Time To Forgive JFK?

[Lucky]

JFK looks like a giant compared to the current president, but even he wasn't adverse to grabbing pussy when he could. His multiple affairs, including with a Mafia broad, were often conducted right under Jackie's nose. Kennedy kept his Addison's disease secret, as well as his use of drugs to keep his energy up...or more.

I was alive when he was elected, and when he was assassinated. The youthful belief I had in him caused me to be crushed when, 55 years ago today, he died. LBJ was no JFK!

Over the years, more has come out about Kennedy to tarnish the image. But I do believe he accomplished some things, (We didn't get blown up over Cuba.) and there is no doubt that he inspired many people. The Peace Corps continues today to help the poor.

So can we forgive his indiscretions?  If he was alive now, the Me/Too movement would castigate him. I would not.

[MsGuy]

I never held them against him in the first place. So far as I've ever heard, all his affairs were with adults and were consensual. Given the nature of this site, it's difficult to believe anyone here is addled enough to to get all bent about his affairs.

Interesting that you would select the Cuban missile crises for praise. I too think that was his finest moment as President. The more details of that confrontation that have leaked out over the years since, the more it appears his refusal to be pushed into an aggressive military response may well have prevented nuclear war.

Let's all pray that our current POTUS does not get himself into a similar situation requiring good judgement and steady nerves.

[RockHardNYC]

I've met Jackie Kennedy on more than one occasion. Never thought of her as the type of woman who enjoyed sex. Hated the fact that she smoked cigarettes.

15 hours ago, Lucky said:

If he was alive now, the Me/Too movement would castigate him.

Why would they castigate him? As far as I know, he wasn't a predator. He wasn't known for harassing. I've never heard one charge of attempted rape or a lost job due to failure to submit. Many women seemed to throw themselves at Jack. There certainly was no shortage of women who wanted to fuck and suck him.

Why is it OK for gays to have open marriages, but straights can't? Since when does not adhering to the rules of monogamy automatically qualify you for #MeToo?

This thread seems way off to me.

[RA1]

12 hours ago, MsGuy said:

I never held them against him in the first place. So far as I've ever heard, all his affairs were with adults and were consensual. Given the nature of this site, it's difficult to believe anyone here is addled enough to to get all bent about his affairs.

Interesting that you would select the Cuban missile crises for praise. I too think that was his finest moment as President. The more details of that confrontation that have leaked out over the years since, the more it appears his refusal to be pushed into an aggressive military response may well have prevented nuclear war.

Let's all pray that our current POTUS does not get himself into a similar situation requiring good judgement and steady nerves.

It is somewhat difficult for a conservative to in retrospect judge JFK in a VERY friendly manner.  However, I agree that his affairs were consensual to include the media in SILENT agreement.  Not likely today.  However, it seems difficult to decide if the Cuban missile crises was a high point.  Of course the US and the Soviet Union avoided nuclear conflict ( a good thing) but JFK gave up (secretly) other things to Nikita to insure the stand down. Naturally with international conflicts it is difficult for one side to completely dominate the other, probably a good thing also.

Yes, I was alive during the JFK presidency and Camelot.  I was thrilled and entranced with it all.  Now, not so much. 

 

Best regards,

RA1 

[MsGuy]

RA1, I agree that Kennedy was a very average POTUS, fucked up any number of times, died a timely death (for his reputation), and benefited from a massive and sustained propaganda effort by the Kennedy wing of the Democratic party in the years following his death. Think Hitler if assassinated in 1938. The Krauts would still be building monuments in his honor.

That said, Kennedy was under tremendous domestic pressure to meet the Russian provocation with decisive military response. The CIA and military intelligence were insisting that the missiles were not yet operational but soon would be. Once they were fully installed the Russians would be in a position to thumb their noses at us. Pentagon advising take out the sites NOW, cabinet (including McNamara and Stevenson) thumping their chests and competing on who dick was bigger, Republicans screaming for blood and warning against a sell out.

Kennedy, with little support from his administration, went with his least confrontational option: a naval quarantine. No blood, no dead Russians (and giving the Russians a week or two to think things over). Sanity prevailed, a deal was cut, we agreed to pull  some soon to be obsolete missiles from Turkey and  not to invade Cuba again; Ruskies pulled their missiles and agreed not to build any large Naval base in Cuba and not to station a large army presence there. Neither side had to admit in public to the side agreements. Not a bad deal for us. Good enough for us that it got First Secretary Nikita bounced by the Party not long after.

What we know now is that despite all the assurances by our intelligence folks, some of the missiles were in fact operational.   What we know now is that the Kremlin, not knowing if they could maintain communications with their command authority in Cuba in event of hostilities, had already authorized the use of those very operational missiles in event of a pre-emptive attempt by the US to destroy them. We didn't know Castro was willing to take a nuclear hit to keep those missiles and was throwing a fit at the notion of Russia backing out. Castro just didn't believe our private promise that he wouldn't wake up some morning to the sight of US troops landing in Havana harbor.

So all that macho chest thumping by all those folks who should have known better was based on the false assumption the there was nothing much the USSR could do in response. No operational missiles, remember? Ask yourself what the result would have been of a Russian nuke going bang in the middle of a 2nd Fleet task force off the coast of Cuba.

Back then, neither folks on our side nor folks on their side had  really thought through the nature of nuclear war. Both civil and military authorities conceptualized nukes as bombs; extremely large, extremely destructive, but not different in essence from say firebombing Dresden or Tokyo.

It was, in fact, only in the aftermath of the close call of the Cuban confrontation that folks began to realize that nukes were different in essential nature from other munitions. It seems an insane joke to say that it took folks almost two decades to figure out that nukes had made general war between Great Powers obsolete except as the means of an elaborate ritual of national suicide but that in fact is the case: Folks who own nuclear arsenals just can not use them against other folks with nuclear arsenals; It's exceedingly dangerous to engage in conventional war against a nuclear power; Because of very practical considerations relating to pre-emptive strikes, it actually very dangerous to set precedents by using nukes against non-nuclear powers. And so on... To this day, some folks still don't get it.

So let's give Kennedy the credit he's due. his gut instinct was right and all the wise advice he got was very very wrong.

[RA1]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.  However, you make it sound like the stiffest opposition JFK was facing was his own military, staff, etc. as opposed to the Soviets and Cubans.  I believe that it is accurately reported that JFK suffered quite a bit wrestling with this situation.  He reputedly consulted RFK for support.  I agree the naval blockade was the best interim approach.  

I also agree that some folks today still do not "get it" about nukes but I also think that most powers that had them in the 1960's realized the reality of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).  It seems that the later nuke powers think that having the bomb will keep the US or possibly others from removing them from power.  Here I mean North Korea, Iran, possibly Pakistan and India.  I know of no reason these countries should have much less use the bomb.

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

For  most third world despots, there's not a whole lotta daylight between regime survival and personal survival. Where ia Sadam (or his sons) now? Where is Kadaffy (or his sons)? What will happen to the top leaders in Iran or in PRK if their regimes fail? It's kind of difficult to arrange a quiet retirement in Paris or London when you've spent decades doing the kind of shit those folks get up to.

Some manage it, like in those clowns in South Africa, but for most, nukes are actually less dicey than their other alternatives.

PS, my point on JFK was not that the enemy was internal. The Soviets were trying to put about a third of the US homeland under direct threat of destruction on 5 minutes notice. They had to go. The problem was how to get them out w/o general war. Nobody (us or them) had really thought through the problem and everybody was being forced to wing their actions under extreme stress.

People under stress tend to fall back on old habits of thought and action. That's why football coaches like to practice the hell out of their players. Our side was pretty well practised at blowing up bases. Their side was likely pretty good at rolling tanks into places like Berlin. And those missile troops in Cuba were probably not too bad at spinning up IRBMs on short notice. And the Navy  most likely had a good idea of what they would do to Murmansk, Sevastopol and that big Russian naval base in their Pacific Maritime region if a nuke took out a US carrier group. And so forth.

Remember WW1 occurred without a single participant wanting a general war. Shit just happened.  The version of that war that you and I were taught back when was pretty much based on Allied b.s.

[RA1]

Of course.  The winners get to write the history.  I have wondered more than once why Viet Nam bothered to try to or actually win the war against the US when we would have immediately given them more aid than they could reasonably use had they lost.  They had to wait until fairly recently to receive same.

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

Well, duh.

Clearly those goofy retards in Hanoi were obsessed with renaming Saigon Ho Chi Min City.

[BiBottomBoy]

I never blamed him for his indiscretions.

Fucking up the Bay Of Pigs is another story.

[MsGuy]

If you squint your eyes just right, the Bay of Pigs looks like a good thing.

Taught Kennedy the wise men and expert advisers  didn't necessarily know shit.

The next time the shit hit the fan, he thought things through for himself. 

 

[AdamSmith]

On 11/23/2018 at 12:28 PM, RA1 said:

It is somewhat difficult for a conservative to in retrospect judge JFK in a VERY friendly manner.  However, I agree that his affairs were consensual to include the media in SILENT agreement.  Not likely today.  However, it seems difficult to decide if the Cuban missile crises was a high point.  Of course the US and the Soviet Union avoided nuclear conflict ( a good thing) but JFK gave up (secretly) other things to Nikita to insure the stand down. Naturally with international conflicts it is difficult for one side to completely dominate the other, probably a good thing also.

Yes, I was alive during the JFK presidency and Camelot.  I was thrilled and entranced with it all.  Now, not so much. 

 

Best regards,

RA1 

Agree with almost everything you say.

Bur the 'things he gave up' were some US-owned Turkish missile bases that were already of zero strategic value.

Thus allowing face-saving on both sides.

[RA1]

Did we know that at the time?  Like most hoarders, I hate to give up anything that I MIGHT think of value later. 

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

...in 1959 the US and Turkey agreed to deploy one squadron of 15 nuclear tipped Jupiter medium range ballistic missiles (MRBM) missiles in Turkey. They also deployed them to Italy. The deployment to Turkey began in June 1961. They became operational in April 1962. This photo shows one of the five "flights" (3 missiles each) of Jupiter MRBMs deployed at Cigli Air Base, Turkey during 1962 and early 1963.
 

 

The Jupiters were armed with 1.1 megaton W49 nuclear warheads. You can see from this map why the Soviets did not appreciate these missiles in Turkey. The sites in Turkey were largely in western Turkey. Even though the Jupiter was a MRBM with a nuclear warhead, it could hit Moscow. That certainly stuck in Khrushchev’s craw.

Furthermore, the Jupiters really were very vulnerable. They had to stand in a vertical position, it took a long time to prepare them for launch, and they had little to no value as a deterrent. Instead, if anything, they would motivate the Soviets to attack them first, pre-emptively.

--------

RA1, the missiles in question were the medium range version of the liquid fueled Jupiter. It took several hours to drag them out of their sheds, haul them to their launch pads, hoist them upright and then load them up with hydrogen and lox and otherwise spin them up to a ready condition. H>O>U>R>S.

Recall these are not the Jupiter ICBMs buried deep in super hardened holes in Arkansas. These are the fragile birds sitting in a Quonset hut version. Said sheds being located less than a hour from Warsaw Pact air bases. Deterence value: zero; retaliation value: zip; even first strike value; awkward at best, but scary as shit to the Russians.

So what they were was exactly what you NEVER, EVER want in your nuclear inventory: (1)scary as shit but (2) easily trashed in a pre-emptive strike. The worst of all possible weapons to deploy, more dangerous to you than to the enemy.

RA1, hard as it is to believe, in 1960 the guys running the world simply had not figured out that nuclear weapons were not just a novel, game changing war technology, they changed the whole dynamic of great power rivalry.

So, yes, obsolete from the day of installation. We actually made ourselves a smidgen safer by removing them. As the Russians made themselves safer by removing theirs.

It's funny how it's easy to see how the Russians were better off w/o those Cuban missiles but much harder to see why the US was safer w/o those in Turkey. It takes figuring that out to begin to understand the true, real world, very practical consequences of possessing nuclear weapons.

PS Did we know they were useless at the time? Well, a lot of people didn't understand it that way. So many in fact that that side agreement remained secret until we actually began closing the bases some months later. And Kennedy denied any such  agreement to the day of his death. 1960's version of FAKE NEWS! LOL.

So Dear Hoarder: at the least, Kennedy figured it was worth  scrapping a handful of  missiles to keep Khrushchev's head on his shoulders long enough to get those missiles out of Cuba. Remember there were lots of folks (hoarders?)in Russia who didn't understand how Russia was better off w/o those Cuban missiles. Learning to think in terms of 3rd and 4th order consequences doesn't come easy.

 

[RA1]

And here I thought that Douglas MacArthur was the last man who really thought nuclear weapons were just the latest thing AND almost had the authority to use them.  

I would like to think that JFK understood how the Soviet Union was better off without US missiles in Turkey or thereabout but I really think he was just trying to defuse the situation as best he could.  I think he was terrified of what the Soviets would do and, fortunately, so was Khrushchev similarly terrified.  Only in retrospective does one allow that both nations might be better off.  

Today, US and perhaps a few other's, technology could deliver fairly clean tactical weapons of nuclear design.  Unfortunately the dictator's weapons are extremely dirty.  I have little thoughts that the US would use them in a first strike but I have no such reservations about others.  What is holding the world at bay?  Pixie dust?

Best regards,

RA1

 

[AdamSmith]

10 hours ago, RA1 said:

And here I thought that Douglas MacArthur was the last man who really thought nuclear weapons were just the latest thing AND almost had the authority to use them.  

I would like to think that JFK understood how the Soviet Union was better off without US missiles in Turkey or thereabout but I really think he was just trying to defuse the situation as best he could.  I think he was terrified of what the Soviets would do and, fortunately, so was Khrushchev similarly terrified.  Only in retrospective does one allow that both nations might be better off.  

Today, US and perhaps a few other's, technology could deliver fairly clean tactical weapons of nuclear design.  Unfortunately the dictator's weapons are extremely dirty.  I have little thoughts that the US would use them in a first strike but I have no such reservations about others.  What is holding the world at bay?  Pixie dust?

Best regards,

RA1

 

The very real risk today is the leakiness of the post-Soviet nuke stockpile to 3rd-world (or whoever) random anonymous terrorists.

A Congressional committee member once asked Oppenheimer, 'What technology could secure New York City from a nuclear attack?'

Oppie replied: 'A screwdriver.'

Meaning of course you would have to open & inspect every single shipping-borne packing crate entering the ports.