Thank God for Small Favors
I have heard a lot of Republicans, including the man Stephen Colbert describes as his favorite Republican, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT), argue over the last few years that the Democratic Party has abandoned our tradition of muscular foreign policy to, in effect, weaken our country. A Republican friend of mine even says that JFK would not be allowed into the Democratic Party today. (You could easily make the same argument about Abraham Lincoln and the GOP, but that is neither here nor there.) Today, I write to examine this charge about what JFK would have done in Iraq, by looking at what he actually did.
In 2004, at the Republican National Convention in New York, Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-NYC) said that on the day of Septmeber 11, he turned to his appointed police chief Bernard Kerik and said:
However, after reading the book Thirteen Days by Robert F. Kennedy, I thank God that George W. Bush was not President in 1962. We are told by those who don't care about the legacy of our 35th President (except for scoring cheap and bogus political points) that he would have attacked Iraq, but I would ask that we look at the evidence of the biggest foreign policy crisis of the Kennedy Administration, as well as the closest the world had ever come to its destruction. The thirteen days in October 1962 that encompassed the Cuban Missile Crisis and showed the world how a leader should act when dealing with the greatest threats of our day.
For those who don't remember the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy woke up the morning of Tuesday, October 16, with word from his CIA Director McGeorge Bundy that the United States had conclusive evidence, including photographs, that the Soviet Union had shipped surface-to-surface missiles to Cuba, thus ratcheting up nuclear tensions between the two world superpowers. Six days later, President Kennedy ordered a naval quarantine of all ships headed towards Cuba, with required inspections 500 miles away from Cuba. After a tense negotion and UN session leading to the famous "Stevenson moment," where two-time Democratic Presidential nominee, former Governor and then-UN Ambassador Adlai Stevnson (D-IL) confronted the Soviet Ambassador, and asking if there were missiles in Cuba, waiting for the Soviet ambassador to answer the question of whether the Soviet Union had missiles in Cuba, Stevenson famously said:
At this point, pictures were brought into the UN general assembly, which showed the Soviet missles and weapons site.
A few days later, the first ship went through the inspection process, and on October 25, Soviet ships and submarines either stopped dead in the water or turned around before reaching the quarantine, with an agreement ultimately being made on October 28 that the Soviet Union would dismantle missiles in Cuba with UN inspection and verification with the United States to secretly dismantle weapons that they deemed unnecessary in Turkey several months later.
Does this sound like what Goerge W. Bush would have done? I think that the evidence of the buildup to the Iraq War proves otherwise. President Kennedy was on the hotline with Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev on a daily basis, and both were determined to avoid a nuclear war. Hearing most of the advisors in the room advocate for a strike against Cuba, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, President Kennedy's most trusted advisor, wrote a note to his brother (who he referred to as "the President" in the book on all except for two occasions, where he referred to him as "President Kennedy") saying:
In other words, President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy were both concerned with the moral standing of the United States in the world. President Kennedy also thought several steps ahead, worried about the casualties, which Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told him would be 25,000 in the first day alone. His prmary concern wasn't with the first step, but "the fourth or fifth step, because the world will be gone before the sixth step." However, Attorney General Kennedy knew the stakes in this escalation, and he said later:
President Kennedy was also an astute student of history, as evidenced by his senior thesis at Harvard, Why England Slept, which detailed the reasons the United Kingdom overlooked the growing threat in Germany, that would eventually be published, so he was no reactionary dove. He also wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage in 1955, detailing the stories of eight of his historical Senate colleagues who made unpopular decisions under intense pressure. He was also well informed by the book The Guns of August, written by Barbara Tuchman, chronicling the miscommunications, misunderstandings and mistakes that ultimately drew Europe into World War I alnost by accident. President Kennedy did not want to repeat that history, as he told his brother on October 26:
Does this sound like how George W. Bush treated the Iraq War? It certainly doesn't seem like it to me. Instead, he used every oportunity to rachet up the conflict with Iraq, consequences be damned. However, there was a person involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis who did seem an awful lot like George W. Bush in this situation. That was Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay. General LeMay argued for a full-scale air attack on Cuba from the beginning, and when asked what he thought the Soviet Union's response would be, insisted that there would be none. Rather than being a beacon of Democratic Party thinking, as hawks would have you believe, General LeMay would resurface six years later as running mate for the American Independent Party campaign of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace (D-AL).
So, the next time you hear a Republican insist that Democrats should be the ones supporting the Iraq War because of our history, remind them that they are not following the tradition of John F. Kennedy, they are following the example of Curtis LeMay, and that if George W. Bush were President in 1962, the world as we know it would not exist.
In 2004, at the Republican National Convention in New York, Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-NYC) said that on the day of Septmeber 11, he turned to his appointed police chief Bernard Kerik and said:
Thank God that George W. Bush is President.
However, after reading the book Thirteen Days by Robert F. Kennedy, I thank God that George W. Bush was not President in 1962. We are told by those who don't care about the legacy of our 35th President (except for scoring cheap and bogus political points) that he would have attacked Iraq, but I would ask that we look at the evidence of the biggest foreign policy crisis of the Kennedy Administration, as well as the closest the world had ever come to its destruction. The thirteen days in October 1962 that encompassed the Cuban Missile Crisis and showed the world how a leader should act when dealing with the greatest threats of our day.
For those who don't remember the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy woke up the morning of Tuesday, October 16, with word from his CIA Director McGeorge Bundy that the United States had conclusive evidence, including photographs, that the Soviet Union had shipped surface-to-surface missiles to Cuba, thus ratcheting up nuclear tensions between the two world superpowers. Six days later, President Kennedy ordered a naval quarantine of all ships headed towards Cuba, with required inspections 500 miles away from Cuba. After a tense negotion and UN session leading to the famous "Stevenson moment," where two-time Democratic Presidential nominee, former Governor and then-UN Ambassador Adlai Stevnson (D-IL) confronted the Soviet Ambassador, and asking if there were missiles in Cuba, waiting for the Soviet ambassador to answer the question of whether the Soviet Union had missiles in Cuba, Stevenson famously said:
You are in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and you can answer yes or no. You denied that they exist, and I want to know whether I have understood you correctly. [...}
I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that's your decision. And I am also prepared to present the evidence in this room.
At this point, pictures were brought into the UN general assembly, which showed the Soviet missles and weapons site.
A few days later, the first ship went through the inspection process, and on October 25, Soviet ships and submarines either stopped dead in the water or turned around before reaching the quarantine, with an agreement ultimately being made on October 28 that the Soviet Union would dismantle missiles in Cuba with UN inspection and verification with the United States to secretly dismantle weapons that they deemed unnecessary in Turkey several months later.
Does this sound like what Goerge W. Bush would have done? I think that the evidence of the buildup to the Iraq War proves otherwise. President Kennedy was on the hotline with Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev on a daily basis, and both were determined to avoid a nuclear war. Hearing most of the advisors in the room advocate for a strike against Cuba, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, President Kennedy's most trusted advisor, wrote a note to his brother (who he referred to as "the President" in the book on all except for two occasions, where he referred to him as "President Kennedy") saying:
Now I know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.
In other words, President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy were both concerned with the moral standing of the United States in the world. President Kennedy also thought several steps ahead, worried about the casualties, which Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told him would be 25,000 in the first day alone. His prmary concern wasn't with the first step, but "the fourth or fifth step, because the world will be gone before the sixth step." However, Attorney General Kennedy knew the stakes in this escalation, and he said later:
The 10 or 12 people who had participated in all these discussion were bright and energetic people. We had perhaps amongst the most able in the country, and if any one of half a dozen of them were Preisdent the world would have very likely been plunged into catastrophic war.
President Kennedy was also an astute student of history, as evidenced by his senior thesis at Harvard, Why England Slept, which detailed the reasons the United Kingdom overlooked the growing threat in Germany, that would eventually be published, so he was no reactionary dove. He also wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage in 1955, detailing the stories of eight of his historical Senate colleagues who made unpopular decisions under intense pressure. He was also well informed by the book The Guns of August, written by Barbara Tuchman, chronicling the miscommunications, misunderstandings and mistakes that ultimately drew Europe into World War I alnost by accident. President Kennedy did not want to repeat that history, as he told his brother on October 26:
I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, The Missiles of October. If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move. I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary.
Does this sound like how George W. Bush treated the Iraq War? It certainly doesn't seem like it to me. Instead, he used every oportunity to rachet up the conflict with Iraq, consequences be damned. However, there was a person involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis who did seem an awful lot like George W. Bush in this situation. That was Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay. General LeMay argued for a full-scale air attack on Cuba from the beginning, and when asked what he thought the Soviet Union's response would be, insisted that there would be none. Rather than being a beacon of Democratic Party thinking, as hawks would have you believe, General LeMay would resurface six years later as running mate for the American Independent Party campaign of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace (D-AL).
So, the next time you hear a Republican insist that Democrats should be the ones supporting the Iraq War because of our history, remind them that they are not following the tradition of John F. Kennedy, they are following the example of Curtis LeMay, and that if George W. Bush were President in 1962, the world as we know it would not exist.
posted by Albert McStephenson at 12:32 PM
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