad religiosa a imponerles todo tipo de restricciones: no podían ser profesores o abogados y tampoco votar. Tenían prohibido celebrar misa fuera de sus casas y bautizar a cualquiera que no fuera hijo de católicos.

Caricatura dibujada por Thomas Nast en 1876 en la que se presenta a obispos católicos como cocodrilos atacando a las escuelas públicas en connivencia con los políticos católicos irlandeses.

Muchas de estas restricciones, por ejemplo en Nueva York, siguieron en vigor incluso tras ganar la independencia de Gran Bretaña y durante los primeros años de vida de los nuevos Estados Unidos de América. Solo en 1789 la nueva constitución estableció que el país no tendría religión oficial y que tampoco restringiría la práctica de ninguna fe. Además, especificó que las creencias religiosas “no pueden ser nunca un requisito para acceder a un cargo público” federal.

Los llamados “padres fundadores” habían creado un estado aconfesional, pero los prejuicios contra los católicos estaban muy lejos de desaparecer.

Inmigración y ‘fake news’

Entre 1820 y 1930, llegaron a EE. UU. unos 4,5 millones de inmigrantes irlandeses católicos. Esta inmensa oleada migratoria puso nerviosos desde el principio a muchos protestantes, que recibieron a los recién llegados con los prejuicios heredados de los primeros colonos y algunos nuevos. Era habitual acusarlos de querer derribar al gobierno por orden del papa, y sobre ellos se difundían las fake news más exageradas, a veces con consecuencias dramáticas.

En 1834, una turba le prendió fuego a un convento cerca de Boston. Habían corrido rumores de que la congregación había asesinado a una de sus monjas por intentar abandonar la orden, aunque resultó que estaba tan viva que testificó en el juicio contra los incendiarios.

Todos los edificios del complejo quedaron completamente arrasados, en parte por la pasividad de los bomberos, que no pusieron mucho esfuerzo en apagar el fuego. Solo un hombre fue a prisión por el crimen, pero después fue indultado.

Dibujo que representa las ruinas del convento quemado en 1834.

Los bulos anticatólicos estaban a la orden del día y además eran un negocio muy rentable. Maria Monk, una mujer canadiense que había pasado por un albergue católico para prostitutas, vendió durante la década de 1830 cientos de miles de libros en los que decía falsamente que había sido monja y contaba toda suerte de historias sobre asesinatos de bebés en conventos.

Para difundir sus libros, Monk se asoció con algunos pastores protestantes radicales, aunque no está muy claro quién se quedó con los beneficios, porque ella murió en un hogar para indigentes después de ser detenida por robar a un cliente en un burdel.

A veces la violencia no se desataba por un rumor, sino por disputas políticas, sobre todo en las grandes ciudades, donde la población migrante católica iba creciendo y quería hacer valer su fuerza electoral. En 1844, el debate sobre qué biblia debía usarse en las escuelas públicas de Filadelfia provocó unos disturbios en los que ardieron varias viviendas de católicos y dos de sus iglesias y murieron al menos veinte personas.

Al enterarse de ello el arzobispo de Nueva York, un inmigrante irlandés, advirtió a las autoridades de que no consentiría lo mismo. “Si una sola iglesia católica se quema, Nueva York será un nuevo Moscú”, dijo en referencia al incendio de la capital rusa durante la invasión de Napoleón.

El partido que no sabía nada

Los católicos empezaban a organizarse políticamente, pero también los anticatólicos. Fue en esa época cuando surgió el partido Know-nothing, “no sé nada”. Tomó ese nombre porque en sus inicios era una sociedad secreta cuyos miembros debían responder así cuando se les preguntara por ella.

Unos años después se organizaron abiertamente bajo el nombre de Partido Nativo Americano o Partido Americano, y predicaron con bastante éxito el odio a los inmigrantes en general y a los católicos en particular. Sobre todo a los de origen irlandés y alemán.

En la década de 1850, el partido xenófobo llegó a tener más de un centenar de representantes en el Congreso, donde defendía que se prohibiera a los católicos desempeñar cargos públicos y abogaba por las deportaciones masivas de inmigrantes.

Además, gobernaba en ocho estados y en la ciudad de Chicago, donde el alcalde Levi Boone impedía a los católicos trabajar para el ayuntamiento o entrar en la policía. Pero los Know-nothing no se limitaban a impulsar el racismo en las instituciones, también lo hacían en la calle.

En una jornada electoral en agosto de 1855, los militantes del partido en Louisville, Kentucky, estaban decididos a que solo los “verdaderos americanos” votasen. Un tercio de la población de la ciudad eran católicos de ascendencia alemana o irlandesa, así que los Know-nothing desplegaron patrullas en el exterior de los centros electorales que pedían a los votantes una contraseña difundida de antemano entre los protestantes. A los que no la tenían les impedían el paso y a los que no se iban a casa, les daban una paliza.

Imagen del ciudadano ideal estadounidense según el movimiento Know Nothing.

Por supuesto, el candidato a la alcaldía de los Know-nothing ganó aquellas elecciones, pero además el llamado “lunes sangriento” dejó 22 muertos. La catedral católica de la ciudad, construida tres años antes, fue destruida, y más de un centenar de casas y negocios de católicos acabaron ardiendo. Los tribunales no condenaron a nadie por ello.

Aquella década de 1850 fue el pico del poder del partido anticatólico, que en los siguientes años se partiría en dos por el debate sobre la legalidad de la esclavitud que empujó al país a una guerra civil. Sin embargo, otros grupos extremistas no tardarían en reclamar su legado.

Una ley seca contra los católicos

La siguiente gran oleada de inmigrantes no fue tan irlandesa, pero también fue católica. Entre 1880 y 1914, más de cuatro millones de italianos se trasladaron a EE. UU. y sufrieron los prejuicios que ya existían sobre su religión, además de una mayor dificultad para aprender el idioma.

Aparte de las acusaciones ya tradicionales de que iban a derribar la democracia por orden del papa, los católicos de la época se vieron arrastrados al gran debate de la época: la prohibición de la venta y consumo de alcohol.

El movimiento a favor de la ley seca tenía su mayor fortaleza en las zonas rurales de EE. UU., que contaban con muchos menos católicos que las grandes ciudades. Si uno busca entre los principales líderes abolicionistas de aquella era, encontrará muchas declaraciones anticatólicas.

El fundador de la Liga Anti Salones, William H. Anderson, decía que si las ciudades no apoyaban la ley seca era por “los extranjeros que no se lavan” y porque la Iglesia católica estaba “indignada por lo que consideran una victoria protestante”. El obispo episcopaliano James Cannon Jr. decía que los italianos o los polacos le daban “dolor de estómago” y que había que cerrarles la puerta del país.

Ningún lugar era tan odiado por los líderes abolicionistas como Nueva York, y no despreciaban a ningún líder político tanto como a su gobernador, el católico Al Smith. A la ciudad, donde un tercio de sus casi seis millones de habitantes había nacido en el extranjero, la llamaba el obispo Cannon “la sede de Satán”. También decía que sus habitantes católicos eran “la gente que quiere Smith, las personas sucias que encuentras por las aceras de Nueva York”.

En 1924, cuando el Partido Demócrata se planteó por primera vez hacer a Al Smith candidato a presidente, su convención nacional fue una batalla campal. Primero los delegados discutieron agriamente sobre si condenar o no las actividades del Ku Klux Klan, que acababa de resurgir con enorme fuerza gracias, entre otras cosas, a su discurso anticatólico. Después de no lograrlo, tuvieron que votar 103 veces a lo largo de dos semanas para elegir entre el católico Smith y otro candidato apoyado por el KKK. A la vista de que el bloqueo era insuperable, ambos se retiraron para permitir la elección de un candidato desconocido.

Cuatro años después, Smith sí que consiguió ser el primer católico en convertirse en candidato presidencial de uno de los grandes partidos. Durante aquella campaña se le acusó de querer imponer el catolicismo como religión oficial y se imprimieron panfletos que lo acusaban de haber construido un túnel submarino entre el Vaticano y Nueva York para recibir órdenes del papa. Varios predicadores protestantes pidieron a sus fieles que no le votaran, y el obispo episcopaliano Cannon lo definió como “el clásico intolerante de la jerarquía católica romana irlandesa de Nueva York”.

El esfuerzo funcionó. La ley seca era impopular y le quedaban cinco años para la derogación, pero Smith se derrumbó en el Sur protestante y sufrió una derrota arrasadora. El recuerdo de esa catástrofe política pesó mucho durante años en el Partido Demócrata y muchos de sus líderes lo tenían en mente cuando, 32 años después, el católico John Kennedy se presentó a la presidencia. ¿Estaba EE. UU. preparado por fin?

De Kennedy a Biden

En 1960, muchos de los líderes demócratas más importantes eran católicos, jefes políticos de grandes ciudades donde los descendientes de los inmigrantes irlandeses o italianos ya eran mayoría. Sin embargo, temían que el resto del país diera a Kennedy el mismo trato que había dado a Smith.

El candidato logró disipar sus dudas venciendo en las primarias demócratas de West Virginia, donde el 95% de la población era protestante, después de pronunciar su famoso discurso sobre el catolicismo: “¿Vamos a decir que un tercio de la población de EE. UU. tiene vedada para siempre la Casa Blanca?”.

Kennedy aún tuvo algunos problemas más. Un grupo de 150 ministros protestantes declaró antes de las elecciones que no sería independiente del papa salvo que renunciara abiertamente a su catolicismo.

La campaña de Nixon obtuvo un mejor resultado de lo esperado en algunos estados de fuerte tradición protestante, pero Kennedy ganó, y abrió el camino a que Joe Biden ni siquiera haya tenido que responder a muchas de las preguntas con las que él se encontró.

El anticatolicismo en EE. UU., que el historiador Arthur Schlessinger llamó “el sesgo más profundo de la historia del pueblo americano”, ha quedado aparentemente para los libros de historia.

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Capturing History as it Really Happened in October 1962

Posted in Crisis de los misiles, Imperialismo norteamericano, tagged Cuba, Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Robert Kennedy on 21 abril 2015| Leave a Comment »

Capturing History as it Really Happened in October 1962

Sheldon M. Stern

HNN April 20, 2015

President Kennedy meets in the Oval Office with General Curtis LeMay – Wikipedia

Historians are obviously familiar with research based on old or new primary sources as well as with work that synthesizes both primary and secondary sources. Historical investigation based on audio recordings, however, is clearly distinct from these more traditional categories of historical investigation because, as Max Holland and I wrote in 2005—

the historian shoulders an even larger burden in this new genre. He or she is obviously selecting, deciphering, and making judgments about a primary source, much like the editor of a documentary collection. But, in the process of transcribing a tape recording, the historian is also creating a facsimile—while still endeavoring to produce a reliable, “original” source. In essence, the historian/editor unavoidably becomes the author of a “new” source because even a transcript alleged to be “verbatim” is irreducibly subjective at some level. As a result, the historian’s responsibility in this genre is a very unusual one, and requires the most careful scholarship imaginable. No other task of discovery and/or interpretation in the historical canon is quite comparable.

As the audio recordings from the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies have gradually been made public, historians have been drawn to this extraordinary challenge. As Columbia University’s Alan Brinkley concluded, “No collection of manuscripts, no after-the-fact oral history, no contemporary account by a journalist will ever have the immediacy or the revelatory power of these conversations.”

My own work, which includes the three books cited above on the JFK Cuban missile crisis tapes, has underscored the unique value of these recordings, for example, by demonstrating—conclusively and incontrovertibly—that Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days should no longer be taken seriously as a historically reliable account of the October 1962 White House ExComm meetings.

Last month the History News Network ran my short piece about a fascinating and surprising exchange between President Kennedy and Republican House Minority Leader Charles Halleck at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. In fact, there are many such dramatic and revelatory exchanges on the ExComm tapes and editor Rick Shenkman has agreed to my suggestion to periodically offer HNN readers additional historical snapshots of some of the most striking moments on these unique recordings.

The Context

On Sunday, October 14, 1962, U-2 photos revealed solid evidence of Soviet ballistic missile sites in Cuba. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundybrought the photos to the White House early on October 16. President Kennedy, his face and voice taut with anger at Soviet duplicity, reeled off the names of key members of the National Security Council and told Bundy to organize a meeting later that morning. He then summoned his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to the White House. “Oh shit! Shit!, Shit! Those sons a’ bitches Russians,” RFK exclaimed after seeing the U-2 pictures. The Kennedys had tried over forty back channel contacts with an official at the Soviet embassy in an effort to deter Khrushchev. Their efforts, as a result of calculated Soviet deception, had come to nothing.

The Soviets and Cubans, of course, were aware of the Kennedy administration’s own deceptions, namely the secret war in Cuba, which included sabotaging the Cuban economy and plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Nikita Khrushchev claimed that the Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba were defensive—to protect Castro’s revolution against another American attack. Khrushchev also anticipated that Kennedy would accept the deployment in Cuba as a reasonable counterweight to American missiles in Turkey and Italy. But, the Soviet leader grossly underestimated the intensity of American fears of a communist military outpost in the Western Hemisphere.

October 16, 1962

As the president’s advisers entered the Cabinet Room, the human implications of the situation was made poignantly plain when they found JFK talking with his nearly five-year-old daughter, Caroline. She quickly scurried from the room and the meeting began. The fifteen men gathering that morning were stunned that the Soviets had taken such a gamble just ninety miles from the Florida coast and infuriated that the administration had been deceived by top Kremlin officials. President Kennedy assumed that if the U.S. took military action against Cuba, the U.S.S.R. would move against West Berlin. The U.S. would be forced to respond; the Soviets would react in turn—and so on—escalating towards the unthinkable. A reckless or careless move could set in motion an irreversible and catastrophic chain of events.

Nonetheless, the tone of the discussions was nearly always calm and businesslike—making it difficult for the listener to grasp that the stakes were potentially nothing less than human survival. The meetings were also remarkably egalitarian, and participants spoke freely with no regard for rank. Indeed, there were repeated disagreements with the president—sometimes bordering on rudeness and disrespect. There were also moments of laughter, clearly an emotional necessity in coping with what became nearly two weeks of unrelenting, around-the-clock anxiety and uncertainty.

The overriding question was clear at the outset: what exactly were the Soviets doing in Cuba? JFK and most of his advisers had little or no experience in photo analysis, and the strange objects in the U-2 pictures could easily be mistaken for trucks or farm equipment. Arthur Lundahl, director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center, and missile expert Sydney Graybeal were on hand to explain the evidence. The president pored over the photos using a large magnifying glass and participants later recalled that he appeared nervous and exasperated.

Deputy CIA director General Marshall Carter began by identifying fourteen canvas-covered missile trailers, sixty-seven feet in length and nine feet in width, photographed on October 14 at an MRBM site in San Cristobal. Lundahl pointed to small rectangular shapes and whispered to the president, “These are the launchers here.” President Kennedy then asked how far advanced the construction had been when the photos were taken. Lundahl admitted that his analysts had never seen this kind of installation before. “Not even in the Soviet Union?” Kennedy pressed. “No sir,” Lundahl replied.

The CIA had kept careful tabs on Soviet missile bases, but Lundahl reminded the president that surveillance had been suspended after a U-2 was shot down in 1960. “How do you know this is a medium-range ballistic missile?” Kennedy asked. “The length, sir,” Lundahl responded patiently. “The length of the missile?” Kennedy replied, examining the photo, “Which part?” Graybeal handed the president photos of missiles from the U.S.S.R.’s annual May Day parade. JFK then asked grimly if the missiles in Cuba were ready to be fired; not yet, Graybeal declared. The bases, however, were being assembled more rapidly than similar sites previously observed in the U.S.S.R., and no one could be sure when the missiles would be ready to launch their deadly payloads at military sites or cities in the U.S.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara pressed Graybeal further—were Soviet nuclear warheads also in Cuba? “Sir, we’ve looked very hard,” Graybeal replied. “We can find nothing that would spell ‘nuclear warhead.’ ” He added, however, that the warheads could be mounted on the missiles in just a few hours. General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also stressed that the sites could rapidly become operational. McNamara insisted that the Soviets would never risk a military confrontation over missiles that did not have nuclear warheads: “There must be some storage site there. It should be one of our important objectives to find that storage site … but it seems extremely unlikely that they are now ready to fire, or maybe ready to fire within a matter of hours, or even a day or two.” The missile bases apparently did not have to be attacked—at least not immediately. One decision quickly commanded a consensus: the president should authorize further U-2 flights to locate any other missile bases and the elusive warheads and storage sites.

General Taylor, however, deepened the uncertainties facing the president by acknowledging that it was impossible to be certain exactly when the missiles sites would become operational and, in any event, air strikes would not destroy “a hundred percent” of the missiles. Secretary of State Dean Rusk agreed, and cautioned that if the Russians “shoot those missiles,” before, during, or after air strikes, “we’re in a general nuclear war.” McNamara agreed that air strikes had to be carried out before the missiles became operational: “if they become operational before the air strike, I do not believe we can state we can knock them out before they can be launched, and ifthey’re launched, there is almost certain to be chaos in part of the East Coast or the area in a radius of six hundred to one thousand miles from Cuba.” Less than an hour into their first meeting, the president and his advisers were confronting the possibility that millions of Americans might be only hours away from a nuclear attack.

One key question remained—what was the Soviet motive for a nuclear presence in Cuba? “There must be some major reason for the Russians to set this up,” JFK speculated. “Must be that they’re not satisfied with their ICBMs.” Taylor agreed that Soviet short-range missiles in Cuba supplemented “their rather defective ICBM system.” But, no one in the room raised the possibility that Khrushchev might be trying to protect Cuba from the Kennedy administration’s covert war against Castro’s government.

– Dr. Stern is the author of numerous articles and “Averting ‘the Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings” (2003), “The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis” (2005), and “The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths vs. Reality” (2012), all in the Stanford University Press Nuclear Age Series. He was Historian at the Kennedy Library from 1977 to 2000.

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Preventing ‘Another Castro’: John F. Kennedy and Latin America

Posted in Imperialismo norteamericano, tagged American Imperialism, Cold War, Cuba, Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Latin America, Thomas G. Paterson on 12 febrero 2015| Leave a Comment »

PREVENTING ‘ANOTHER CASTRO’: JOHN F. KENNEDY AND LATIN AMERICA

by Mark Seddon ·

History Matters February 2, 2015

In December, Presidents Barak Obama and Raul Castro announced that they would be taking steps to normalise US-Cuban relations thereby ending decades of animosity between the two governments. In a public statement, Obama declared it time ‘to cut loose the shackles of the past’ and do away with the enmity that brought about the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Although Cuba is currently in the headlines, the Caribbean island does not figure as prominently in US politics as it once did. During the Cold War, developments in Cuba had a profound effect on US policy towards Latin America as a whole. In particular, Washington officials feared that the Cuban Revolution would pave the way for other communist governments, allied with the Soviet Union, to emerge throughout the region. For President John F. Kennedy, this prospect made Latin America ‘the most dangerous area in the world’.

As a senator, Kennedy had initially called for a ‘patient attitude’ towards Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro who, after coming to power in January 1959, repeatedly denied being a communist. However, as Castro nationalised US property, delayed elections and accepted aid from the Soviet Union, Kennedy’s view shifted. 1 In the run up to the 1960 election, he repeatedly argued that Latin America was threatened by future communist revolutions. ‘I have seen Communist influence and Castro influence rise in Latin America’ he declared and asked ‘By 1965 or 1970, will there be other Cubas in Latin America?’ 2

As President-Elect, Kennedy’s fears were supported by a government report which warned that ‘the present Communist challenge in Latin America resembles, but is more dangerous than, the Nazi-Fascist threat of the Franklin Roosevelt period and demands an even bolder and more imaginative response.’ A response came as, once in office, Kennedy established the ‘Alliance for Progress’ which ostensibly aimed to undermine support for radical social movements by funding Latin America’s economic development. 3 Kennedy asserted that the Alliance should aim to ‘eliminate tyranny’but as historian Thomas C. Field Jnr has revealed, in practice, US aid was used to support the increasingly authoritarian regime of Bolivian President Víctor Paz Estenssoro. 4

In 1961, Kennedy’s advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger cautioned that ‘Bolivia might well go the way of Cuba’ and argued that ‘we simply cannot let another Latin American nation go Communist; if we should do so, the game would be up through a good deal of Latin America.’ 5 By providing Paz with financial support and military hardware, Washington was able to ensure that the country’s leadership maintained an anti-communist stance and liberalised the national economy against the wishes of armed, left-wing trade unions. Yet the authoritarianism that Washington encouraged ultimately inspired civilian and military revolt against Paz, culminating in the 1964 coup that overthrew him. 6

Fears of ‘another Castro situation’ also informed Kennedy’s attitude towards British Guiana which, by 1963, was taking steps towards independence from the British Empire. At the time, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) held a majority in the colony’s assembly but US officials had concerns regarding the possible ‘communist connections’ of its leader Cheddi Jagan. Fearing that British Guiana would emerge as a ‘Castro-type state in South America’, Washington was keen to see the more conservative Forbes Burnham, leader of the People’s National Congress (PNC), assume leadership of the colony following its independence.

The US government persuaded London to alter British Guiana’s electoral system to proportional representation and, in 1964, despite receiving the highest share of the popular vote, Jagan’s PPP lost its majority status in the legislative assembly to a coalition led by the PNC. Subsequently, in May 1966, the colony became an independent state, renamed Guyana and led by Burnam. 7

The Kennedy administration’s interventions in Latin America took a number of forms with each aiming to prevent ‘another Castro’. As Thomas G. Paterson has argued, US officials were gripped by the ‘fear that the Cuban Revolution would become contagious and further diminish United States hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.’ 8 Now, with the Cold War concluded, this fear has diminished and at least some US officials desire a more cordial relationship with Havana.

Significant steps have already been taken to improve US-Cuban relations with prisoners released and the announcement that Washington will ease restrictions on commerce and travel between the two countries. Fidel Castro has tentatively backedhis brother’s rapprochement with Obama who intends to set up an embassy in Havana but tensions remain as officials from both countries have continued to criticise the others’ human rights record. While the future of this relationship is uncertain, it seems unlikely that Cuba will ever again be so central to US foreign policy as it was during the Kennedy presidency.

Mark Seddon completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2014. His research focuses on British and US interventions in Latin America during the Second World War and Cold War. You can find him on Twitter @MarkSedd0n.

For an overview of Kennedy’s policy towards Latin America see: Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999)

Notes:

Thomas G. Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba: The Bay of Pigs, Missile Crisis, and Covert War Against Castro’ in Thomas G. Paterson (ed.) Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 124-125. ↩
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29403 ↩
Jeffrey F. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York, NY, 2007), pp. 11-28. ↩
Thomas C. Field Jr., From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era (New York, NY, 2014). ↩
Ibid., p. 14. ↩
Ibid., pp. 189-196. ↩
Stephen G. Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill, NC), pp. 105-151. ↩
Thomas G. Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba: The Bay of Pigs, Missile Crisis, and Covert War Against Castro’ in Thomas G. Paterson (ed.) Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (Oxford, 1989), p. 127. ↩

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When J.F.K. Secretly Reached Out to Castro

Posted in Imperialismo norteamericano, tagged Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, JFK, President John F. Kennedy, Richard Helms, William Attwood on 19 diciembre 2014| Leave a Comment »

When J.F.K. Secretly Reached Out to Castro

Michael Beschloss

The New York Times December 17, 2014

In December 1962, at the Orange Bowl in Miami, President Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, greet newly freed Brigade 2506 members, who had been captured by Fidel Castro’s government in the previous year’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Credit Cecil Stoughton/The White House, via John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library

President Obama’s surprise effort to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, concurrent with an economic embargo, recalls the two-track approach — economic and sometimes military force, along with secret, sporadic attempts to find some kind of accommodation — that formed American policy toward Cuba during the most dangerous years of that relationship.

On Monday evening, Nov. 18, 1963, at the Americana Hotel in Miami Beach — four days before his assassination — President John F. Kennedy, wearing black tie, told the Inter-American Press Association that only one issue separated the United States from Fidel Castro’s Cuba: Castro’s “conspirators” had handed Cuban sovereignty to “forces beyond the hemisphere” (meaning the Soviet Union), which were using Cuba “to subvert the other American republics.” Kennedy said, “As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible.”

The president had asked his speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, for language that would open a door to the Cuban leader, although, as Sorensen later observed, the audience was “a very tough anti-Castro group.”

That same day, Ambassador William Attwood, a Kennedy delegate to the United Nations, secretly called Castro’s aide and physician, Rene Vallejo, to discuss a possible secret meeting in Havana between Attwood and Castro that might improve the Cuban-American relationship, which had been ruptured when President Eisenhower broke diplomatic ties in January 1961.

Attwood had been told by Castro’s U.N. ambassador, Carlos Lechuga, in September 1963, that the Cuban leader wished to establish back-channel communications with Washington. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy worried that such talks would leak and embarrass his brother on the eve of his 1964 re-election campaign, but the president quietly encouraged Attwood to pursue the matter.

Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, told Attwood that J.F.K. wanted to “know more about what is on Castro’s mind before committing ourselves to further talks on Cuba.” He said that as soon as Attwood and Lechuga could agree on an agenda, the president would tell him what to say to Castro; in the meantime, J.F.K. had to make a trip to Texas.

Had Kennedy survived, the Attwood back channel might conceivably have led to some improvement in the relationship between Havana and Washington, but the odds against it were formidable. By allying Cuba with the Soviet Union, Castro was in flagrant defiance of America’s Monroe Doctrine, and Kennedy was eager to stop it.

In April 1961, he had authorized an invasion of Cuba by C.I.A.-supported Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. When that failed, Castro’s regime jailed more than a thousand members of the invasion brigade, who were released in December 1962 in exchange for $53 million in medical supplies and food. President Kennedy greeted the freed prisoners at the Orange Bowl in Miami. They presented him with their battle flag, which J.F.K. pledged to return to them “in a free Havana.”

Trying to recoup from the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Kennedy administration covertly unleashed Operation Mongoose, which included sabotage, paramilitary raids, guerrilla warfare and – although differences remain to this day over how much the president knew about them – efforts to assassinate Castro.

Kennedy saw Operation Mongoose as a substitute for authorizing a full-fledged American invasion to remove Castro from power. But the Cuban leader mistakenly presumed that Mongoose was actually the prelude to such an invasion, and he asked the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to do something to keep the Americans out. Castro’s request was one of the reasons that, in the fall of 1962, Khrushchev ordered nuclear-capable missiles sent to Cuba, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kennedy settled the crisis, in part, by pledging that the United States would not invade Cuba; however that pledge was conditioned on the presumption that Castro would stop trying to encourage other revolutions like his own throughout Latin America. But Castro was furious that Khrushchev had not consulted him before making his bargain with Kennedy to end the crisis — and furious as well that U.S. covert action against him had not ceased. (In fact, on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, the C.I.A., in Paris, gave a disaffected comrade of Castro’s a poison pen that was to be used against the Cuban leader.)

In September 1963, Castro appeared at a Brazilian Embassy reception in Havana and warned, “American leaders should know that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, then they themselves will not be safe.”

Late on Tuesday, Nov. 19, 1963 — the evening before President Kennedy’s final full day at the White House — the C.I.A.’s covert action chief, Richard Helms, brought J.F.K. what he termed “hard evidence” that Castro was still trying to foment revolution throughout Latin America.

Helms (who later served as C.I.A. director from 1966 to 1973) and an aide, Hershel Peake, told Kennedy about their agency’s discovery: a three-ton arms cache left by Cuban terrorists on a beach in Venezuela, along with blueprints for a plan to seize control of that country by stopping Venezuelan elections scheduled for 12 days hence.

Standing in the Cabinet Room near windows overlooking the darkened Rose Garden, Helms brandished what he called a “vicious-looking” rifle and told the president how its identifying Cuban seal had been sanded off.

Helms (who died in 2002) told me in 1987 that he realized that in response to this evidence, Kennedy “wasn’t going to invade Cuba,” but that he was certain the president’s “real energy” on Cuba was directed toward covert action. Helms insisted that J.F.K.’s quiet efforts to communicate with Castro were at best “a feint” — “like most two-track policies, try everything.”

Helms’s skepticism about Kennedy’s back channel to Castro no doubt reflected the president’s careful efforts to show no sign of weakness on Cuba in front of his covert action director. And indeed, as Helms later related to me, Kennedy responded to the sight of the Cuban rifle by telling him, “Great work!”

The president reminded the C.I.A. man that he would be leaving on Thursday morning for Texas. He told Helms, “Be sure to have complete information for me when I get back from my trip.”

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Why Lee Harvey Oswald Pulled the Trigger

Posted in John F. Kennedy, tagged Jackie Kennedy, JFK, JFK assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Warren Commission on 20 noviembre 2013| Leave a Comment »

Why Lee Harvey Oswald Pulled the Trigger

by Steven M. Gillon
HNN November 20, 2013

Image via Wiki Commons.

It has been fifty years since that tragic day in Dallas, but Americans remain fascinated with both the details of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and its meaning. This year will see the publication of nearly a dozen new books, and a flood of reprints, as the assassination cottage industry shifts into high gear. A number of television networks have produced documentary specials devoted to the assassination.

The question that is appropriate to ask at this point is: Is there really anything new to learn? While writing my new book, Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live, I went back to the standard narrative of that day — the Warren Commission. How well does it hold up in light of five decades of attacks?

In September 1964, The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, popularly known as the Warren Commission, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had fired three bullets from the sixth floor of the school book depository building.

The Warren Commission initially received a warm reception. Before the release of the report, a Gallup poll found that only 29 percent of Americans thought Oswald acted alone, while 52 percent believed in some kind of conspiracy. A few months after the release of the report, 87 percent of respondents believed Oswald shot the president.

Over the next few years however, critics turned public opinion against the report. In 1966, Mark Lane published his best-seller Rush to Judgment. Later that year, a New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, launched a highly publicized, but deeply flawed, investigation of his own which purported to reveal a vast conspiracy. At the same time Life Magazine published color reproductions of the Zapruder film under the cover: «Did Oswald Act Alone? A Matter of Reasonable Doubt.» The editors questioned the Commission’s conclusions and called for a new investigation.

Most of these early skeptics used the Warren Commission’s own evidence against it. They focused on contradictions among some of the witnesses about the number of shots and from where they were fired. Some witnesses claim they heard gunfire from the grassy knoll, an elevated area to the front, right of the presidential limousine. A favorite topic was the so-called «magic bullet.» According to the Warren Commission, Oswald fired three shots in less than eight seconds: the first shot missed, the second shot struck Kennedy in the back, exited through his throat, and then hit Governor Connally, breaking a rib, shattering his wrist, and ending up in his thigh. Critics claimed the bullet, which remained largely intact, could not have been responsible for all of the damage. Also, if Connally and Kennedy were hit by different bullets in a fraction of a second, then it meant there had to be another shooter.

The most serious threat to the Commission’s credibility, however, came not from the army of investigative reporters and self-styled assassination experts, but from new government investigations.

In 1975 the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Idaho’s Frank Church, revealed that American intelligence agencies had systematically hidden important evidence from the Warren Commission. Both the FBI and the CIA had lied by omission to the Warren Commission. One prominent senator told a television audience that «the [Warren] report… has collapsed like a house of cards.»

These revelations led to the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). In December 1978, after two years of work, the committee was prepared to issue a report that supported all the major conclusions of the Warren Commission. It found no evidence of a conspiracy. No second shooter. But in the final weeks the committee changed its opinion and concluded that although Oswald was the assassin, there was a conspiracy involving a second gunman.

The committee relied on the highly questionable, and now discredited, acoustical analysis of a police dictabelt recording from Dallas police headquarters. It contained sounds from a police motorcycle in Dealey Plaza whose radio transmitting switch was stuck in the «on» position. Two acoustics experts said there was a 95 percent certainty that the recording revealed that four shots had been fired at the presidential motorcade. As a result the House Committee came to the bizarre conclusion that a second shooter fired at the president but missed.

Coming in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, the HSCA report added to public cynicism about the Warren Commission conclusions. At just the time that Americans were learning that the government lied to them about Vietnam and Watergate, they now discovered it had lied about aspects of the assassination of President Kennedy. If the CIA and the FBI had lied to the Commission, the reasoning went, then they clearly had something to hide.

There were now two conspiracies: The conspiracy to assassinate the President and, potentially, an even larger and more insidious plot among powerful figures in government and the media to cover it up.

In 1991, filmmaker Oliver Stone tapped into these doubts, and added his own paranoid twist, to create the wildly popular movie JFK. The film portrayed an elaborate web of conspiracy involving Vice President Johnson, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the KGB, pro-Castro and anti-Castro forces, defense contractors, and assorted other officials and agencies. The movie makes it seem that First Lady Jackie Kennedy was the only person in Dealey Plaza that day who was not planning to murder the president.

The movie ended with a plea for audience members to ask Congress to open up all Kennedy assassination records. The plea worked. In 1992, Congress passed a sweeping law that placed all remaining government documents pertaining to the assassination in a special category and loosened the normal classification guidelines. The legislation led to the most ambitious declassification effort in American history — more than five million documents in total.

What we have learned from the new government investigations and from the flood of declassified documents is that Warren Commission got it mostly right. There have been no shocking revelations to challenge the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Moreover, there has emerged no convincing alternative explanation of what took place in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Yet the new information does highlighted one major flaw with the Warren Commission: its failure to present a convincing explanation for why Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK. Much of the final commission report represented an indictment of Oswald. It failed to ascribe a single motive, but it made a strong case that Oswald was little more than a disaffected sociopath who was in desperate need of attention. It spent a great deal of effort showing how the events in his childhood – growing up without a father, feeling isolated, moving often, and dealing with an overbearing mother – turned him into an angry, embittered sociopath.

Many of the new documents and information, while fragmentary and often contradictory, reveal that Oswald was driven as much by ideology as he was by personal demons. None of the information reveals a conspiracy, or proves the involvement of any outside group, but it does reinforce a possible political motive to the assassination, highlighting that Oswald was driven by a desire to prove his fidelity to the Cuban Revolution, gain Castro’s respect, and possibly travel to Cuba as a conquering hero. In his fantasy world, Oswald probably assumed that he would be welcomed in Cuba as the man who killed the American devil, not appreciating that neither Castro nor the Soviets would wish to incur the wrath of the United States by harboring JFK’s assassin.

Why did the Warren Commission fail to highlight Oswald’s political motives? Cold War fears likely chilled the Commission’s desire to place too much emphasis on Oswald’s pro-Castro activities. The Commission knew a great deal about Oswald’s politics: his early embrace of Marxism, his defection to the Soviet Union, his involvement in pro-Castro groups in New Orleans, and his attempted assassination of right-wing retired general Edwin Walker a few months before he killed JFK. It pointed out that while he was being interrogated Oswald asked to be represented by a lawyer, John Apt, who represented many Communist party figures. It mentioned that Oswald had traveled to Mexico City where he shuttled back and forth between the Soviet embassy and the Cuban consulate in search of a visa. Yet it refused to connect the dots.

More importantly, the Commission lacked the proper context for evaluating Oswald’s motives because it was denied relevant intelligence information. Recently declassified document reveal that American intelligence agencies had kept close tabs on Oswald in the months before the shot JFK. The CIA took pictures of Oswald outside the Soviet embassy and even recorded his phone calls. But none of this evidence was turned over to the Commission, and all of it was later destroyed. The Commission, for example, never saw a memo prepared by J. Edgar Hoover that reported that Oswald had threaten to kill JFK during his trip to Mexico City just three weeks before the assassination.

In the most important omission, the CIA refused to provide the Commission with any of the information related to its activities in Cuba, including proposed assassination plots against Castro. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who oversaw the administration’s anti-Castro campaign, deliberately misled the Commission, denying that he was aware of any relevant information.

The final Commission report states, without any supporting evidence, that Oswald became disillusioned with Castro and Cuba after he was denied a visa to enter that country in late September. There is tantalizing evidence that just the opposite is true: As the Hoover memo suggests, it is more likely that Oswald killed Kennedy in order to convince Cuban authorities to accept his petition for a visa.

If the Commission had known about the administration’s covert campaign against Castro it would have seen Oswald’s pro-Castro actions in a new light, and could have investigated further some of his actions and associations.

The new more complicated portrait of Oswald does not change the fact that he pulled the trigger, but it does muddy the waters about why. Since he was killed before he confessed or was placed on trial we will never know for sure. Unfortunately, the Warren Commission’s incomplete portrait of Oswald and his motives has fed the conspiracy frenzy and served to undermine public faith in its lone-gunman theory.

Steven M. Gillon is the Scholar-in-Residence at The History Channel and professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live.

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JFK Was an Unapologetic Liberal 

Posted in John F. Kennedy, tagged JFK, Liberalism on 16 noviembre 2013| Leave a Comment »

JFK Was an Unapologetic Liberal 

His underrated career as ideological warrior

by David Greenberg

New Republic | November 11, 2013

In the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the hype—the movies and books and magazine covers, the roundups and reminiscences and retrospectives—is in overdrive. How can America resist another JFK love-in? The popular adoration of Kennedy, five decades on, puzzles pundits and historians, who note, correctly, that he neither led the nation through war nor racked up a legislative record on par with that of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, or Lyndon Johnson.

Some explanations for the discrepancy are obvious: His youth and good looks. His vigor, grace, and cool. The facility with which he projected this image through television, of which he was the first presidential master. And the assassination itself, which by taking Kennedy in his prime allowed Americans to spin fantasies of greatness unrealized.

Yet neither the Camelot mystique nor Kennedy’s premature death can fully explain his continuing appeal. There was no cult of Warren Harding in 1973, no William McKinley media blitz in 1951. I would submit that Kennedy’s hold on us stems also from the way he used the presidency, his commitment to exercising his power to address social needs, his belief that government could harness expert knowledge to solve problems—in short, from his liberalism.

To make that case requires first correcting some misperceptions. Wasn’t JFK a cold warrior who called on Americans to gird for a “long twilight struggle”? Didn’t he drag his heels on civil rights? Didn’t he give us tax cuts a generation before Ronald Reagan? While there’s some truth to those assertions, layers of revisionism and politicized misreadings of Kennedy have come to obscure his true beliefs. During the 1960 presidential campaign, when Republicans tried to make the term liberal anathema, Kennedy embraced it. A liberal, he said in one speech, “cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties,” and under that definition, he said, “I’m proud to say I’m a ‘liberal.’”

In 1960, the United States was gripped by a quest for “national purpose,” a yearning to find a meaningful goal for America’s energies. This desire had several sources. The cold war was enervating. Material comfort gave rise to an existential uncertainty about what our riches were supposed to produce, a malaise captured in books such as John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society and David Riesman’s Abundance for What? Kennedy’s pledge to “get America moving again” should be understood as a part of this collective soul-searching. After the hands-off economic management of President Eisenhower’s free-marketeers, Kennedy promised an aggressive effort to spur growth and create jobs. After Eisenhower’s neglect of mounting urban problems, Kennedy promised a federal commitment to education and housing. After Sputnik and the U-2 affair, Kennedy promised a vigorous effort to win hearts and minds around the world.

As an activist, Kennedy called on Americans to trust government to address the nation’s problems; as a pragmatist, he bade them to believe that dedicated public servants could again muster, as they had during the New Deal, the requisite know-how. In word and in deed, JFK put the weight of his presidency behind a liberal program. He backed a demand-side—not supply-side—tax cut designed to put money in people’s hands to stimulate short-term economic activity. The War on Poverty (an idea he had rolled out during the campaign) sought to alleviate penury, especially among the elderly, by pushing for Medicare and expanded Social Security benefits. The President’s Commission on the Status of Women endorsed workplace equality, child care facilities for working women, paid maternity leave, better Social Security benefits for widows, and equal pay for comparable work. Federal employees got collective bargaining.

Even on civil rights, where Kennedy often gave into his fear of alienating the Southern bloc, he ultimately put the power of the federal government behind racial equality. He used federal troops to ensure the enrollment of black students at the universities of Mississippi and Alabama; his administration implemented the first “affirmative action” program for government employees and contractors. Some movement leaders seethed with frustration over his slow pace. But when the historian Ellen Fitzpatrick compiled post-assassination condolence letters to Jackie Kennedy for a 2010 book, she found affecting notes from African Americans who considered Kennedy, as one correspondent wrote, “a beacon—a light in the darkness who would indeed be a second Emancipator.” His picture graced walls and mantelpieces.

In foreign policy, too, Kennedy’s liberalism has been underappreciated. We hear nowadays that he ran to the right of Richard Nixon on national security in 1960—a claim supported chiefly by his invocation of the so-called missile gap. But that stance no more made Kennedy a hawk in 1960 than Barack Obama’s 2008 pledge to escalate in Afghanistan placed him to the right of John McCain. Overall, in 1960, it was Kennedy who expressed skepticism about the extension of military forces around the globe. He was, to be sure, a staunch anti-communist, and not averse to using hard power. But it was Nixon, not Kennedy, who was ready to go to war to defend Quemoy and Matsu, the tiny islands off China’s shore, while Kennedy questioned his rival’s ill-considered stance.

JFK’s 1961 inaugural address, too, is typically misread as saber-rattling. But his famous call to steel the nation for the cold war conflict was a prologue to the exposition of a more hopeful, conciliatory policy. In that speech, Kennedy endorsed the United Nations as “our last best hope,” warned against the stockpiling of nukes, urged arms-control negotiations, and held out the prospect of collaboration in science, medicine, and commerce. Press accounts treated it as a summons to work toward peace.

In office, Kennedy also preferred diplomacy to military intervention. His wariness of using force led him to deny the CIA-supported Cuban rebels the sufficient air cover they needed at the Bay of Pigs; 18 months later, it counseled him to buck his military chiefs and negotiate the withdrawal of Soviet missiles. He rejected initial calls to get involved in Laos, and his frequently voiced doubts about the effectiveness of U.S. military support for South Vietnam make it at least plausible to surmise that, had he lived, Kennedy wouldn’t have escalated as Johnson did (a speculative matter either way). Following the Cuban missile crisis, moreover, Kennedy redoubled efforts to pull back from the brink. He installed the “hot line” to Moscow and concluded a historic nuclear test-ban treaty. If by “cold warrior” we mean someone cognizant of the stakes of the superpower rivalry, JFK deserves the label. But his presidency was marked at least as much by efforts to defuse tensions as it was by the adventurism for which he has since become known.

Under Kennedy, popular support for government was near its peak. More than 70 percent of Americans said they trusted Washington most or all of the time. As the Vietnam war and the kulturkampf of the 1960s dragged on, that figure declined. Today, after decades of anti-government rhetoric and gridlock, debt and wage stagnation, it stands at about 20 percent. Promises of an activist government are met with cynicism, hostility, and questions about the price tag. The climate is inhospitable to those who would rally the public to higher purposes.

Layers of revisionism and politicized misreadings of Kennedy have come to obscure his true beliefs.

JFK is a reminder that this wasn’t always so. Retrospectives on him inevitably include the witty press conferences, the white-tie White House dinners with the likes of Pablo Casals, the photos of John Jr. playing under the Oval Office desk. But the warm feelings Americans have toward Kennedy may be something more than nostalgia for a glamorous presidency cut short. They reflect a wistfulness for the sense of common purpose and faith in a collective project that a proudly liberal president helped the nation achieve.

David Greenberg, a contributing editor at The New Republic, is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University.

Source URL: http://www.newrepublic.com//article/115522/jfk-was-unapologetic-liberal

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Five best Kennedy assassination books

Posted in John F. Kennedy, tagged JFK, JFK assassination, Kennedy assassination on 16 noviembre 2013| Leave a Comment »

The Five Best Kennedy Assassination Books
Jon Wiener
The Nation November, 11, 2013

President Kennedy minutes before his assassination in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963. (Baylor University Collections)

November 22 is of course the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. I haven’t read all 1,000 books about it, but I have five favorites:

Don DeLillo, Libra
“We will build theories that gleam like jade idols,” says DeLillo’s surrogate, a CIA historian writing the secret history of Dallas. “We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams.” In the novel, two CIA veterans of the Bay of Pigs seek to arouse anti-Cuban sentiment by organizing an assassination attempt by a Castro supporter. But in their plan, the assassin—with an identity “made out of ordinary pocket litter”—will miss. DeLillo, as John Leonard wrote in The Nation, “is an agnostic about reality.”

Stephen King, 11/22/63
When Jake steps thru the secret passage in Al’s Diner in Maine, it takes him back to 1958; can he stick around and change the course of history by stopping Oswald before November 22, 1963? And what if he discovers that the conspiracy theorists were right, and JFK was shot by someone else? Eight hundred and fifty wonderful pages of time travel romance and adventure in a world where the food tastes better and the music is more fun—and where history itself resists change, with all its might.

Robert Caro, LBJ: The Passage of Power chapters 11–13
The assassination seen through LBJ’s eyes, one car back in the motorcade in Dealey Plaza: after Oswald’s first shot, Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood shouted, “Get down! Get down!” Then LBJ “was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him,” as the two cars sped toward Parkland Hospital. When they arrived, Agent Youngblood said, ‘I want you and Mrs. Johnson to stick with me and the other agents as close as you can. We are going into the hospital and we aren’t gonna stop for anything or anybody. Do you understand?’ ‘Okay, pardner, I understand,’ Lyndon Johnson said.”

Norman Mailer, Oswald’s Tale
Mailer in his reporter-researcher mode: at age 70, he spent six cold months in Minsk, where Oswald had lived with his Russian wife Marina for thirty months starting in 1960. Mailer interviewed fifty people and used the KGB’s tapes from Oswald’s bugged apartment to paint a vivid picture of the dullness and misery of their lives. Mailer said he started “with a prejudice in favor of the conspiracy theorists,” but he found Oswald to have been a lonely Marxist megalomaniac and an angry loser. In the end, Robert Stone wrote in The New York Review of Books, Mailer had to conclude that “absurdity and common death gape far wider beneath us than high conspiracy, tragedy, or sacrifice.”

Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History
An encyclopedia of assassination conspiracies, with each and every one refuted, “revealed as a fraud on the American public.” One thousand six hundred oversize pages, plus a CD with 1,100 pages of notes, written by the legendary criminal prosecutor. “No group of top-level conspirators,” he argues, “would ever employ someone as unstable and unreliable as Oswald to commit the biggest murder in history, no such group would ever provide its hit man with a twelve-dollar rifle to get the job done, and any such group would help its hit man escape or have a car waiting to drive him to his death, not allow him to be wandering out in the street, catching cabs and buses to get away, as we know Oswald did.”

Jon Wiener teaches U.S. history at UC Irvine.

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The Man with the President’s Ear, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and JFK

Posted in Imperialismo norteamericano, tagged JFK, John F. Kennedy on 30 octubre 2013| Leave a Comment »

The Man with the President’s Ear, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and JFK
No historian has ever been as close to power as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was to President Kennedy as a new collection of his letters marvelously shows. Ted Widmer on the whirl of celebrity and policy that dance across the pages.

by Ted Widmer | October 27, 2013

The Daily Beast Company
The 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s presidency winds down this fall, and it is refreshing to have these two books, each a celebration of genuine life and thought, as we enter an echo chamber that is unlikely to promote either in the weeks leading up to November 22.

‘The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’ Edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger. 672 pages. Random House. .

Schlesinger’s letters complete a download that has been coming steadily since his death in 2007. Indeed, after going to his reward, he has been publishing at a prodigious pace. First came the Journal, in a hefty volume in 2007. Then, in 2011, the lengthy interviews he conducted in 1964 with Jacqueline Kennedy. Now, the letters, lovingly culled by his two sons, Andrew and Stephen, which offer more grist for a mill that was not exactly grist-deficient.

In a postscript, the editors recount the process of sifting through this pile of paper—134 boxes, with about 200 letters in each—and estimate that their father wrote 35,000 letters! Evidently, he never sent one without making a copy—ergo, this book. This paper trail seems almost incomprehensible in the Age of Twitter—letters, written on paper, composed of full sentences and paragraphs, making complex arguments, rooted in history and facts. Reading it during the government shutdown, it felt like an ancient cuneiform, testifying to the strengths and weaknesses of the civilization that preceded our own time. Ours feels smaller—tweetier—in comparison.

I had that feeling even when Arthur was alive (I was one of his 35,000 correspondents). Now and then, a postcard would arrive with a curt message, typed on a manual typewriter. Who types a postcard? It felt like a summons from Olympus. Typed on an Olympia.

To reenter the world of his correspondence is like a form of time travel, giving the reader access to the same vertiginous ride he was on, following the presidency and the course of American liberalism from its high-water mark under FDR, through its many peaks and valleys since then.

President-elect John F. Kennedy is greeted by Harvard professor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., (right) at the professor’s residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 9, 1961. (Bettmann/Corbis)

The first letter dates from 1945, the year of FDR’s apotheosis, and the publication of Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson. That great work was as much about FDR as Jackson, and its appearance as a great chieftain left the stage helped establish Schlesinger as something above the ranks of a normal historian. He was a sage and a soothsayer, a mystic who communed with the spirits of former presidents and helped divine the path forward for current and would-be occupants of the White House.

Schlesinger goes ballistic when Boehner misquotes Lincoln— “Seriously, Congressman, do you really think those quotations sound like Abraham Lincoln? Come on!”

There is a festive tone throughout, and the first letter, written from a Paris that is about to be liberated, reveals Schlesinger at the center of a party, and loving it (“What a two days! It is just as well that world wars are so few. I don’t know how many peace celebrations I could stand per generation, especially in Paris.”) Throughout the late 40s and 50s we see him building his networks, joining Adlai Stevenson’s eggheads, and slowly falling in love with the upstart Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. They had known each other slightly at Harvard, and the letters reveal Kennedy dexterously working on Schlesinger in the most artful way, asking leading questions about obscure 19th century Senators (his weak spot), and slowly recruiting an actual Arthur into the magical kingdom that would become Camelot. Schlesinger had a bit of explaining to do as 1960 approached, and Stevenson and Kennedy jostled on the way to the nomination they both sought (Arthur’s wife Marian remained an Adlai supporter). But he sorted that out, and for the rest of his long life, basked in the afterglow of the Kennedy White House. Indeed, he was probably much more valuable as a former aide than he was when Kennedy was actually president. His 1965 book, A Thousand Days, retains its vigor, and has never been excelled as a study of those years. He defended Kennedy’s positions long deep into the 60s and 70s, and was especially helpful clarifying his positions on Vietnam, when others were falsely invoking him to justify escalation of the war. These letters also reveal him to be a keeper of the liberal flame in other ways, urging candidates not to wobble on the legacy of the New Deal, and to stand by core principles, even during the long amnesia brought on by Reaganism and its aftermath.

To his credit, he seemed to enjoy the years out of power as much as his thousand days. As gate-keeper, he was always available to disburse advice to new aspirants, and the correspondence includes nearly everyone from our political pantheon, including a Republican or two—George H.W. Bush is in there, and even John Boehner makes a cameo (Schlesinger goes ballistic when Boehner misquotes Lincoln— “Seriously, Congressman, do you really think those quotations sound like Abraham Lincoln? Come on!”).

To be sure, there were fights, and some of the most entertaining letters relive the arguments—with William F. Buckley, and Lillian Hellman, to name a few. He took it from all sides; from a left that regarded the courtier with distrust, and disliked his anti-communism; and from a right that found him too left-wing, too Harvard, too much. The biggest argument of all, Vietnam, caused some of Schlesinger’s friendships to fall apart. As these letters reveal, those were agonizing days for liberals. Schlesinger was right on the fault line, more establishment than the young protesters, but outraged over the venality of a war that had no achievable purpose. Schlesinger, with his sharp ear for language, hated the mealy-mouthed arguments he was hearing from centrist Democrats like Hubert Humphrey, who sprang from the same liberal tradition he did. (Humphrey misidentified him as “Art,” rather than Arthur—one wonders if intentionally). The letters convey the full intensity of an argument that came to a full boil around 1968, and has never stopped simmering.

Throughout, we see Schlesinger navigating the blurry lines of historian, participant, observer, and observee. Obviously, he loved the limelight. A typical letter, to a young schoolgirl in Pennsylvania, begins “I am glad, but a little appalled, to know that I have been chosen as your topic for a term paper.” He relished the chance to pour out his thoughts, to friends far and near (an amusing note from 1957 reveals that he and Lyndon Johnson enjoyed meeting each other, but each felt that the other person talked too much). The full weirdness of the 1960s is on display here, with letters to celebrities like Sammy Davis Jr. following closely upon sober policy messages to high-ranking members of the LBJ administration.

It would have been interesting to read a few more letters from his inbox, the emphasis is decidedly on the ones he wrote to others, but some of the ones he received are gems. In one, Adlai Stevenson explains, like a displaced Mafia don, why he feels angry at JFK, whose career he helped to advance. In another, Henry Kissinger defends his wounded pride, after a well-aimed hit from Arthur (Kissinger had defended his honor in a 1974 press conference, and Schlesinger quoted Emerson, “the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”) The conversation could get loud, and large issues were at stake. But the fact that a conversation was actually happening, and that friends and rivals like Schlesinger, Kissinger, and Moynihan could write each other so volubly was good for the republic. There are a lot of good-natured insults—many from William F. Buckley, Jr.—and those little bee-stings read nostalgically, from a time when the Right and Left didn’t agree, but at least tolerated each other’s existence. During October’s government shut-down, the bankruptcy of public conversation was very much in evidence.

Robert Dallek’s profile of the Kennedy White House offers a very different perspective on the presidency, and the particular president Schlesinger served. Schlesinger figures in the book, but in this telling, he is only one of many courtiers circling around the vital center of American power.

Dallek is deeply knowledgeable about Kennedy, and his 2003 biography, JFK: An Unfinished Life, broke new ground for its revelations of medical information relating to the 35th president. An Unfinished Life was apparently an apt title, for Dallek now returns to the subject, as so many biographers do, conscious that the public will never lose its fascination for John F. Kennedy. With this volume, he pulls the camera back a bit from the star, to pan across the full range of supporting actors giving daily life to the New Frontier. It’s a smart idea for a book. Through this tour d’horizon, we meet all of the major aides, and a few (not too many) of the minor ones. I was mildly disappointed that there was not more emphasis on two aides in particular, Kenny O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien—charter members of the “Irish Mafia” who gave President Kennedy unstinting loyalty and hardened political advice. They were under-represented when the wordsmiths (Schlesinger and Sorensen) wrote their books in the 1960s, but they were integral to the story, and to the work of governance that underlay the glamour. Dallek brings out in vivid detail the debates over Vietnam and Cuba that dominated so much of the Kennedy presidency. He pays less attention to domestic difficulties, like the civil rights struggle, or the efforts to fight poverty and pollution that were gaining traction near the end. Overall, this is a highly capable synthesis of the work done within the Kennedy White House, and the complex range of personalities at the heart of it all.

Near the end of his letters, Arthur Schlesinger quotes Benjamin Franklin, near his own demise, who said that he had never troubled himself worrying about the divinity of Christ, because he expected to know the truth soon, “with less trouble.” Perhaps the two skeptics are together now, lamenting our failure to live up to the founders (a lament that goes back nearly to the founders themselves). In any event, the publication of these two books continues an important conversation with the past, all the more urgent at a time when no one in power seems to be talking to anyone else. As long as Congresses and Presidents exasperate each other, Schlesinger will have an audience, and an afterlife.

Ted Widmer is Assistant to the President for Special Projects at Brown University. He edited Listening In: The Secret White House Tape Recordings of John F. Kennedy.

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Rethinking the JFK Legacy

Posted in John F. Kennedy, tagged Historia de Estados Unidos, JFK, President John F. Kennedy on 29 octubre 2013| Leave a Comment »

JFK at Rice University in September 1962. Image via Wiki Commons.

Rethinking the JFK Legacy

Steven M. Gillo

huffingtonpost.com October 27, 2013

As we approach the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination we are reminded of his enduring hold on the popular imagination. Once again countless magazine articles, newspaper stories, books, and television stories will focus on the man, his presidency, and his death. Politicians from both parties continue to invoke his name to sell themselves and their policies. Polls show that Kennedy is America’s favorite president, ranking above Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.

Public adulation of Kennedy baffles many historians who have spent the past twenty years assaulting the foundation of Camelot. The public sees him as a bold and gallant leader who inspired the young, helped the disadvantaged, pushed for civil rights, stood down the Russians, and added glamor and style to the White House.

In recent years, however, many historians have focused attention on Kennedy’s shortcomings: the obsession with Fidel Castro, his reluctant support of civil rights, and the escalation in Vietnam. They have also probed beneath the glossy Kennedy charm and discovered a man who was dependent on prescription medication and who possessed an insatiable sexual appetite. Kennedy, a recent critic charged, was «deficient in integrity, compassion, and temperance.» That is a harsh judgment, and certainly not one shared by most historians. Most would agree, however, that his short time in office prevented JFK from leaving a lasting legacy of accomplishment.

Why the wide gap between the way historians view Kennedy and how the public perceives him? Part of the problem is that historians have difficulty appreciating Kennedy’s emotional impact on the public. Kennedy was the first president to use television to bypass the Washington opinion-makers and communicate directly with the American public. Television made obsolete traditional models which used legislative accomplishments to determine influence.

Because of the intimate relationship Kennedy established with the American public many people felt a sense of personal loss at his death. The assassination affected America unlike any other single event in modern history — with the possible exception of 9/11. No American born prior to 1960 can forget where he or she was the moment they heard the news of the President’s death. Seventy-five hours of television coverage helped create a shared sense of national grief. Four of five Americans felt «the loss of someone very close and dear,» and more than half cried.

Inevitably, in the years that followed Americans have searched to give his death some meaning. Our refusal to accept that Kennedy’s death could have been the result of a random, inexplicable act of violence has led us to search for more satisfying explanations. We refuse to accept that a loser like Lee Harvey Oswald could single-handedly kill a man as great as JFK. That search for meaning has lead to the creation of a mythical, heroic Kennedy. The thread that runs through most conspiracy theories, and permeates the popular view of JFK, is that nefarious individuals conspired to kill the President because he offered a new direction for the country.

But the Kennedy mystique is based on more than his photogenic qualities and his tragic death. In trying to understand Kennedy’s appeal I am reminded of what our first professional biographer, James Parton, wrote about Thomas Jefferson. «If Jefferson was wrong,» he wrote, «America is wrong. If Jefferson was right. America is right.»

Since the Puritans came to America searching for deliverance from the corruption of the Old World, Americans have believed in national destiny. Thomas Jefferson declared the new nation «the last best hope of mankind.» Herman Melville compared Americans to the biblical tribes of Israel, calling them «the peculiar chosen people… the Israel of our time.» At the heart of this belief was a faith that the future would always be better than the past. America stood as the exception to the historical rules which dictated that great civilizations eventually peaked and crumbled. Devoid of the class conflict, racial tensions, and the imperial designs that characterized other civilizations, America would move inevitably toward realizing its divinely inspired mission to be «as a city upon a hill.»

More than any president since FDR, Kennedy embodied these ideals of American greatness. Kennedy, like the nation he led, seemed larger than life. Every dimension of the New Frontier projected an image of strength and vitality: the inspirational rhetoric of sacrifice and idealism; the aristocratic elegance and democratic demeanor; the brilliant but compassionate advisers. Robert Frost captured the mood of the nation when he predicted that the Kennedy years would be an «Augustan age of poetry and power.»

The tragic series of events that followed Kennedy’s death challenged our faith in national destiny. A lost war in Vietnam and a crippling oil embargo reminded us that we could not shape the world in our own image. At home, racial violence, student protests, and government corruption revealed that America remained a deeply divided nation. During our time of trouble we turned to a heroic Kennedy for comfort. He reminded us of a time when America stood strong in the world, our nation felt united, and life seemed simpler. As the American dream slips further from the grasp of most people, as our faith in government and our hope for the future diminishes, we cling more tenaciously than ever to a mythic view of Kennedy.

We have transformed Kennedy into a metaphor of American greatness and judged all of his successors by that standard. Not surprisingly, they look dull by comparison. Politicians, eager to win the hearts of American voters, have tried to mimic Kennedy’s style and to steal his message. Republicans have invoked Kennedy’s memory to sell programs — supply-side economics, for example — that were antithetical to JFK’s own policies. President Obama flexed his political and legislative muscle to push through legislation that was far more ambitious than anything JFK could have imagined, yet even he, and his accomplishments, appear diminished by the comparison to a mythical Kennedy.

Over the years, the public, which has grown cynical and angry over raised expectations and diminished results, has moved to the sidelines of American politics waiting for the «next JFK.» Powerful, well-organized and well-funded, interest groups have moved to fill the void.

It is ironic that the memory of JFK would weaken political institutions. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960 by advocating change and, at least on a rhetorical level, he challenged us to confront old ideas. «For the great enemy of truth,» he said in a famous Yale commencement address in 1963, «is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.»

Ultimately, our fascination with Kennedy tells us more about ourselves, our deeply rooted beliefs and our need for heroes, then it does shed light on the man or his times. Kennedy was a very mortal man, very much a product of his times. In life he offered few solutions to the pressing issues of his time. His memory, burdened by the weight of myth, limits our ability to find answers to the problems of our own time.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-m-gillon/rethinking-the-jfk-legacy_b_4167729.html

Steven M Gillon is Scholar-in-Residence at History and Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma

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El Imperio de Calibán

El objetivo de este blog es fomentar el estudio de la historia de los Estados Unidos y analizar las prácticas, instituciones y discursos del imperialismo estadounidense.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-m-gillon/rethinking-the-jfk-legacy_b_4167729.html

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El objetivo de este blog es fomentar el estudio de la historia de los Estados Unidos y analizar las prácticas, instituciones y discursos del imperialismo estadounidense.

Posts Tagged ‘JFK’

Carlos Hernández-Echevarría

La Vanguardia 4 de febrero de 2021

Inmigración y ‘fake news’

El partido que no sabía nada

Una ley seca contra los católicos

De Kennedy a Biden

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