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Themage posted:Have we ever had a good president? It's an interesting discussion! And, obviously, heavily focused on your definition of the word 'good'. In my view, the president who was the most able administrator of the Presidency and the most decent person by modern moral standards was Lincoln—while he still held views that would be considered akin to white supremacy today, he recognized the deep moral evil of slavery and the necessity of excising it from the United States by blood if necessary. From his second inaugural address (I was going to just quote a part of it but it's all good, Lincoln was by far one of the best speechwriters of the American Presidents): quote:Fellow-Countrymen: In personal life he was a kind and gentle man with a reputation for honesty. And as President, he was a stark contrast to many of the weak-willed sacks of flesh that had been inhabiting the office for many of the previous few decades. He astutely outmaneuvered men who had much more political power and experience then he did, worked well with his allies in Congress, and successfully sold the nation not only on a bloody and brutal war to keep the country together, but abolition and freedom for millions of slaves. He also passed into law landmark legislation that would shape the country for centuries to come—the transcontinenal railroad, the Homestead Act, and the Land-Grant Colleges. Lincoln was a flawed man in many respects. But he was fundamentally, I feel, a good man, one who did not allow his prejudices to overcome the task of correcting the nation's greatest historic wrong.
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Dec 19, 2018 17:51
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Themage posted:Have we ever had a good president? No American Presidents are in The Good Place, of course nobody has made it into The Good Place in over 500 years so that might not be an indictment of the Presidents
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Dec 19, 2018 18:11
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howe_sam posted:
Correct! When his mother remarried, he was rechristened with his stepfather's name.
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Dec 19, 2018 18:13
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Correct! When his mother remarried, he was rechristened with his stepfather's name. I did not know that! Interesting. My vote, if it's still open, is for Slick Willie.
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Dec 19, 2018 19:30
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So I just read the posts on W. Bush and shame on y'all for not even mentioning Guantanamo Bay.
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Dec 19, 2018 20:09
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Part 4: The Thousand Days of John F. Kennedy When we last left John F. “Jack” Kennedy, he’d been elected President of the United States by a razor-thin popular vote margin over the sitting Vice President,  . He’d done it by cobbling together the most diverse (and somewhat bizarre) alliance of voters since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition: young voters, African Americans, women, and a collection of Southern whites. In doing so he’d made history--at 43 years of age, John Kennedy was the youngest President ever elected to the office (Theodore Roosevelt had taken over for William McKinley at 42, but was not elected to his own term in office until age 45).The next three years in American politics were perhaps some of the most chaotic in the modern era--and yet for history nerds like me, they are some of the most exciting. With the country at the height of Cold War hysteria and racial tensions stretched as taut as guitar strings, we were in for some weird, wild poo poo. Strap yourselves in, and let’s take a tour through the thousand days of what historians called “Camelot”: the administration of John F. Kennedy. We aren’t going to go chronologically; like with all the consequential Presidents I’ve written about so far, I’m going to cover a handful of events that I think bear mentioning. Now What? Arthur Schlesinger said that in the days that followed his election, Kennedy was more “perplexed than bothered by his margin of victory”. He was happy, to be sure, but journalist Henry Brandon said that the results had actually somewhat “hurt his self-confidence and pride”. He actually took Ken O’Donnell aside and asked him, “How did I only manage to beat a guy like this by only a hundred thousand votes?” Thing was, he didn’t have much time to ponder it. The days immediately post-election are insanely hectic, as the transition team must immediately begin choosing a Cabinet. During the press event at Hyannis Port the day after the election, Kennedy was still showing signs of campaign exhaustion--according to witnesses, though they were out of camera sight, his hands shook. Ted Sorensen reported that even days later when he visited Jack at the Palm Beach retreat that he still hadn’t recovered completely. “[He] still seemed tired then and reluctant to face up to the details of personnel and program selection,” Sorensen recalled. But Jack knew he couldn’t show any signs of fatigue. The questions about his health had never gone away and he knew that if he betrayed any public signs of weakness that they’d flare up again. When asked by reporters if he did in fact suffer from Addison’s disease, he flatly denied it. “I have been through a long campaign and my health is very good today,” he asserted. Today’s Health, an American Medical Association journal, published an article on Jack’s physical health and described him as being in “superb physical condition”. It was a lie, of course. Jack’s health remained as iffy as ever. The colitis, the back problems, and the Addison’s all still plagued him and he spent nearly every day in some degree of pain or another. To manage it he was on a combination of medicines unprecedented by anyone to ever hold the office--information voters never received. There was no time to dwell on this, of course. Kennedy knew he had to act quickly on appointments, but he also knew that his thin margin of victory had denied him the mandate he wanted. He was convinced that he needed to bridge the divide with Republicans and indicate that as President he’d put the national interest above party squabbles. It’s a nice thought, but as you and I know, it rarely works out. Two days after the election, Kennedy made his first moves. The CIA and FBI would remain untouched: Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover would remain as directors of their respective agencies (Hoover had a folder full of dirt on Jack and the family knew that if he was dislodged it would all come spilling out). Jack hoped that this would signal Democrats that he wasn’t going to be pushed around on other appointments as well, but Hoover was the primary motivator. Lyndon Johnson said later that it was preferable to keep Hoover inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in. His next move was to hop on a plane to Key Biscayne to meet with his defeated rival, Richard Nixon. Ken O’Donnell opposed this move--when he asked Jack what on earth he was going to ask Nixon, Jack replied “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll ask him how he won in Ohio.” You and I both know why he did it, and the meeting achieved its intended purpose--to make Jack look like a statesman and a magnanimous winner, as well as a signal to Republicans that he welcomed constructive contributions to his administrations (though Nixon himself would not be given a role). Nevertheless, Kennedy couldn’t ignore the political differences. O’Donnell recalled that Nixon actually did most of the talking during their meeting, and after they left Jack rolled his eyes and said “It was just as well for all of us that he didn’t quite make it.” (Incidentally, Nixon did not reveal his Ohio strategy.) The highest priority during the transition was to find the right men (no women were considered for top posts) for the administration. Kennedy would be his own chief of staff, and the men who had traveled with him--Sorensen, O’Donnell, Salinger, and Powers--would be the insiders. All four got West Wing offices near the Oval Office. Salinger would be the press secretary, O’Donnell his appointments secretary, Sorensen as chief speechwriter and special legislative assistant, and Powers as the “political man Friday”--but they would not be bound by any specific job duties. They’d frequently tread into each other’s territory, working on anything and everything. Jack made a few notable appointments to his Cabinet that I feel bear mentioning. For Secretary of State, he chose this man:  Dean Rusk was the President of the Rockefeller Foundation and had been a Rhodes scholar and a college professor, as well as serving as an assistant secretary under Truman. He came highly recommended by the biggest names in foreign policy--Dean Acheson, Adlai Stevenson and others sang his praises--but Rusk was, at best, a bland, faceless academic. Jack planned to run foreign policy out of the Oval Office and he needed a Secretary of State who would serve rather than lead. For the Pentagon, Jack looked at a number of names, but one of them kept jumping out at him.  Most of you will only know him as the face of Lyndon Johnson’s failed Vietnam policies years later, but as of 1960, Robert McNamara was the President of the Ford Motor Company. A Republican, he nevertheless had impeccable credentials as a businessman and he’d served as an Air Force officer during World War II. During his military service he’d applied a system of statistical control that had dramatically improved the Air Force’s effectiveness. He came highly recommended by both Michigan Democrats and United Auto Workers officials as tough but fair-minded and possessed of the managerial skills needed to whip the chaotic Defense Department into shape. When Jack met with him, McNamara told Kennedy that he would run the Defense Department and although he would defer to the President in terms of decisions, he would not play a political role or dole out favors. This so impressed Bobby Kennedy that they practically offered McNamara the job on the spot. Fun fact: no doubt due to what I can only assume is McNamara’s liberal use of Brylcreem, Lyndon Johnson used to call him “the lard-hair man”. But as always, folks, when you remember John Kennedy’s Cabinet, you remember who he chose for Attorney General.  There had been questions about where Bobby Kennedy would serve in the administration. Originally it was thought he would take a sub-Cabinet post in State--but all the new Cabinet officers knew it would be impossible to have the President’s brother serving as their second banana. Bobby himself worried about charges of nepotism--he told Jack to first ask Abe Ribicoff and Adlai Stevenson to serve as Attorney General--and he also worried about the position being a magnet for criticism over civil rights, making Jack indirectly responsible for the entire burden. Despite the fact that Bobby had never practiced law or served as a judge, Joe Sr. lobbied hard for him, believing that he deserved the position after all the work he had done to get his brother elected, but Bobby himself decided as late as December that he wasn’t going to take the job. “This will kill my father,” he lamented. Jack was determined to have him, though. Bobby didn’t suck up to his brother--he had a reputation for telling the unvarnished truth, an attractive quality in a Cabinet officer. Jack thought he was going to need that going forward when dealing with some of the issues on his plate, and he feared that some of his other Cabinet officers would not be so forthcoming due to their desire to please him. The story of Bobby’s reluctance and Joe Sr’s insistence was useful to the narrative, however, and it was used as a screen for appointing him all the way until it was made official. Even Evelyn Lincoln, Jack’s secretary, was given the same false picture of Bobby’s appointment to the Justice Department as everyone else--the story was, according to her, that Jack had tried first to persuade him to take the Attorney General’s job. If not that, then Senator from Massachusetts; if not that, then Undersecretary of State for Latin Affairs. Officially, Bobby didn’t want any of them--he said he’d rather write a book. In fact, Bobby had reluctantly agreed to take the Justice Department position already, and the Kennedys were gambling on the Administration being successful enough that criticism would ultimately be muted. They were wrong, at least initially. Journalists and legal experts claimed that Bobby’s background gave him no claim to the Justice Department, and political insiders were no less skeptical. Vice President Lyndon Johnson, of course, was hardly one of Bobby’s biggest fans. “[Senator Richard] Russell is absolutely shittin’ a squealin’ worm,” he told Bobby Baker, his aide. “He thinks it’s a disgrace for a kid who’s never practiced law to be appointed...I agree with him.” But LBJ was less convinced that Bobby would have unfettered ability to direct Presidential opinion. “I don’t think Jack Kennedy’s gonna let a little fart like Bobby lead him around by the nose,” he added. Johnson did his duty with the Senate, and Presidential prerogative--the idea that the President should be largely allowed to pick his Cabinet--cowed the Senators into accepting Bobby as Attorney General. Whatever it takes, I guess. Interlude: The Inauguration I feel like I have to mention this, too, even if I just give it short billing. Jack knew that to get off on the right foot he’d need a barnburner of an inaugural address, but he was nearly overwhelmed with suggestions on what to say. According to Ted Sorensen’s recollections, it was a bloody madhouse. quote:Pages, paragraphs and complete drafts had poured in, solicited from [journalist Joseph] Kraft, [economist John Kenneth] Galbraith, [Adlai] Stevenson, [Undersecretary of State Chester] Bowles, and others, unsolicited from newsmen, friends and total strangers. That wasn’t all. According to historian Robert Dallek, clergymen besieged Kennedy’s speechwriters with lists of Biblical quotes they thought would be appropriate, and Sorensen himself pored over past inaugural addresses to see if there was some sort of “secret recipe” to find what worked best. Fun fact--one of the things he found was that the examples of the best eloquence in inaugurals had come from our worst Presidents! More germane to the task, Sorensen determined that brevity was key and that excessive use of multisyllabic words caused Presidents to trip over their tongues more often than not. The result was a 1,355-word magnum opus, delivered on a cold January day in 1961--and Sorensen’s efforts became one of the two most memorable inaugural addresses in the 20th century. Its clarity of vision and its boldness made it stand next to Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural in terms of its exemplary use of language and its clarion call to civic duty. “We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom”, Kennedy observed. Though the world had changed even since World War II--“man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life”--Kennedy said that “the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe.” But it isn’t those lines we remember Kennedy’s inaugural address for. No, it’s this one that has stuck with us for the last 60 years. quote:Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are--but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out...a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself….And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country. The power of oratory is never to be underestimated, guys. The Bay of Pigs (Or: Why Dick Bissell Is An rear end in a top hat)  I should start this section with a little bit of necessary (and obvious) history. In the late 1950s, the regime of tyrannical Cuban President Fulgencio Batista had been overthrown in a violent revolution by this man:  Yes, it’s Fidel Castro, the monster under every right-winger’s bed for the last 60 years. Kennedy had been sympathetic to the revolt in the beginning--after all, Batista was hardly popular, given how corrupt and repressive his administration was--but after a few years he, like many others, believed that Castro had sold out his utopian socialist ideals to a gang of Cuban Communists in exchange for their help solidifying his hold on the country. The new regime in Havana became decidedly anti-U.S. and allied itself with Moscow and Beijing. Eisenhower had broken off diplomatic relations with Cuba, a decision Kennedy secretly supported (I say secretly because he had gotten dinged badly during the campaign by liberals--and Nixon!--when he actively supported an invasion of the island by Cuban exiles). We already had an arms embargo in place in Cuba after the civil war between Batista and Castro began in 1958, and it had been expanded to include all exports besides food and medicine in October 1960. Kennedy pulled in one of his foreign policy advisors, an Adlai Stevenson associate (Stevenson had been made UN Ambassador) named John Sharon, and quizzed him on the effectiveness of the Eisenhower economic sanctions. Basically, he wanted to know if they were working and if his incoming administration would gain any advantage by rolling them back. A report from a Chicago union leader named Sidney Lens who had just returned from Cuba confirmed the loss of civil liberties under Castro--but it also reported that most of the populace seemed to support him regardless. Bottom line? The embargo was ineffective because other countries were stepping in to fill the hole the United States had left behind. The report also warned that Castro’s spies had infiltrated anti-Castro groups of exiles in America and were passing information on their plans back to the Cuban government. While all this was going on, CIA Director Allen Dulles was briefing Jack on a plan to use militarily-trained Cuban exiles in Guatemala to infiltrate Cuba and topple Castro. Officially, Jack endorsed nothing--but he told Dulles to continue the planning. Two days after Kennedy took the oath the CIA was banging down his door urging action on Cuba. Dulles emphasized that the Cubans in Guatemala had a short shelf-life of maybe about two months--the urgency rested on the CIA’s belief that Castro’s influence was spreading to South America, particularly Venezuela and Colombia. The Cabinet demurred, especially now that the CIA was advocating for direct U.S. intervention. Secretary of State Dean Rusk urged caution, trying to impress upon the room (which included Bobby, Rusk, McNamara, Dulles, and other national security experts like National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy) the gravity of such a move. Rusk thought doing this might trigger “Soviet and Chinese Communist moves in other parts of the world”. There were many differences of opinion among the foreign policy guys about what the result of an invasion would be. Bundy told Jack on February 8 that Defense and the CIA were much more optimistic about it than State was--the military was counting on an invasion that would trigger a second full-on civil war, wherein the United States could start openly backing the anti-Castro faction. State? They anticipated backlash not just in Latin America, but anti-U.S. sentiment in the United Nations as well. Rusk’s reluctance bothered Kennedy greatly, but he now faced two really bad choices. If he decided to stand down, he’d have to disarm the Cubans training in Guatemala--and face their wrath for failing to implement Eisenhower’s plan to contain the spread of Communism in Latin America. The CIA told Kennedy that if he didn’t use them to invade Cuba that they “doubted that other really satisfactory uses of the troops in Guatemala could be found”. Scrapping the invasion would make Kennedy look like an appeaser, as Ken O’Donnell said later. But going with the invasion would risk an international disaster. “However well disguised any action might be, it will be ascribed to the United States,” Arthur Schlesinger told Jack. The result would be an immediate tidal wave of protests and general unrest throughout not only Latin America, but Europe, Asia, and Africa as well. It would dissipate all the goodwill the new administration had earned on the world stage if this was Kennedy’s first foreign policy initiative. As Schlesinger said, “it would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions.” Kennedy certainly heard Schlesinger’s concerns. He remembered all the things he’d once said about liberty and self-determination, and he understood that a visible U.S. role in toppling Castro would be seen as a betrayal of the progressivism he’d ostensibly committed himself to. Problem was, Jack was first and foremost an anti-Communist and a Cold Warrior--and the idea of toppling a Castro government that seemed to have little regard for civil liberties that they promised during the revolution or the autonomy of their fellow Latin American countries appealed to him. During that February 8 meeting, Kennedy asked if the CIA planners could land the Cubans quietly and stage their first military efforts from the mountains--thus making them a Cuban force from within Cuba, rather than an American-backed invasion force. The CIA and the Joint Chiefs told Kennedy that the Cubans could succeed without American forces. According to Defense Secretary McNamara, the “small invasion force” of some 1200-1500 men would “be expected to achieve initial success. Ultimate success will depend on the extent to which the initial assault serves as a catalyst for further action on the part of anti-Castro elements within Cuba.” In layman’s terms, the exile force was only supposed to light the wick on the dynamite, not shoot the powder kegs. So why did I title this section the way I did? Well, it has to do with this man.  Richard “Dick” Bissell was the CIA’s deputy director of planning, and at a meeting with Kennedy on the 11th of February, he and Allen Dulles predicted that Castro would not fall absent outside intervention and that if Kennedy waited, his military might would reduce the likelihood of a successful invasion within the space of a few months. “The Cuban paramilitary force if effectively used [in the next month] has a good chance of overthrowing Castro, or of causing a damaging civil war, without the necessity for the United States to commit itself to overt action against Cuba,” Bissell said. He was very convincing--Jack Kennedy bought what Dick Bissell was selling, and that was more or less the story. Kennedy told the room that he was “willing to take the chance of going ahead; [but]...he could not endorse a plan that put us in so openly, in view of the world situation.” Kennedy told the CIA and the Joint Chiefs that they needed to develop a plan where U.S. involvement was minimally visible. Side note: I should mention that it’s not entirely clear what made Dick Bissell as persuasive as he was, but Robert Dallek makes a go of it in “John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life”: quote:[Jack] and Bobby shared an affinity for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and their urbane hero. Bissell, who did so much to sell Kennedy on the Bay of Pigs, seemed to be something of a real-life Bond himself--an Ivy League graduate, socially sophisticated, tall and handsome, “civilized, responsible”, “a man of high character and remarkable intellectual gifts.” I honestly am not sure what to make of this other than the idea that he seduced Jack Kennedy into listening to him. I really hope this topic spurs further discussion, because I’d like to know what you guys think. For the landing location, the CIA assured the President that an inlet in the Zapata region of Cuba around 100 miles from Trinidad would be the ideal landing spot to stage the operation and land the exile force. That landing spot? It was known as the Bay of Pigs. Here’s a map to give you an idea of where we're talking about :  Bissell and his people told Kennedy now that the landing would look less like a World War II-style amphibious assault and more like a guerrilla infiltration. Both Bissell and Dulles were cognizant that the Communist world would immediately accuse the United States of interfering, but they preferred it to what they viewed as the “certain risks” of demobilizing and disarming the Cubans in Guatemala and returning them to the United States, where they’d almost certainly start launching ugly political attacks against the Kennedy Administration. Bottom line? We were more scared of being called Communist appeasers than we were of a failed U.S.-backed coup in Cuba. I didn’t say it was right, I’m just saying that’s how they thought. As the days wore on, Dulles continued to counter Kennedy’s lingering worries about the plan. “Mr. President, I know you’re doubtful about this. But I stood at this very desk and said to President Eisenhower about a similar operation in Guatemala, ‘I believe it will work.’ And I say to you now, Mr. President, that the prospects for this plan are even better than our prospects were in Guatemala.” Dulles’ continued emphasis that there was small risk of failure and no risk of American involvement that would compromise our credibility in regards to the right to self-determination. Ironically, despite the CIA and the Chiefs’ assurances, the project got the codename “Operation Bumpy Road”. Kennedy had listened to, but not entirely believed, Dulles’ continued assurances of success and kept emphasizing that the invasion “needed to appear as an internal uprising”. Despite the secrecy, the operation was, as you know, doomed from the start. Newspapers were publicly printing stories about anti-Castro forces being trained in Guatemala and elsewhere. True, no one knew explicitly what they’d be used for, but Castro and his spies weren’t stupid. They were more than capable of putting two and two together. On April 12, with the invasion only a few days away, Kennedy was asked at a press conference how far the United States would go “in helping an anti-Castro uprising or invasion of Cuba.” His reply? quote:There will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces. This Government will do everything it can….to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba. See the cute little verbal sleight-of-hand Kennedy played there? It was easy, back when the newspapers and the evening news were your only sources of information. On Saturday, April 15, it began. Eight B-26 bombers flying from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, hit three airfields in Cuba. According to historian Theodore Draper, it was the beginning of what became known as “one of those rare events in history: a perfect failure.” The bombers barely managed to dent Castro’s air capabilities, destroying only 5 of his nearly 40 combat planes and failing to remove the danger that the invading exile force would be under, as they were traveling by boat from Nicaragua. They’d now be vulnerable to air attacks before and after landing. To give credence to their cover story, the CIA had arranged to have a ninth bomber with Cuban air force markings and bullet holes fly from Nicaragua to Miami, where it would make an “emergency” landing and the CIA-trained pilot would pretend to be a defector who’d flown from Cuba. It was meant to bolster the narrative that the uprising was purely of Cuban origin. UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who, as it turns out, was not on the list of people that the White House felt it needed to tell their plans to, sincerely and earnestly denied American involvement before a meeting of the General Assembly that was charging the United States with “imperialist aggression” towards Cuba. The CIA cover story quickly came apart, and when it did, a VERY pissed-off Adlai Stevenson complained to Dean Rusk and Allen Dulles on April 16, “I do not understand how we could let such an attack take place two days before debate on the Cuban issue in the GA.” Nor could he understand “why I could not have been warned and provided pre-prepared material with which to defend us.” Stevenson’s anger was justified. The White House had hung him out to dry. A second planned air strike in support of the invasion on April 17 became, in the words of Robert Dallek, “a casualty of the CIA’s unraveling ruse.” Without the ability to establish a beachhead--and, indeed, the ability to make a plausible case that that was where the B-26s launched from--Kennedy insisted on grounding the exiles’ 16 planes. After giving the order to Rusk by phone, Kennedy had his first inkling that the whole operation might prove to be the fiasco State had warned him about. Let this be a lesson to you, kids: maybe the military doesn’t always know what will work and what won’t. When the CIA planners got wind that Kennedy had grounded the planes they girded themselves for failure of the entire mission, and indeed, by April 18, Mac Bundy told Kennedy that “the situation in Cuba is not a bit good. The Cuban armed forces are stronger, the popular response is weaker, and our tactical position is feebler than we had hoped. Tanks have done in one beachhead, and the position is precarious at the others….The real question is whether to reopen the possibility of further intervention and to support or to accept the high probability that our people, at best, will go into the mountains in defeat.” For four hours that night, even during a white-tie reception for Congress, Kennedy pondered the situation, his despair increasing as the minutes ticked by. Bissell and Navy Chief Admiral Arleigh Burke urged Kennedy to use carrier planes to shoot down Castro’s aircraft, and to use Navy power to shell Castro’s tanks on the beaches. Kennedy held fast to his decision not to use American troops in the effort. Later, he told Dave Powers that the Chiefs and the CIA “were sure I’d give in to them...they couldn’t believe that a new President like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.” By the morning of April 18, though, Castro had sunk the exiles’ primary supply ship with ten days’ worth of ammunition and most of the communication equipment. Later that afternoon he’d pinned them down with a force of 20,000 men and a bevy of Soviet tanks. He’d also ordered the arrest and jailing of nearly 20,000 political opponents, silencing the CIA’s predicted internal uprising that the invasion was meant to spur. When the exiles attempted to flee into the Escambray Mountains, an eighty-mile stretch of swamp between the beach and the mountains made it nearly impossible. Outgunned and outmanned, the exiles faced a hopeless fight to the death or surrender. More than 80 percent of them surrendered--nearly 1,200 of the 1,400-strong invading force. Kennedy felt the full impact of the operation’s failure, and he made no attempts to dissemble. He blamed himself for keeping Allen Dulles at the CIA--he had not known Dulles before being elected and could not objectively assess his advice. A secret review conducted by the CIA’s inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, concluded after six months, placed blame squarely on the CIA--in particular Dulles and Dick Bissell, and it recommended their resignations. A defiant Dulles and Bissell blamed Kennedy for canceling the planned air strikes, but the inspector general did not agree. Kirkpatrick saw the root cause in the “CIA’s poor planning, organization, staffing and management.” He blamed Dulles and Bissell for the false assumption that the invasion would trigger a real internal uprising--surely the CIA should have known of the multiple security leaks that led Castro to conduct the mass arrests that he did. Kennedy remained somewhat withdrawn and dejected for days after. On April 19, Jackie told his sister Rose that Jack “was so upset all day and had practically been in tears….She had never seen him so depressed except once at the time of his operation.” Dave Powers recalled that “within the privacy of his office, he made no effort to hide the distress and guilt that he felt.” Kennedy blamed his willingness to trust the military and the CIA for ever going with the plan in the first place. In a press release, he quoted an old saying that said “Victory has a hundred fathers, yet defeat is an orphan.” Ultimately, Jack never intended to blame anyone but himself. His original impulse concerning the Chiefs and the CIA was, to be honest, “They made me do it.” But ultimately, he knew the question should be “How could I have been so stupid?” The experience taught him never to rely on the experts, telling journalist (and future Washington Post editor) Ben Bradlee: “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a drat.” It was an object lesson for the young President. He would manage future crises with much greater skill, as we’ll soon learn. Khrushchev and Vienna  Jack knew that after getting elected largely on the back of his anti-Communist bonafides that a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev would have to come sooner rather than later. Khrushchev, for those of you who are uninitiated (although if you’re reading this, I can’t imagine a world where you don’t know), was the leader of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union--he had taken over after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. He also knew he needed to prepare. Bringing in experts Charles Bohlen, George Kennan, Llewellyn Thompson, and others (a group that included French President Charles de Gaulle, a veteran when it came to dealing with Soviet premiers), Kennedy quizzed them on what to expect when he met Khrushchev for the first time. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs Averell Harriman took Kennedy aside when the American delegation landed in Paris on the first leg of the journey (they were attending a state dinner at De Gaulle’s invitation). Harriman’s advice? “Go to Vienna. Don’t be too serious, have some fun, get to know him a little, don’t let him rattle you, he’ll try to rattle you and frighten you, but don’t pay any attention to that. Turn him aside gently. And don’t try for too much. Remember that he’s just as scared as you are...he is very aware of his peasant origins, of the contrast between Mrs. Khrushchev and Jackie.” Kennedy’s chief concern was that after the failure of the Bay of Pigs that Khrushchev would not believe in his resolve when it came to matters concerning the now-divided Germany. For those of you who don’t remember, Germany was divided into an American West Germany and a Soviet-dominated East Germany, but since the capital, Berlin, was in East Germany, the city itself was also divided accordingly into West and East Berlin. However, by 1961, there had been an almost embarrassing number of East Germans fleeing to West Germany--provoking the Soviets into threatening to sign a treaty with East Germany that would remove all Western access to Berlin completely and bring it under the Soviet sphere of influence for good. It was all hot air, according to De Gaulle. “Khrushchev has been saying and repeating that his prestige is engaged in the Berlin question and that he will have to have a solution of it in six months, and then again in six months, and then still in six months,” De Gaulle told Kennedy by way of assuring him that the Soviets did not want to go to war over Berlin’s status. To further assuage Kennedy’s worries, De Gaulle reported that he’d asked Khrushchev point-blank if he wanted war and Khrushchev had said no. “In that case,” de Gaulle told Kennedy, “do nothing to bring it about.” It wasn’t easy, at least on the Soviets’ part. Kennedy’s initial arrival in Vienna and his first meeting with Khrushchev as President proved to be both a PR and optics victory for the United States. Very few people turned out to greet Khrushchev as he rode in an open car from the Vienna railway station on June 2, and it contrasted sharply with the screaming crowds that greeted Kennedy on his ride from the airport to the U.S. Embassy. The next day, when Khrushchev arrived at the embassy, Kennedy came bounding down the steps to greet him, and (according to Robert Dallek), “towered over the short, squat, sixty-seven-year-old Khrushchev”. They walked inside, Khrushchev smiling and exchanging small talk with Kennedy, but even now Khrushchev sought to score subtle points. Recalling a meeting with Kennedy in 1959 when Jack was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he said he remembered Jack as “a young and promising man in politics.” “He must have aged since then,” JFK countered. Khrushchev showed his diplomatic skills, however, when he ambushed JFK at the table where the two countries began formal talks. He began lecturing Kennedy on America’s past failures to advance Soviet-American friendship, emphasizing that the United States wanted to reach agreements with Moscow that would be “at the expense of other peoples”. Khrushchev made it very clear he would not agree to anything of this nature. He also emphasized that while the Soviet Union intended to surpass America in terms of economic growth, they had no wish to stand in the way of further American growth while doing so. Kennedy was clearly backfooted. He tried to bring the conversation back onto friendly footing, noting that the Soviet growth rate had impressed him and “that this was surely a source of satisfaction to Khrushchev, as it was to us.” Still Khrushchev pressed his advantage, wily diplomat that he was. Asserting that Eisenhower’s State Department had sought to “liquidate” Communism and that America and the Soviet Union could not coexist peacefully without accepting each other’s systems of government, he brushed aside what he knew were Kennedy’s false assertions. Kennedy countered with the fact that it was not America that was destabilizing the global balance of power or seeking to overturn existing spheres of influence; that was solely the domain of the Soviets. This made Khrushchev kinda mad. He disputed the assertion that the USSR was trying to impose its will on any country (which everyone in the room knew was a lie, of course) and that Communism would triumph because, as he said, “history is on our side.” Kennedy retorted that America didn’t share the Soviet vision of Communist inevitability (while rolling his eyes, I assume), but he tried to reorient the conversation onto the current situation. Kennedy asserted that the problem right now was to find means of avoiding conflict in places where both the US and the USSR had conflicting interests. Around and around they went. When Kennedy tried to argue that the clash of ideas should not produce a conflict of interests that could lead to war, Khrushchev asked him if that meant any expansion of Communist influence would be casus belli for the United States. The older man was unrelenting and it was plain to Kennedy’s aides that he wasn’t fully prepared for it. During a stroll in the garden after lunch, Kennedy tried to establish a greater rapport with Khrushchev but the Soviet premier, according to O’Donnell and Powers, “was carrying on a heated argument, circling around Kennedy and snapping at him like a terrier and shaking his finger.” Later, an exhausted Kennedy was soaking in a tub, Powers remarked on how calm he seemed while Khrushchev read him the riot act. Exasperated, Kennedy responded, “What did you expect me to do? Take off one of my shoes and hit him over the head with it?” Khrushchev’s initial read on Kennedy was not charitable. “He’s very young...not strong enough. Too intelligent and too weak,” the Soviet leader reported. Khrushchev now made the calculation that given America’s deficiencies (the perceived superiority of Russia’s missile capabilities, American failure at the Bay of Pigs, and the success of the Soviet space program) that he could best JFK at the summit and badly undermine American political standing in the world. He was no longer at Vienna to negotiate, as Robert Dallek said--he was now there to compete. If Kennedy thought that things would improve once talk turned to Berlin, he was disappointed. The failure of test ban talks earlier in the summit were capable of presenting long-term dangers, but Berlin was the more immediate problem. Berlin was personal to Khrushchev--a reunited Germany would, in his view, be capable of inflicting new suffering on Russia. Reminding Kennedy that the Soviet Union had lost 20 million men in the war, Khrushchev threatened to sign peace treaties with both halves of a divided Germany--or, at least, with East Germany--to avoid reunification and stop all Western road access to Berlin through East Germany. If America agreed to sign, Berlin would remain a “free” city, but if they refused they would be locked out of Berlin completely. Kennedy had had enough. He told Khrushchev that the United States would not be bullied into an agreement. “This matter is of great concern to the U.S.. We are in Berlin not because of someone’s sufferance. We fought our way there...If we were expelled from that area and if we accepted the loss of our rights no one would have any confidence in US commitments and pledges.” Just like now! Khrushchev would not back off his threat. His only concession to Kennedy’s response was that the USSR would not sign such a treaty until December of that year. America, to Khrushchev, would be responsible for any war over Berlin, and only a “madman” would want such a conflict. Kennedy was unable to penetrate the Soviet wall of silence, even when he said that Moscow’s assault on the current power balance would be the only real casus belli possible. All in all, Vienna was not a net positive for us, guys. As the two men left the Soviet embassy on the last day of talks, Khrushchev made a great show of looking merry, but Kennedy was unsmiling and grim. Upon returning to the U.S. Embassy, journalist James Reston said that Kennedy walked in and sank onto a couch, placing the hat he had with him over his eyes. “Pretty rough?” Reston asked. “Roughest thing in my life,” Kennedy replied. “He walked all over me.” Reston recalls that Kennedy described his problems now as twofold: what accounted for Khrushchev’s aggressiveness at the summit and how to respond to it. As with Cuba, though, Kennedy turned his anger inward. Again, he viewed himself as having failed--for the second time in three months, he thought he had acted unwisely, this time by thinking he could use rational explanation to reduce differences with Khrushchev. He felt that he had not shown a tough enough side to Khrushchev, who now believed him an inexperienced and irresolute neophyte who could simply be bullied into concessions on Berlin and Germany. Worst of all, he feared that his actions had increased rather than decreased the chances of the Cold War going hot. Smaller things than Berlin had sparked World Wars in the past, after all. It gets better, guys, I promise. Let’s fast forward a bit. On Sunday, August 13, while Kennedy was relaxing in Hyannis Port, he received word that East German security forces had thrown up barriers on the West Berlin border. Washington had expected something like this for at least a few weeks at this point--on July 30, Sen. William Fulbright (D-AR) had wondered during a television interview “why the East Germans didn’t close their border, because I think they have a right to close it.” Five days later, Kennedy had been walking in the Rose Garden with journalist Walt Rostow, and he’d mused on Khrushchev’s refugee problem. People were abandoning East Berlin in droves, and Kennedy knew Khrushchev would have to do something to stop it. “The entire East bloc is in danger. He has to do something to stop this. Perhaps a wall. And there’s not a drat thing we can do about it,” Kennedy said. That said, they had no advance knowledge, merely conjecture--and their failure to accurately anticipate left Jack frustrated and angry. Nevertheless, he knew that it gave the West--in particular, the United States--a powerful propaganda weapon to use against Soviet rhetoric and promises of freedom. If Berlin was indeed meant to be a “free city”, why did Khrushchev feel the need to put up a wall to keep people in? However, the wall, to Kennedy, was a bit of a relief. It was a clear sign that, contrary to his actions at Vienna, Khrushchev had no designs on seizing West Berlin--after all, what use would a wall be toward this purpose? West Germany wasn’t happy with Kennedy’s less-than-vigorous response, though. West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt said that it had amounted to a “crisis of confidence”. He asked Kennedy to reinforce the garrison stationed in the city. Kennedy agreed, but he also sent a letter with two emissaries--General Lucius Clay, architect of the Berlin Airlift, and his Vice President, Lyndon Johnson. The letter specified that Kennedy viewed a troop buildup as more symbolic than substantive, and that he would be open to the possibility of continuing a buildup in Europe to counter the Soviet threat to Berlin. For his part, Johnson opposed the trip--not because he feared for his own safety, but because he thought his presence would make things worse. When he found out he’d be greeting the American troops that were traveling through East Germany on their way to West Berlin, Johnson predicted, “There’ll be a lot of shooting, and I’ll be in the middle of it. Why me?” Kennedy, nevertheless, thought Johnson would convey the right message to Khrushchev, West Germany, and fellow NATO allies. LBJ and General Clay were sent to Bonn on August 18, and Johnson delivered a speech in front of 300,000 cheering Berliners at West Berlin’s City Hall, urging them to maintain faith in themselves and “in your allies, everywhere throughout the world. This island does not stand alone.” The convoy came through West Berlin the next day, greeted enthusiastically by shouts, tears, and flowers from West Berliners. The American commander described the event as “the most exciting and impressive thing I’ve ever seen in my life, with the possible exception of the liberation of Paris.” That said, this was a temporary morale boost at best. Kennedy knew that diplomacy remained the best route to a solution, because any other route would involve the use of nuclear weapons. Khrushchev was of like mind. In an interview with Drew Pearson at his estate on the Black Sea, Khrushchev said “there isn’t going to be a war.” Consequently, George Kennan, the Serbian ambassador, received word from the American man in Moscow. The Soviets wanted to go to the negotiating table to talk about Germany and Berlin. Kennedy agreed, despite the protests of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who was of the firm belief that only military steps would restrain the Soviets. Why? Well, probably because the Soviets had resumed nuclear testing. You know, after they said they would stop? Yeah. A seriously pissed-off Kennedy, when he received this news, said, “hosed again. That loving liar.” Publicly declaring it a form of “atomic blackmail”, Kennedy accused the Russians of wanting to foment terror over reason in an attempt to overturn the state of international relations. Privately he ordered the resumption of underground testing in the United States too, as a response to the Soviets’ actions, but he remained committed to a controlled test ban agreement that would put a halt on all atmospheric weapons tests capable of producing radioactive fallout. Make no mistake, guys: Khrushchev never forgot how horrible a nuclear exchange between the United States and Soviet Union would be. Now that he had “solved” the emigrant problem in Berlin, Khrushchev began moving slowly away from threats and toward talks. He’d abandoned the idea of a peace treaty with East Germany, believing that such action would “spark a Western economic embargo against the socialist bloc” which would destabilize the satellite nations around the western border. Nevertheless, Khrushchev had talked himself into a corner. He needed a face-saving way out. He sent a message to JFK signaling that he wanted to form an informal backchannel--one that would allow them to settle the crisis without damaging either country’s prestige. Remember this fact, guys, because it’s going to come in handy later on. At his speech opening the United Nations’ annual session on September 25, Kennedy struck a conciliatory yet condemnatory tone. quote:Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. This is not the time or the place for immoderate tones...We are committed to no rigid formula. We see no perfect solution….But we believe a peaceful agreement is possible….There is no need for a crisis over Berlin, threatening the peace--and if those who created this crisis desire peace, there will be peace and freedom in Berlin. It took some doing, but he had stared Khrushchev down and forced him to retreat on Berlin--a fact he could take great satisfaction in by November 1961. His firm but calm response to Khrushchev’s threats had spared West Berlin from Soviet dominance--true, it meant a wall between the two halves of the city, but Kennedy knew that the Berlin Wall had become a giant brick-and-mortar symbol of Eastern Europe’s discomfort with Communism. It restored his faith in his foreign policy leadership--something that would become very important around this time the following year.
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Dec 26, 2018 01:06
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The Freedom Riders Understand this: winning in 1960 had not cooled the relationship between civil rights activists and Jack Kennedy. Kennedy felt underappreciated, and Martin Luther King Jr. predicted, after watching Jack fumble through the first few months of his term, that he would do no more than “reach aggressively for the limited goal of token integration”. Activists everywhere braced themselves for yet another disappointment in the Oval Office. King told Harris Wofford that while he believed Kennedy certainly had the intelligence and the vision he’d displayed on the subject during the campaign that he lacked the moral fortitude to do what was needed. James Forman, President of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), gave Kennedy even less credit, accusing him of “quick talking and double-dealing”. Their resentment was well-founded. During the first six months of Kennedy’s term he refused to sign an executive order that would desegregate government housing--something he’d promised during the campaign. He felt that doing so would piss off Dixiecrats and squander any momentum he had for future reforms, but I’m unclear as to what reforms he felt were more important than this. Remembering Kennedy’s criticisms of Eisenhower for his failure to do likewise “with the stroke of a pen”, people actually started sending Jack pens in the mail so as to remind him of his promise. Rough all over. At least you didn’t have to deal with Twitter, Jack. The President was in a quandary. A Gallup poll commissioned of Southern voters said that 76% felt that one day blacks and whites would share the same public accommodations. Problem was, that same population couldn’t muster up a majority in support of what they felt was an inevitability. Talk about hosed up: “Yes, we know our way of life is insanely byzantine, but we’re going to cling to it like grim death until it’s yanked out of our cold, dead hands!” Bear in mind that this was seven years after “separate but equal” had been declared as legal horseshit by the Supreme Court. And yet even now, even as Americans answered in the overwhelming affirmative that they felt that only desegregated public schools should receive federal funding, only 23% agreed that radical change should be used to hasten integration. 61% preferred “gradual change”. Nothing but  all the way down.So what do you do when you’re President of the United States and half of your country is a bunch of mouth-breathing regressives? Thing was, Kennedy’s own Justice Department felt their hands were somewhat tied in terms of what the President was capable of when it came to civil rights. Burke Marshall, head of the Civil Rights Division, told Dr. Martin Luther King that constitutional federalism placed restrictions on the government’s power to intervene in both desegregation of schools and police brutality cases. I think it was just cowardice on their part, but what do I know? Kennedy’s administration held King at arm’s length for now--he hadn’t been invited to the inauguration, for one, and he wasn’t present at a March 6 meeting of prominent civil rights leaders held in Bobby Kennedy’s office. Only by the end of April did an off-the-record sit-down occur between King, Bobby, and several Justice Department officials. However, I should note that King was so agreeable and charmed Bobby Kennedy so thoroughly that he took King aside and gave him the names and numbers of a couple influential Justice Department officials, including Burke Marshall and John Seigenthaler, for any difficulties his poll workers might encounter during voter registration drives. I should mention that Kennedy had promised to desegregate all forms of interstate transportation within his first year--a claim that struck particularly hollow with civil rights leaders at this moment. Why? Well, you’re about to find out. In early May 1961, thirteen members of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), both black and white, boarded two Greyhound and Trailway buses in Washington D.C.. Their goal was to go on a pilgrimage throughout the South, ending in New Orleans and traveling through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. The goal was to hit New Orleans by May 17, the seventh anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling that desegregated public schools. They told the Justice Department of their intentions, and a reporter friend of the Kennedys had told Bobby personally--but Jack had no advance warning of the trip. You know what happened, I don’t have to tell you. After experiencing minor difficulties in Virginia and the Carolinas, violence against the Freedom Riders (as they came to be known) hit its peak in Alabama. In Anniston, a gang of Klansmen attacked the Greyhound bus, forcing it to a stop outside of town and firebombing it. The fuckers then held the doors shut as the bus burned. It’s unclear what made them back off--either the explosion of the bus’ fuel tank or an undercover investigator brandishing a gun (one of the Klansmen in the mob was an FBI informant named Gary Thomas Rowe), accounts differ--but the riders escaped the bus. Unfortunately, the mob beat them after they got out. They’d already lost one person to the hospital--in South Carolina, a young man named John Lewis (yes, that John Lewis!) was assaulted when he tried to enter a whites-only waiting room. Two men attacked him and beat him, kicking him in the face and ribs. Believe it or not, this would not be the last time now-Congressman Lewis would be beaten for daring to fight for his civil rights, but that’s a story for another President. When the other bus reached Anniston an hour later, Klansmen boarded it and beat the Freedom Riders into a state of semi-consciousness, leaving them in the back of the bus. It saddens and angers me to talk about this, it really does. Anniston wasn’t the last of it, either. In Birmingham the buses were attacked by a mob of Klansmen, aided and abetted by this miserable waste of oxygen.  The walleye is a nice touch. Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor was the Commissioner of Police in Birmingham, and he was such a virulent racist that his name has become synonymous with the racial oppression of the 1960s. He ensured that the Freedom Riders were singled out for especially vicious beatings by his gangs of racist thugs. One man, James Peck, required more than 50 stitches for the wounds in his head by the time the KKK was finished with him. Word of the violence traveled back to the White House, and Bobby was incensed. Calling up Harris Wofford, he raged, “Can’t you get your goddamned friends off those buses? Tell them to call it off! Stop them!” When the Freedom Riders abandoned their buses to fly to New Orleans, they found themselves trapped in the Birmingham airport due to bomb threats--and Bobby sent John Seigenthaler to help them in an effort to show that the White House supported them. Problem was, I’m not sure they did. Gallup showed that 64% of the country disapproved of the Freedom Riders, and civil rights leaders were still calling Kennedy out for doing the bare minimum on the subject so as not to piss off Southern whites. When a group of students from Nashville decided to embark on a Freedom Ride of their own, they journeyed to Birmingham intending to complete the bus trip to New Orleans. When they arrived, they were immediately arrested by Birmingham cops for violating segregation laws. Well gently caress. Kennedy met with Bobby and his deputies, and they decided to call Alabama Governor John Patterson, one of Kennedy’s most reliable Southern allies during the campaign. Patterson refused to talk--a State House operator told Kennedy he was fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and was unreachable. Clearly, he wasn’t going to fall on his sword for Jack Kennedy. But Jack was undeterred. He called Patterson again and said that he was considering sending federal troops to protect the Freedom Riders--a gesture that would have Alabama’s shame plastered all over the evening news for days, if not weeks, unless Patterson agreed to protect the Freedom Riders himself. Grudgingly, Patterson agreed--and Bobby got Greyhound to find a driver who would risk driving an integrated bus. He’d had to threaten a company supervisor in Birmingham, swearing and cursing at the man on the other end of the phone--a conversation that got leaked to the press by an eavesdropper. Immediately, stories began to run about Bobby Kennedy aiding and abetting the Freedom Riders--and the backlash was twofold. Southern racists were, of course, upset, and civil rights leaders castigated Kennedy for reacting rather than leading on an issue they considered of paramount importance. What’s worse is that the violence didn’t stop when the bus reached Montgomery. More racists, carrying ax handles, chains, and lead pipes attacked the Freedom Riders, and local cops did nothing to restrain them (seeing as how they were also racist trash). Activists, reporters, and photographers were subject to the mob’s wrath, including Seigenthaler, who had tried to protect two women from being assaulted. John Doar, a Justice Department attorney on assignment in Montgomery, was watching from a federal building window and talking to Burke Marshall on the phone, describing in hysterics what was happening. “There are no cops. It’s terrible! It’s terrible! There’s not a cop in sight. People are yelling ‘There those n---ers are! Get ‘em, get ‘em!’ It’s awful.” Seigenthaler was beaten unconscious by rioters and he didn’t receive medical attention for more than 30 minutes. Bobby Kennedy ended up having to send federal marshals to Montgomery to protect the Freedom Riders, a move that incensed Governor Patterson. He claimed that it was “destroying us politically.” Bobby replied “John, it’s more important that these people...survive physically than for us to survive politically.” Publically, Bobby called for a “cooling-off” period, saying that the Freedom Riders had made their point. A rather ticked-off James Farmer of CORE responded waspishly, “Negroes have been cooling off for a hundred years.” When Dr. King rejected Bobby’s request, he said to some of his associates, “You know, they don’t understand the social revolution going on the world and therefore they don’t understand what we’re doing.” Kennedy’s failure to do more on civil rights is inexcusable. He knew that it was not simply something like a five or ten-cent increase in the minimum wage, but rather an issue that contradicted one of the nation’s fundamental principles--the idea that all men are created equal. His assumption that devoting more time to civil rights would undermine his quest for world peace was fundamentally flawed. Many civil rights leaders concluded that Kennedy’s background meant that he simply lacked the moral commitment to their cause that they needed--he was more of an “interested observer” than a visceral proponent like Hubert Humphrey or Joseph Rauh. It makes one wonder--if Kennedy survives his trip to Dallas in 1963, what happens to civil rights in America? The Cuban Missile Crisis  Be honest: you only read this whole mess to get to this point, didn’t you? In the spring and summer of 1962, Nikita Khrushchev was still busy spitting lasers and fire over the subject of Germany and Berlin--actions that were tied in part to his belief that the United States wasn’t done trying to topple the Castro regime in Cuba. For the record, he was wrong--at least for now. When Cuban exile leader Jose Miro Cardona asked the State Department for help with an invasion, he was refused. Mac Bundy said that “Decisive action [cannot] be accomplished without the open involvement of U.S. armed forces. This would mean open war against Cuba which in the U.S.’ judgment [is] not advisable in the present international situation.” So Khrushchev, much like Kennedy, is left with a very skewed view of world events due to his own paranoia, and he’s convinced that America isn’t done trying to destroy one of his only allies in the Western Hemisphere. Even though he was told that Kennedy had refused Cardona’s overtures, Khrushchev still believed that Castro’s support of subversion in other Latin American countries would force Kennedy’s hand at one point. Finally, Castro was making overtures to communist China--a move that frightened Khrushchev. Despite the fact that they were two of the most powerful nations on Earth and shared a common ideology, the Soviets and Red China were not on each others’ Christmas card list. He felt he needed to strengthen ties between Moscow and Havana. To do this, he decided to turn Cuba into a missile base. In May and June of 1962, he and the military and political chiefs decided to deploy 24 medium-range R-12 missiles--which could travel 1,050 miles on a full load of fuel--and 16 intermediate R-14 missiles with a range of more than 2,000 miles. These 40 missiles could be used to effectively menace the entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States. The Soviet plan to weaponize Cuba also called for 44,000 troops and 1,300 civilian construction workers, as well as a fully-functional Soviet naval base with nuke-carrying submarines. Remember: Cuba is 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Khrushchev was poking the bear and setting up shop in Kennedy’s backyard. The aim, for Khrushchev, was to hide the buildup in Cuba until after the 1962 midterm elections in America. He was going to see Kennedy at the UN General Assembly after that, and that’s where he planned to reveal the Cuba base’s existence and extract concessions from the young, naive President. As historian Timothy Naftali said, “it was one hell of a gamble.” Khrushchev had reached the breaking point on a final settlement in Berlin, and he had no guarantee of Castro’s safety--two things he planned to get from Kennedy at the GA meeting in December 1962. Khrushchev’s efforts to hide the Cuba project from the sharp eyes of the American intelligence apparatus, however, were not entirely successful. In August 1962, Kennedy received the first reports of increases in Soviet military manpower and materiel going to Cuba, where it was being transported to the island’s interior under heavy Soviet guard. Initially, national security officials assumed that the Soviets were installing SA-2 missiles, anti-aircraft weapons that only had a range of about 30 miles or so. The report they gave to Kennedy did stipulate that SA-2s could be fitted with nuclear warheads, “but there is no evidence that the Soviet government has ever provided nuclear warheads to any other state, on any terms. It seems unlikely that such a move is currently planned.” The report did stipulate, however, that it believed such a move was possible if the Soviets felt that doing so would advance Soviet interests in a controllable way, in what I can only assume was a way for the CIA to leave the door open in case they hosed up the call again. Khrushchev assured Kennedy that the Soviets had no bases in Cuba and had absolutely no interest in building any, and on July 30, 1962, in an attempt to hide from further exposure, he asked Kennedy to stop aerial reconnaissance flights over Soviet ships in the Caribbean “for the sake of better relations”. Kennedy agreed, eager to avoid another crisis during the 1962 elections and hoping that it would ice the Berlin question until 1963. Khrushchev kept up the ruse to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall in September 1962. quote:Now, as to Cuba--here is an area that could really lead to some unexpected consequences. I have been reading what some irresponsible Senators have been saying on this. A lot of people are making a big fuss because we are giving aid to Cuba. But you are giving aid to Japan. Just recently I was reading that you have placed atomic warheads on Japanese territory, and surely this is not something the Japanese need. So when Castro comes to us for aid, we give him what he needs for defense. Kennedy wanted to believe Khrushchev’s professions of restraint, but their secret resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing had made him very wary of taking anything the Soviets said at face value. Bobby, for one, was convinced that a “defensive” buildup could very easily turn into an offensive one, and Republicans were joining the chorus of complainers about the administration’s “timid” response to the Cuban threat. So, at the start of September, Kennedy privately promised Congress that if it was discovered Khrushchev was installing surface-to-surface nuclear missiles in Cuba that the administration would take whatever action necessary against the Castro regime. They decided to go public on September 4. The statement that Press Secretary Salinger delivered that night omitted any mention of the Monroe Doctrine, for one, and it expanded the admonition about “offensive weapons” to include “ground-to-ground missiles”. It focused on Soviet aggression in the Western Hemisphere rather than on the administration’s eagerness to topple Castro or American colonial power in the region, ensuring that the audience would know that our problem was with the Soviets and their missiles, not Cuba. Three days later Kennedy called 150,000 army reservists to active duty for a full year. If you’re wondering when the assholes began to pucker, this was about the time. Still, though, Kennedy didn’t grasp the seriousness of the installations in Cuba. When Sen. Alexander Wiley (R-WI) asked for a breakdown of the administration’s Cuba policy, Kennedy still indicated that an attack on Cuba would be out of proportion. “We’re talking about 60 MiGs, we’re talking about some ground-to-air missiles….which do not threaten the United States. We are not talking about nuclear warheads. We’ve got a very difficult situation in Berlin. We’ve got a very difficult situation in Southeast Asia and a lot of other places.” When Wiley asked about the likelihood of a blockade of Cuba, a policy he supported, Kennedy rebuffed him. “It’s an act of war,” he told Wiley. And yet Democratic senators up for reelection in November 1962 were still pressing Kennedy for stronger action. Through Majority Leader Sen. Mike Mansfield (D-MT), the Democratic caucus told Kennedy that they might “have to leave [him] on this matter” unless there were “at least a do-something gesture of militancy.” They urged a wide range of options, from a Congressional resolution for a “quarantine” of Cuba (a polite way of saying ‘blockade’) to actual all-out war. In case you were curious before, the answer is yes: Senate Democrats have always been spineless to one degree or another. Kennedy was backfooted by the ferocity of the Democrats’ hysteria, and on September 13 at a news conference he tried to tamp it down a bit. Castro’s charges of an imminent American invasion, Kennedy said, were just his way of deflecting attention from Cuba’s economic problems and a way to convince the Soviets to keep sending them weapons. If the Senate kept blathering about an invasion, all it would do is give Castro’s rhetoric credibility, and unilateral intervention was neither required nor justified. I don’t know if he dropped the mic after he was done speaking, but he should have. Incredibly, the CIA echoed Kennedy’s counsel. On September 19, they acknowledged that while deploying ballistic missiles or building a submarine base on Cuba would give the USSR considerable advantages in the Western Hemisphere, “[it] would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it. It would indicate a far greater willingness to increase the level of risk in US-Soviet relations than the USSR has displayed thus far.” Christ, even when these guys AREN’T advocating for war they’re still wrong. The Senate ignored the warnings. On September 20, in an eerie echo of the IWR vote in 2003, they voted 86-1 to authorize Kennedy to “prevent the creation or use of an externally supported military capability endangering the security of the United States”. The resolution did not specify what methods Kennedy was restricted to in the accomplishing of this goal, but the message was clear: whatever is necessary. Still Kennedy demurred. As long as the Cuban buildup appeared defensive in nature he didn’t want to go beyond warning Moscow--but secretly, he went to McNamara at the Pentagon and ordered him to put plans for military options into motion. The military also held some large-scale maneuvers along the Southern Atlantic coast and around Puerto Rico in an attempt to war-game some scenarios. The exercise, codenamed Operation Ortsac (Castro, spelled backwards...seriously?) involved 7,500 Marines staging a mock invasion of Puerto Rico’s beaches in a simulation of a home island invasion of Cuba. It spooked Khrushchev, especially after the operation to topple Castro--known as Operation Mongoose--stepped up its operations. The general in charge, General Edward Lansdale, was given wide latitude for sabotage, mining of harbors to impede the supply ships’ approach, and possible capture of Cuban military officers for interrogation. Khrushchev canceled the deployment of surface ships and nuclear-armed subs to Cuba, fearful that the development of plans for a naval base would simply be too hard to hide from an America whose radar was up. On October 1, Secretary McNamara and the Joint Chiefs received the first of what would be many pieces of disturbing news about the Cuba weapons buildup. A first-hand sighting on September 12 of a truck convoy carrying “20 objects 65 to 70 feet long which resembled large missiles” showed it traveling to an airport just outside Havana. The Defense Intelligence Agency (for the uninitiated, it is the DoD’s intelligence arm) hypothesized that mid-range ballistic missile sites were being constructed in the Pinar del Rio province in Cuba. When this was presented to Kennedy, it came with a recommendation for U-2 spy plane flyovers--but they were concerned that SA-2 AA missiles would shoot the planes down. The CIA remained convinced that U-2 flights were worth the risk. “Don’t you ever let up?” Rusk grumbled to the CIA’s representative at a September 10 meeting. “How do you expect me to negotiate on Berlin with all these incidents?” Bobby was of a different mind, however. “What the matter, Dean, no guts?” he asked the Secretary of State. Even now, Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet journalist stationed in Washington, carried a message to Bobby from Khrushchev: “The weapons that the USSR is sending to Cuba will only be of a defensive character.” On October 9, however, all bets were off--the MRBM reports settled the matter. Kennedy approved a U-2 mission as soon as weather permitted--something that we didn’t get until 5 days later on October 14. The CIA came back again and announced that they had evidence now of six intermediate-range ballistic missile sites in Cuba--with a range, like I said, of 2,100 miles--and still the Soviets were trying to snow us. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin told Chester Bowles that the USSR was not shipping offensive weapons and “well understood the dangers of doing so.” The balls on these guys. The October 14 U-2 flight produced the pictures I referenced in the very first paragraphs of this writeup. 928 photographs were taken, revealing conclusive evidence of offensive weapons: three medium range ballistic missile sites under construction; one additional MRBM site discovered at San Cristobal; and two IRBM sites at Guanajay. It also revealed 21 IL-28 bombers capable of carrying a nuclear payload. The lid was officially off. We knew what the Soviets were up to. The news came in on the evening of October 15, but Mac Bundy waited until the next morning to present it to the President because a late night meeting would attract the wrong kind of attention. This was big news; and only an earth-shattering event would get the President, the Chiefs, and the national security apparatus out of bed this late at night. Behold.  Next morning at 8:45, Bundy informed Kennedy of what the U-2 flights had found. Kennedy immediately ordered Bundy to set up a meeting in the Cabinet Room before noon, ticking off the names of the national security issues he wanted present. Then he called Bobby. “We have some big trouble. I want you over here,” Jack said. He was lowballing it. No President had confronted a danger like this since Roosevelt had led the country through World War II. Truman and Eisenhower had shouldered Cold War burdens, but Soviet missiles in Cuba...this was bad on a lot of levels. It challenged American national security and threatened nuclear war on a level we hadn’t seen since the dawn of the Atomic Age. On a still-potent but more trivial note, if Kennedy failed to removed them by negotiation or force, he knew that his successor would oust him with promises that he would. At 11:45 AM thirteen men joined the President in the Cabinet Room for an hour-and-ten minute discussion--again, refer to the first paragraphs of this writeup for more detail. Rusk, McNamara, acting CIA director Marshall Carter (new CIA director John McCone, who had taken over the fired Allen Dulles, was at a funeral), Joint Chiefs chairman General Maxwell Taylor, Bundy, Bobby, and Lyndon Johnson were in attendance, as were a few others. We have the details of this conversation thanks to Kennedy’s tape recorder in the room. Kennedy asked his advisers for a reason as to why Khrushchev was doing this. “What is the advantage?” Kennedy asked. “Must be some major reason for the Soviets to set this up.” Taylor spoke up. “What it’d give them is primarily...a launching base for short-range missiles against the United States to supplement their rather defective ICBM system,” he said. Rusk said that Khrushchev might be concerned about perceptions of American nuclear superiority. “Berlin is very much involved in this,” he said. He thought Khrushchev might be hoping to use Cuba as a bargaining chip in the talks over Berlin, or use an attack on Cuba as an excuse to act in Berlin. Military options were the first thing on everyone’s minds--including Kennedy. His first inclination was not to find a diplomatic or political solution; his focus was on military options and how to keep the crisis muted until he came up with a plan. This news would, Kennedy calculated, send the entire country into a doomsday panic. Four possible options were presented to him: an airstrike against the missile installations, a more general air attack against a wider array of targets, a blockade of Cuba, and a full-scale invasion. …  . That’s all I got, how about you? All these options would have meant the Cold War going hot within a matter of weeks or months.The thirteen men in the original meeting came to be called the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExComm for short. The ExComm convened again that night at 6:30, after a day in which Kennedy followed his normal daily schedule so as to avoid any hint of crisis. The only indication of any trouble came in his remarks to a group of journalists attending a State Department conference that day. “The United States, and the world, is now passing through one of its more critical periods,” he said. “Our major problem over all, is the survival of our country….without the beginning of the third and perhaps the last war.” Kennedy’s fear and uncertainty came mainly from the fact that he couldn’t ascertain Khrushchev’s motives. Considering his caution over Berlin, why was the Soviet premier so willing to risk war by putting missiles in Cuba, especially considering it didn’t reduce America’s military advantage over the Soviets? “It’s a goddamn mystery,” Kennedy groused. “I don’t know enough about the Soviet Union, but if anybody can tell me any other time since the Berlin blockade where the Russians have given so clear a provocation, I don’t know when it’s been, because they’ve been awfully cautious, really.” There was no question that the missiles had to go, though. If the United States left them in place, it would induce the Soviets to keep adding more military materiel in Cuba and it would make the Cubans, Kennedy said, “look like they’re co-equal with us.” More at stake than that, even, were matters of political and strategic balance, and Kennedy knew that. There was still no solution by October 18, where additional recon photos showed five more IRBM launch sites. CIA Director McCone reported that the Soviets could have between sixteen and thirty-two missiles ready to fire “within a week or slightly more”. Kennedy remained concerned about convincing the rest of the world of the accuracy of this information, however, and he asked the CIA’s resident aerial photography expert, Arthur Lundahl, if an outside observer could see the missiles by looking at the images. Lundahl answered in the negative. “I think the uninitiated would like to see the missile, in the tube,” he said. The meetings on October 18, like I said, didn’t yield a solution--but they did reveal Kennedy’s preference: a blockade, then negotiations. He would not talk to Khrushchev unless he could be sure that more missiles were not coming in on Soviet ships. It was determined that a declaration of war would be unwise: “It seems to me,” Llewellyn Thompson said, “that with a declaration of war our objective would be an invasion.” Kennedy kept up a facade of normalcy (thanks Warren Harding!) for the rest of the day, including during a two-hour meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. As Kennedy told one of his national security aides afterwards about Gromyko, “[he], in this very room not over ten minutes ago, told more barefaced lies than I have ever heard in so short a time...I had the pictures in the center drawer of my desk, and it was an enormous temptation to show them to him.” Gromyko had spent two hours reassuring Kennedy, once again, that the Soviet buildup in Cuba was defensive in nature. Still the White House kept the crisis on ice. The next day Kennedy kept to a normal campaign schedule, visiting Cleveland, Ohio, as well as both Springfield and Chicago. When he asked Ken O’Donnell what he thought about canceling the trip, O’Donnell shook his head. “I didn’t call off anything. I don’t want to be the one who has to tell Dick Daley that you’re not going out there.” Next morning, October 20, he convened the Joint Chiefs to discuss the crisis. He knew the Chiefs were favoring an air strike, but Kennedy’s past as a soldier in WWII and the failure of the Bay of Pigs had given him a healthy skepticism of the Chiefs’ recommendations. An attack on Cuba, Kennedy thought, would provoke the Soviets into blockading or invading Berlin--and our allies would complain that “we let Berlin go because we didn’t have the guts to endure a situation in Cuba.” To any of them, I would have said, “Fine, let’s put Soviet nukes ninety miles off your coast then.” General Taylor acknowledged the President’s concerns and tried to allay them, but this man was a bit more brute-force in his methods.  General Curtis LeMay was the Air Force’s Chief of Staff and a massive, MASSIVE dick, in case you were wondering. LeMay disputed the idea that the Soviets would retaliate against Berlin if we attacked Cuba. Any other solution rather than military action, he said, would be “worse than the appeasement at Munich.” LeMay went further, indirectly threatening to go public with his dissent. “I think that a blockade, and talk of politics, would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too.” Way to go, champ. Not only did his response piss Kennedy off, it turned the other Joint Chiefs against him too. When Kennedy left the room, Marine Commandant David Shoup confronted LeMay angrily. “You pulled the rug right out from under him,” Shoup said. When LeMay asked what he meant, Shoup replied that he agreed with LeMay’s assessment--but that confronting him was now going to make Kennedy run any military operation in piecemeal fashion, and Shoup felt that any military action needed to be all-or-nothing. “You can’t fiddle around with hitting the missile sites and then hitting the SAM sites. You got to go in and take out the goddamn thing that’s going to stop you from doing your job.” The Chiefs sensed Kennedy’s antipathy towards military action, especially because they’d had been so vehemently in favor of it. For two hours and forty minutes on Saturday, October 20, Kennedy and ExComm reviewed their options--and the President’s prodding got them to agree to a blockade, or “quarantine”, which Kennedy felt he could pass off as less of an act of war and therefore it would be less likely to draw comparisons to the Soviets’ 1948 blockade of Berlin. The announcement of the blockade, Kennedy determined, would coincide with a demand for the removal of the missiles from Cuba and preparations for an air strike if Moscow did not comply--after all, Kennedy had told Mac Bundy and Director McCone to keep this option open. He asked the New York Times and the Washington Post to hold off on publishing the emerging details--they’d learned of the crisis due to leaks at the Pentagon. On October 22, Kennedy spoke to the nation--to an audience of nearly 100 million Americans, and he told us the gravity of what we were facing. He explained that the missiles could hit Washington D.C., as well as any other city in the Southeastern United States--indeed, most major cities in the Western Hemisphere. The United States, Kennedy announced, could not tolerate this threat to its security, and would therefore quarantine Cuba to block all offensive weapons from reaching the island. If the Soviets didn’t stop, it would necessitate further action. That was Monday. On Tuesday morning there was still no response from Khrushchev, and the country was in full-blown panic. However, Dean Rusk woke his deputy, George Ball, the next morning in his office with a bit of gallows humor: “We have won a considerable victory. You and I are still alive,” Rusk said dryly. ExComm met at 10 AM to hash out a few things: mainly that they needed to convince the public that the administration hadn’t lollygagged on identifying the offensive threat. CIA Director McCone would brief any skeptics in Congress, and Kennedy would attempt to make sure that the public knew that the only way to stop the Soviet buildup of forces in Cuba would have been a full scale invasion in the previous two years--during a point when no one would ever have suggested such a thing. Later that day, at noon, a reply from Khrushchev finally arrived...but it did little to ease anyone’s stomachs. He complained that the speech Kennedy had given represented “a serious threat to peace”. Reaffirming the Soviet line that the weapons were defensive in nature, Khrushchev urged Kennedy to rethink the blockade. Kennedy was unmoved. He and Rusk agreed--they would tell Khrushchev he’d brought this on himself by “secretly furnishing offensive weapons to Cuba”. He would continue to enforce the quarantine, and he advised Khrushchev to do nothing to “make the situation more difficult to control”. One man, however, was searching for a way out already. Bobby Kennedy had approached journalists Frank Holeman and Charles Bartlett, asking them to tell Georgi Bolshakov that the White House would be receptive to the idea of dismantling the Jupiter missile sites in Turkey if the Soviets took the missiles out of Cuba. However, there was one detail: the Americans could only act after the Soviets did: “in a time of quiet and not when there is the threat of war,” Bobby said. When the idea was broached to Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, Dobrynin demurred. The ships would continue going to Cuba. Bobby flew into a rage, accusing both him and Khrushchev of “hypocritical, false, and misleading statements” and he told Dobrynin in no uncertain terms that the United States would stop the ships, come hell or high water. By the 24th, ExComm feared the situation was getting out of hand. The Soviets were making great progress on their missile sites and bringing military forces into full states of readiness. Indeed, by the 24th, all the MRBM sites and their missiles were online. Soviet ships were still steaming towards Cuba, and they had submarines screening them--they were going to reach the Navy’s quarantine line by noon that day. The Armed Forces had gone to DEFCON 2, which is one state of readiness below general war preparations. Guys, for those of you who are students of history, Americans alive on this day were nearly certain that the jig was up. America--and probably the Soviet Union--were about to die in a sea of nuclear fire, and the world we knew would end. This isn’t a joke. We were literally prepared for a real-life version of Fallout. Inside the White House, it was no different. Kennedy was stretched as taut as a guitar string. “This was the moment….which we hoped would never come,” Bobby wrote later. “The danger and concern that we all felt hung like a cloud over us all….these few minutes were the time of greatest worry by the President. His hand went up to his face and covered his mouth and he closed his fist. His eyes were tense, almost gray, and we just stared at each other across the table. Was the world on the brink of a holocaust and had we done something wrong?” This almost childlike terror on the part of Bobby Kennedy is chilling just to read about. I can only imagine what it was like to live through it. The only ray of hope was the State Department report that said Khrushchev was still publicly insisting the weapons were defensive in nature, suggesting that he was trying to leave himself some room to reverse course. A written report handed to CIA Director McCone in the meeting seemed to suggest this very thing. “Mr. President,” he said, interrupting McNamara in the middle of his explanation of how the Navy would deal with the Soviet attack subs, “I have a note here….it says that we’ve just received information through ONI (the office of Naval Intelligence) that all six Soviet ships currently identified in Cuban waters--and I don’t know what that means--have either stopped or reversed course.” Immediately, McCone left the room to get some clarification--he needed to know, for example, what “Cuban waters” meant. Were the ships approaching or leaving Cuba? Rusk, however, was suddenly hopeful. “We’re eyeball to eyeball,” he whispered to Bundy, “and I think the other fellow just blinked.” No one, however, saw this as an end to the crisis. Did the Navy know they weren’t supposed to pursue any retreating ships? Kennedy’s new fear was that a destroyer might sink a Soviet ship that was retreating. His concerns were warranted. When McNamara went to interrogate the Navy’s representative on the Joint Chiefs about procedures for dealing with Soviet ships, the officer, Admiral George Anderson, bristled at what he saw as unwarranted interference in the Navy’s freedom to do its job. Telling McNamara that his local commanders would make the decisions, Anderson said “We’ve been doing this ever since the days of John Paul Jones.” He waved a copy of the Navy regs manual at McNamara. Now angry, McNamara shot back, “I don’t give a drat what John Paul Jones would have done. I want to know what you are going to do, now.” Anderson said the Navy would fire a warning shot across the bow, and if the Soviet ship did not stop, they would disable its rudder. McNamara warned him not to fire on anything without DoD permission and left in a huff. “That’s the end of Anderson,” McNamara said. “He’s lost my confidence.” (Incidentally, a year later, the prediction came true. Kennedy made Anderson ambassador to Portugal.) On the night of the 24th, however, Khrushchev put a fresh damper on the hopes for peace. He sent a letter to Kennedy that used some rather harsh language, objecting to the American “ultimatum” and threats of force, describing American actions towards Cuba as “the folly of degenerate imperialism”. Refusing to submit to the blockade, Khrushchev declared that the Soviets would “protect our rights” and rather ominously declared “We have everything necessary to do so.” Jesus. At the same time, however, Khrushchev was working behind the scenes to de-escalate things. He invited the head of Westinghouse International, William Knox, who was in Moscow on business, to meet with him at the Kremlin. They spoke for more than three hours, Knox reported later, and Khrushchev was “calm, friendly, and frank”. Acknowledging that he had in fact put ballistic nuclear missiles in Cuba, he did stipulate that he had no desire to destroy the world and if “we all wanted to meet up in Hell, it was up to [America].” He was anxious, Khrushchev said, to have a meeting with President Kennedy, where “without fanfare, some of the major problems between our two great countries could be resolved.” No doubt the reply to Khrushchev’s latest letter, which indicated a possibility of an invasion of Cuba, didn’t do much to harden his resolve. On the 25th, Kennedy had some thinking to do. A dozen Soviet ships had turned around at the quarantine line, but Kennedy told ExComm not to relax. “That October 24 message from Khrushchev is much tougher than that,” he said. A proposal from United Nations Secretary-General U Thant came in, proposing a cooling-off period in which Moscow and Washington would avoid testing the Cuba blockade for a while, and it persuaded Kennedy to temporarily suspend a decision that would involve boarding a Soviet ship. He told Thant, however, that the solution to the crisis started with the Soviets getting the missiles out of Cuba, and his attitude was reflected in a confrontation between UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson and Soviet UN representative Valerian Zorin. Zorin bridled when Stevenson pressed him to say whether the Soviets were putting offensive weapons in Cuba, to which Stevenson said, “You are in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and you can answer yes or no...I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over!” Two days later, via British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Kennedy received a long, rambling, panicked letter from Khrushchev. Though he continued to justify Soviet help to Cuba as a way of combating American aggression, Khrushchev had obviously written this letter without any advisors or consultants on hand. “Let us not quarrel now. It is apparent that I will not be able to convince you of this.” Again, Khrushchev said he had no interest in mutual destruction; it was time for “good sense”. If the United States promised not to invade or support an invasion of Cuba, the Soviets would no longer see a need to arm the island--and they would remove the missiles. It’s important to know that Khrushchev STILL couldn’t bring himself to say this publicly. Secretly, he sent KGB station chief in Washington Aleksandr Feklisov to meet with ABC journalist John Scali, someone Feklisov was on good terms with. At a restaurant in downtown Washington, Feklisov delivered a startling proposal. In return for a promise not to invade Cuba, the Soviets would dismantle the operations on the island, and Castro would pledge never to accept offensive weapons of any kind. And yet Kennedy remained on guard. More Soviet ships were headed toward the quarantine line, and they were still working on the missile sites in Cuba. “We cannot permit ourselves to be impaled on a long negotiating hook while the work goes on on these bases,” Kennedy declared to a meeting of ExComm personnel on October 27. Around and around we go, I guess. In response, a new initiative from Moscow was published in the papers--a more polished version of Khrushchev’s October 26 letter to Kennedy. It proposed an exchange--the Soviets would remove the missiles from Cuba, if, as had been proposed before, the Americans dismantled the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and pledged not to invade Cuba, as well as an agreement to continue using the U.N. as an intermediary. For almost four hours on the 27th, Kennedy pondered his options. The missile sites in Cuba were nearing completion. A SAM site had shot down a U-2 plane and killed its pilot, and in response the Joint Chiefs were leaning hard on Kennedy for a massive air strike no later than Monday morning (the 27th was a Friday). Finally, Kennedy made a decision: Khrushchev’s proposal was the only chance to reach a settlement that would not lead to all-out war. His advisors disagreed--Llewellyn Thompson, for one, asserted that removing the missiles in Turkey would undermine the NATO alliance and weaken faith in American willingness to protect its allies. Kennedy was adamant. If we kept the missiles, he said, “we are either going to have to invade or have a massive strike on Cuba which may lose Berlin. That’s what concerns me.” Plus, Kennedy knew that once blood was shed, NATO would look back on the Turkey deal as a pretty good idea (of course, they’d have the benefit of hindsight). It worked. At a meeting of the entire Soviet presidium, Khrushchev more or less blinked. He declared a need to “retreat” to save Soviet power and the world from nuclear catastrophe. The presidium authorized Soviet forces to repel an American attack in Cuba, but they needn’t have worried--such an attack would not come as long as the missiles were gone. This broadcast was heard at 9am Sunday morning in Washington, and Kennedy and ExComm breathed a sigh of relief.  All but Curtis LeMay and the Joint Chiefs, of course. Refusing to take Khrushchev at his word, he and the rest of the Chiefs continued to recommend the planned air strikes, following it up with a full invasion unless there was “irrefutable evidence” of immediate Soviet action to remove the missile sites. When Kennedy met with the Chiefs to thank them for their help and counsel during the crisis, they were still angry he had not listened. LeMay called the settlement “the greatest defeat in our history.” gently caress this guy, seriously. It would lead to LeMay angrily resigning (albeit two years later) and eventually running for President with insane racist George Wallace in 1968, but that’s a story for another time. Forty years later, U.S. historians can agree that the Cuban Missile Crisis, as it came to be known, was one of the most dangerous periods of time in American history--and definitely the most dangerous moment in the entire Cold War. And yet despite that, Kennedy’s restraint and calm, cool leadership in the face of fire is one of the main reasons he has earned such high marks as a President despite some of his other conspicuous failures. His willingness to stand up to the Joint Chiefs most likely prevented what would have been the last war the known world would have ever seen. October of 1962 was, unquestionably, Kennedy’s finest hour in the White House--and he’s the reason I’m here writing this today.
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Dec 26, 2018 01:13
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“This Nation Has Tossed Its Cap Over The Wall of Space” This one is going to be a quick one, guys. Despite the budget deficits and greater demands for spending on the social safety net, Kennedy never once doubted that America needed a space program that would outdo the Soviets’. Ever since Sputnik in 1957 we’d been in panic mode where space was concerned, but good news--by June 1962, we’d had two successful orbital flights.   Alan Shepard had been a naval aviator and test pilot before becoming America’s first astronaut, and John Glenn was a pilot and engineer who had circled the Earth three times before successfully landing. Their success hardened Kennedy’s resolve not to divert money from the space program. quote:I do not think the United States can afford to become second in space because I think that space has too many implications militarily, politically, psychologically, and all the rest....I think the fact that the Soviet Union was first in space in the fifties had a tremendous impact on a good many people. He wasn’t wrong. Kennedy justified the costs of the space program by citing its “many industrial benefits”, asserting that it was definitely possible for the United States to do what the Soviet Union had done with a national income less than half of America’s. In 1962, however, the Soviets were still a step ahead. Two Soviet cosmonauts completed successful Earth orbits, enjoying considerable advantages in the “size and total of weights placed in orbit, in the thrust of their operational rocket engines, and in the development of space-rendezvous techniques”, necessitating a renewed commitment to the Apollo program. Kennedy urged NASA officials to consider accelerating the lunar mission’s timetable by diverting money from other space projects, too. This put him at odds with NASA head Jim Webb, who was urging a balanced program of space exploration that didn’t overemphasize the lunar probes. To Webb, the moon landing was just one of many co-equal priorities, but Kennedy disagreed. “Everything we do ought to really be tied in to getting on to the moon ahead of the Russians,” he told Webb. Otherwise, he didn’t know how he could justify the space program’s expenditures. It’s important to understand that Kennedy saw the moon landing as a propaganda victory, largely. The moon was a symbol--sure, there would be research and scientific applications from such a success, but they would be dwarfed next to the symbolic victory that would be achieved by an American astronaut planting the Stars and Stripes on the lunar surface ahead of the Soviet hammer and sickle. It kept him armored against growing complaints about the “moon-doggle,” as critics started calling it. They said that the money going to the NASA budget would be better spent “here on Earth”: medicine, Third World development, and urban renewal were all more worthy causes. Both Democrats and Republicans joined this chorus, with liberal Democrats taking the “better spent on social programs” route, while Eisenhower-led Republicans complained that the moon landing project was too prestige-focused and didn’t pay enough attention to the military implications of such a thing--Eisenhower himself said that spending a total of $40 billion in budget outlays was “just nuts”. Kennedy stood his ground. To his liberal critics, he said that if they “cut the space program….you would not get additional funds for education.” Instead, he said, the money would go towards balancing the budget. Kennedy’s singular focus on beating the Soviets to the moon kept him going--he felt that the recriminations we’d suffer if we failed would be intolerable. To this end, he asked Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who he’d put in charge of overseeing NASA, if Eisenhower had ever put a space program in place--what its timetable was, and how much they had planned to spend on it. Johnson reported that Eisenhower had no such thing, but he also believed just as fervently in the space program as Kennedy. “The space program is expensive, but it can be justified as a solid investment which will give ample returns in security, prestige, knowledge, and material benefits,” Johnson said. When reports about the Soviets having second thoughts on a manned mission to the moon surfaced in the summer of 1962, however, Kennedy began experiencing more pressure from critics to reconsider the American program. Still he refused. He continued to see Soviet gains in prestige from space exploration, and he may not have been entirely unfounded on that front. A USIA worldwide opinion survey taken that summer asked which country, the US or USSR, was ahead in “space developments”, and the answers were almost unanimous: the Soviet Union. In Japan, for example, 69% gave the Soviets the lead, in Britain, it was 59%, and in France it was 68%. No one believed the United States was winning the Space Race. By October’s end, Khrushchev told journalists that the Soviets “were not at present planning flight by cosmonauts to the moon,” an interview that got front page billing in American newspapers. Kennedy was undeterred. “I would not make any bets at all on Soviet intentions,” he said. Indeed, Khrushchev subsequently confirmed that while the USSR was not in the active stages of planning a lunar mission, they were by no means out of the race to the moon--a move that Kennedy felt vindicated his stubbornness on the subject. quote:In the larger sense, this is not merely an effort to put a man on the moon; it is a means and a stimulus for all the advances in technology, in understanding and in experience, which can move us forward toward man’s mastery of space. As Command and Conquer-esque as that sounds, it was actually what Kennedy told Congressman Albert Thomas (D-TX), an ardent supporter of the space program and the man responsible for bringing the Johnson Space Center to Houston--and it’s since served as Mission Control for every manned spaceflight since, including the Apollo 11 mission. Kennedy wouldn’t live to see the fruits of his labor, but by 1965, 58% of Americans were in favor of putting a man on the moon. It proved that Kennedy accurately sensed a shift in favor of public backing for the space program, and when we actually did complete the task in 1969 it signaled a growing U.S. commitment to space travel that we might not have had otherwise. Dallas This isn’t going to be long. I did the minute-by-minute in my Johnson piece, and this update is now wearing a bit long. Kennedy was looking towards the 1964 campaign by late 1963, and he was convinced that the work he’d done on civil rights was going to make winning any of the Solid South fairly difficult. As such, he intended to make special effort to visit two states: Florida and Texas. On November 18, 1963, he flew to Tampa and visited politicians and labor leaders, talking about the economy and foreign affairs--with a particular focus on Latin America. In Texas, however, the story was a bit different. Kennedy was going there to mend some political fences. He’d been pushing Texas Governor John Connally to arrange a dinner with rich donors for months now, but Connally was facing reelection in 1964 too and was not keen on standing too close to JFK just now. Civil rights had split Texas down the middle, and Lyndon Johnson wasn’t too high on a Texas trip either. He didn’t think Kennedy could do much to heal the breach that had opened up between conservative Democrats (led by Governor Connally) and Texas liberals, led by this man.  Senator Ralph Yarborough (D-TX) was a fire-breathing liberal and the only Southern senator to vote for all the civil rights bills of the 1960s, and Johnson feared that the conflict between him and Connally was simply too much for Kennedy to fix. A visit to Texas would only make things worse, and it would undercut Johnson’s ability to control the state party, something Johnson felt he’d need later on. None of this deterred Kennedy though. “He was doing the thing he liked even better than being President,” Ken O’Donnell recalled, “getting away from Washington to start his campaign for reelection in a dubious and important state, with 25 electoral votes, where he was sure he could win the people even though many of the bosses and big money were against him.” That’s our Jack. Air Force One landed in San Antonio on November 21, followed by short-hop flights to Houston and Fort Worth. Kennedy greeted thousands of screaming fans at the airports and rode in motorcades, waving to the cheering crowds--an exhilarating and exhausting activity for him. He dedicated an aerospace medical facility in Houston and delivered remarks to the League of Latin American Citizens. Jackie’s presence on the trip distracted the press from the open hostility between Yarborough and Connally, punctuated by Yarborough’s refusal to even ride in the same car. Of course, the Secret Service had heard rumors about the possibility of right-wing demonstrators during the President’s trip, and it worried them. A crowd of racists had threatened Adlai Stevenson during United Nations Day in Dallas back in October, and consequently some of the President’s friends were a bit ambivalent about him going to Dallas as well. A John Birch Society (you know these fuckers, right?) ad in the Dallas Morning News on November 22 accused Kennedy of being soft on Communism. The Birchers asserted that Bobby was being allowed to prosecute loyal Americans who criticized his brother as well, but when Jack showed the ad to Jackie, he said “We’re heading into nut country today. But Jackie, if someone wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?” This is an especially scary and prescient statement considering what happened next. Indeed, the Secret Service was so focused on a threat from the ultra-right that they failed to consider a possible assassin from the left...and that’s exactly what happened. Neither they nor the FBI picked up on the activities of an ex-Communist named Lee Harvey Oswald, who was a big supporter of Castro’s Cuba and had tried already to breach a travel ban to the island. Had the feds paid closer attention, they would have noticed that Oswald had ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano 91/38 rifle by mail using an alias. We know what happened next. As the motorcade turned into Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Oswald, crouched in his sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, fired three shots. The second of them struck Kennedy in the back of the neck, exiting through his throat, and the third blew a hole in the side of his head. The Secret Service dove on the President and Mrs. Kennedy, and the motorcade sped towards the nearest hospital. At 1pm CST, half an hour after the assassination attempt, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital. He was 46 years old. The death of John F. Kennedy represented, to many Americans, the death of the promise of better times ahead. It showed just how powerful the worst of humanity was. Still, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren predicted, the grief and anger that stemmed from his death became a driving force that spurred some of the greatest gains on the legislative front this country has ever seen. Still, I think this is small comfort to those people who might have avoided the meat grinder of the Vietnam War had Kennedy survived his trip to Dallas that day. It is difficult to say how America would be in 2018 if John Kennedy had survived in November 1963, but we can safely say that his thousand days in office--the sixth-briefest tenure in American history--was one of great consequence, both good and bad. --- This was exhausting to write, but most rewarding to finish. I hope that you have the courage to read it to the end. See you when we do our next President!
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Dec 26, 2018 01:18
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https://youtu.be/uhznecRHGKg
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Dec 26, 2018 02:55
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Excellent. I first saw it somewhere here, but here's a link to how things could have gone down if the Cuban Missile Crisis went the other way: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-cuban-missile-war-timeline.65071/
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Dec 26, 2018 04:38
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Still, I think this is small comfort to those people who might have avoided the meat grinder of the Vietnam War had Kennedy survived his trip to Dallas that day. I could be wrong, but I dont think Kennedy would have been any more dovish on Vietnam than LBJ was. I think it served RFK's purposes later to portray jim that way, but its the same Kennedy whose inaugural said , "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty", who kept funding South Vietnamese army expansion and US troop commitments, who publicly stated that Amerivan withdrawal was a mistake, and who gave covert aid to the coup against Diem because his government's unpopularity was hurting South Viernam's stability.
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Dec 26, 2018 07:51
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I hope someone can make a presidential CYOA as soon as New Years. (My hands are tied; I've got job prep coursework to do and a birthday to celebrate)
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Dec 26, 2018 08:24
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Epicurius posted:I could be wrong, but I dont think Kennedy would have been any more dovish on Vietnam than LBJ was. I think it served RFK's purposes later to portray jim that way, but its the same Kennedy whose inaugural said , "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty", who kept funding South Vietnamese army expansion and US troop commitments, who publicly stated that Amerivan withdrawal was a mistake, and who gave covert aid to the coup against Diem because his government's unpopularity was hurting South Viernam's stability. Disagree. Kennedy had been a soldier, and unlike Johnson he had a healthy degree of skepticism in anything the military recommended, especially after the Bay of Pigs. Even if we did start by sending large numbers of American troops to Vietnam, Kennedy would have grown suspicious of the DoD's motives much faster and a lot fewer people would have died.
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Dec 26, 2018 15:18
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Grouchio posted:I hope someone can make a presidential CYOA as soon as New Years. (My hands are tied; I've got job prep coursework to do and a birthday to celebrate) Would the reader be president or shadow president?
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Dec 26, 2018 15:32
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You have entered the door to the west. The pungent stench of urine emanates for the wet oval walls. There is a desk standing resolute in front of you, the resolute desk. There are too levers, one labeled "Gas Price" and one labeled "Economy". What do you do?
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Dec 26, 2018 15:36
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HootTheOwl posted:You have entered the door to the west. The pungent stench of urine emanates for the wet oval walls. >Get ye flask
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Dec 26, 2018 16:10
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HootTheOwl posted:You have entered the door to the west. The pungent stench of urine emanates for the wet oval walls. Stick my tongue out as I manically pump both levers back and forth.
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Dec 26, 2018 20:56
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OP is updated! Thanks for the great content!Duodecimal posted:Excellent. I've read this before and it's very pro-read. Takes a while but it seems pretty realistic and plausible.
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Dec 27, 2018 07:25
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The Deleter posted:>Get ye flask
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Dec 27, 2018 08:48
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quote:but when Jack showed the ad to Jackie, he said “We’re heading into nut country today. But Jackie, if someone wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?” No way he said that, sorry if I sound dickish, but I need a source on that Otherwise, how dare you write this : quote:Be honest: you only read this whole mess to get to this point, didn’t you? I love every word you write and it wasvery informative, thank you for your incredible efforts
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Dec 28, 2018 08:24
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skipThings posted:No way he said that, sorry if I sound dickish, but I need a source on that
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Dec 28, 2018 14:32
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Oh, by the way? Our clear winner is William Jefferson Clinton. Part 1 is forthcoming; stay tuned.
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Jan 4, 2019 14:10
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Looking forward to finding out what the meaning of the word is, er, is.
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Jan 5, 2019 19:28
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this is a really great thread, thanks. I'm interested in Clinton because my parents always spoke highly of him, but as I was born in the early 90's, I don't really remember very much of his years in office as you'd imagine.
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Jan 25, 2019 12:57
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An important twitter thread relevant to this thread's interests https://twitter.com/paulandstorm/status/1090015044681809920
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Jan 29, 2019 00:55
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howe_sam posted:An important twitter thread relevant to this thread's interests John Adams and the sour pickle. Many are hit or miss, but that one...that one...
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Jan 29, 2019 01:07
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28. Woodrow Wilson - Moon Pie. For those with discriminating tastes. An assortment of ingredients brings peace to your hunger. Minimal contact between the marshmallow center and chocolate edges.
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Jan 29, 2019 01:43
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So did Bill Clinton do Vince Foster in?
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Jan 29, 2019 01:52
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Grouchio posted:So did Bill Clinton do Vince Foster in? No he did an adrenochrome ritual using a tortured child to raise Vince's dead body (slain by KILLARY!) as a zombie assassin to kill Seth Rich 20 years later. IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE YOU JUST DON'T WANT TO ADMIT IT #FREEDOMEAGLE.COM
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Jan 29, 2019 13:44
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Would you guys believe I'm still writing? Yes, as we come around to yet another Presidents' Day in a month, this thread will live again. I have a vacation during the third week of that month, so I'm going to try and make sure you get one, maybe two updates during that period. Bill Clinton's life is WAY more interesting than I thought it would be.
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Jan 30, 2019 03:25
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Thread bookmarked already. Worth the wait
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Jan 30, 2019 03:44
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Would you guys believe I'm still writing? Yes, as we come around to yet another Presidents' Day in a month, this thread will live again. I have a vacation during the third week of that month, so I'm going to try and make sure you get one, maybe two updates during that period. Bill Clinton's life is WAY more interesting than I thought it would be. Thanks Fritz! I cannot believe a thread I made on a whim to kill some time on President's Day has lasted over a year and we've covered so many Presidents!
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Jan 30, 2019 07:04
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:Would you guys believe I'm still writing? Yes, as we come around to yet another Presidents' Day in a month, this thread will live again. I have a vacation during the third week of that month, so I'm going to try and make sure you get one, maybe two updates during that period. Bill Clinton's life is WAY more interesting than I thought it would be. Please keep it up! I`ve been enjoying it immensely. Read this thread from the beginning in no time at all.
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Jan 31, 2019 00:12
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William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd President of the United States Whoops! Wrong picture.  In 1963, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech in the Rose Garden to a crowd of boys who were members of an organization called Boys Nation (I was actually part of this organization myself when I was 17). It was July, and the buses were rolling out from the University of Maryland’s College Park campus to the White House to ferry the Boys Nation participants to the speech. On the bus was a man named Daniel J. O’Connor, the director of National Americanism for the Legion (a weirdly Orwellian title), and he passed the time chatting with several of the boys, asking them where they were from and what each thought of Washington so far. One of the young men made a particular impression--he stood 6’3” and was nearly 200 pounds, and O’Connor remembered him as “good-natured” with “a wave of brown hair”. This young man, O’Connor remembered, strode to the front of the very first bus to disgorge its passengers. The other boys were excited, but the young man in O’Connor’s recollection was faster than them, slipping to the front of the line. As the Boys Nation members lined up behind the Presidential podium, the young man in question was only feet from President Kennedy--and he was the first to shake the President’s hand as Kennedy worked the line. As the 17-year-old William Jefferson Clinton recalled, he got “arthritis of the face” and forgot to breathe as the photographers snapped photos. Yes, John F. Kennedy once shook a young Bill Clinton’s hand--and Clinton had photographic evidence to prove it:  We turn now to one of the more controversial Presidents of the modern era in Bill Clinton. Opinions on him are sharply divided down political lines--to Democrats, he was the man who delivered the nation from twelve long years of Republican hegemony and restored real compassion to the Oval Office. To Republicans, he remains to this day the Great Satan--except of course when his wife or Barack Obama are the outrage du jour. A charismatic, grinning, empathetic personality blessed with a near-genius level IQ (he studied at Georgetown and was a Rhodes Scholar), Clinton’s skill at working a rope line during a rally, as well as his unparalleled adeptness at playing Healer-in-Chief after a tragedy, became the stuff of legend during his Presidency. His soft Southern accent has become ingrained on the American consciousness. He was a new kind of leader for a new age--as the first Baby Boomer elected President, Clinton appealed to younger voters in 1992 much the same way John and Robert Kennedy did in the 1960s. Under his watch the economy boomed; he left office with a budget surplus nearly $2 billion in size, unemployment was historically low, and Americans appeared to be enjoying one of the most prosperous eras since the 1950s. Fun fact: Bill Clinton is the only President I personally have ever seen speak live, and I can attest to his oratorical skills. He managed to get a room riled up to support Martha Coakley during the 2009 special election to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate. If you are from Massachusetts, you know how huge an achievement this is. For all his virtues, however, Clinton’s Presidency remains flawed to this day. His Third Way Democrat philosophy strangled to death what remained of the Democratic Party’s willingness to go to the mat for New Deal-style reforms, and liberal critics of his will point (and justifiably so) to both his welfare reform initiatives and his crime bill as proof that Clinton represented a betrayal of traditional Democratic principles. True, he made a concerted push for a comprehensive overhaul of American health care in the first couple years of his Presidency, but it crashed and burned so spectacularly that he took a legendarily bad shellacking in the 1994 midterm elections. Add to this his serial philandering--while not quite as prolific as John F. Kennedy, Clinton did not enjoy the protection of a friendly press--and it made for eight fairly chaotic and painful years for many. Buckle your seatbelts, kids, and we’ll get started--the “Man From Hope” is an immensely complex subject. “I’m From a Little Town Called Hope”  Unlike the stories of the log cabins from centuries past, Bill Clinton really did come from a town called Hope. Born in Hope, Arkansas, on August 19, 1946, he was christened William Jefferson Blythe IV--but his birth father, William Blythe Jr., died in a car accident before he was born. Clinton’s only recollections of his father are interesting. quote:Many times when I was growing up I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting and marriage. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriend’s ring and asked her if she was married. She stammered “no”--she was single. The next day, he sent the other woman flowers, and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship. I can see where ol’ Billy Five Aces got his charm from. Fun fact--their marriage was later found out to be bigamous: Blythe Jr. was still married to his third wife at the time he married Clinton’s mother. More on that later perhaps. Anyway, Clinton’s father served in World War II, repairing tanks and Jeeps in a motor pool. Funny that he survived that, but when Clinton’s mother went home to Hope before they could move into their new house in Chicago, his father drove from Chicago to Hope to get her. It was on this fateful car trip that he lost control of his car--a 1942 Buick--and was thrown clear into a drainage ditch that had three feet of water in it. Despite his efforts to pull himself out, William Blythe Jr. drowned at the age of 28, leaving behind his pregnant wife. After Bill was born, his mother, Virginia, went to New Orleans to learn to be a nurse anesthetist, leaving him with his grandparents, Eldridge and Edith Cassidy. They were iconoclasts, the Cassidys--at a time when the South, Arkansas included, was a segregated town, the Cassidys sold goods at the grocery store they ran to all races. As for Clinton himself, his recollections of his grandparents are very positive. quote:They loved me very much...For all their own demons, my grandparents and my mother always made me feel like was the most important person in the world to them. Clinton’s grandparents fed him, bathed him, kept a roof over his head, and ensured that he kept a healthy interest in studying and learning. His grandmother, “Mammaw”, as he called her, used to stuff him at every meal, believing that a fat baby was a healthy one as long as he was kept neat and clean. Clinton’s autobiography also contains an interesting recollection about a friend of his from back in Hope. quote:...I used to play in the backyard with a boy whose yard adjoined mine. He lived with two beautiful sisters in a bigger, nicer house than ours. We used to sit in the grass for hours, throwing his knife in the ground and learning to make it stick. Why am I telling you this? Because the boy Clinton is talking about in this vignette was his childhood friend, Vince Foster. Clinton recalls liking Foster because Foster was kind to him and did not patronize him for being the younger of the pair. Foster, as you will recall, would go on to become one of Clinton’s closest advisors, and his suicide remains the topic of numerous right-wing conspiracy theories to this day. When Virginia Blythe returned from nursing school in 1950, however, young Bill’s life took a dark turn. See, that’s when Virginia met and married Roger Clinton, Sr.. He co-owned an auto dealership in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The family moved to Hot Springs after Roger and Virginia were married, but young Bill waited until he was 15 to adopt his stepfather’s surname. Mom...did not approve of the marriage. According to Clinton biographer David Maraniss: quote:According to Virginia’s later recollections, her mother threatened to seek custody of Billy and even consulted a lawyer about how she could do it. The custody thread never made it into court, but it did divide the family more than ever. When Virginia Blythe became Virginia Clinton on June 19, 1950, her parents and her four-year-old son were not at the ceremony. Clinton’s recollections of his stepfather are mixed--Clinton Senior apparently loved his new wife and stepson, as the anecdotes Bill talks about seem to indicate, but according to Bill, “he couldn’t ever quite break free of the shadows of self-doubt, the phony security of binge drinking and the adolescent partying, and the isolation from and verbal abuse of Mother that kept him from being the man he might have been.” Biographers are less kind. Roger Clinton Sr. is remembered primarily as a gambler, a drunk, and an abusive boor, and young Bill recalled intervening multiple times with the threat of violence to protect his mother and younger half-brother, Roger Jr.. Clinton recalled one incident where Roger Sr. fired a gun at his mother during a fight they were having. His stepfather was drunk and angry, and Virginia Clinton scooped up her kids and ran across the street to the neighbors’ house. Roger Sr. was arrested and led away in handcuffs. Clinton is far too charitable to his stepfather in his autobiography, in my opinion. quote:I’m sure Daddy didn’t mean to hurt her and he would have died if the bullet had accidentally hit either of us. But something more poisonous than alcohol drove him to that level of debasement. It would be a long time before I could understand such forces in others or myself. When Daddy got out of jail, he had sobered up in more ways than one and was so ashamed that nothing bad happened for some time. If you’re hearing the warning klaxons sounding, that’s ok. You’re not alone. Fun fact: it was Bill’s younger half-brother, Roger, who gave Clinton yet another of the nicknames that would follow him for the rest of his life: “Bubba”. Bill adored his little brother--in fact, it was solidarity with little Roger that drove Bill to go down to the Garland County Courthouse and change his last name. Bill was a charmer from a young age. There are gobs and gobs of anecdotes about how he loved to be the center of attention and about how he could spin a yarn that would keep everyone in the room hooked on his every word. At the school he attended in Hot Springs, “Billy” as he was known was a middling student--but within weeks he seemed to be running the place. His name had not been officially changed, but he was introducing himself to other children as “Billy Clinton” by the time he was in fourth grade. Friends of his recall that he was the smartest kid in class, so they copied off his tests--a fact young Billy was well aware of, writing loud as he could so that his friends could decipher his pencil strokes. When Clinton headed to Hot Springs High School in 1961, he had proven himself to be an adept sight reader and a great improviser--in his Latin class one day, he had played the part of defense lawyer for Catiline as he stood accused of plotting the murder of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Despite his Latin teacher telling him the case was lost, Clinton’s spirited and persuasive defense of Catiline convinced him that he wanted to be a lawyer one day. His band teacher, however, was the one who recognized Billy Clinton’s true potential. Bear in mind: Clinton’s biological father was long dead, and his stepfather was an abusive drunk. Band teacher Virgil Spurlin, however, was an ex-Marine and Baptist deacon with a big heart--he treated his band members like his extended family, and his young tenor saxophone player was his first lieutenant in keeping the band in order. The three top positions in the Hot Springs band were student director, drum major, and band major--the last of which was held by Bill Clinton for the majority of his high school tenure. As the band major, he’d be responsible for planning the band’s yearly schedule and the state band festival--which, as it turned out, took place in Hot Springs. Together, Spurlin and Clinton planned it all: hiring judges, booking hotels for bands to stay, renting large instruments and scheduling the performances. He was the man from day one. One of his childhood acquaintances, Carolyn Yeldell, recalls some things about 17-year-old Clinton that you should recognize in the current incarnation of the man. quote:He’d go to band camp in Fayetteville and there’d be this sort of be-still-my-beating-heart if he saw a good looking clarinetist. Bill always had this sense about him that he collected girls. Like the Ricky Nelson song, he had a girl in every band. He had the eye for girls everywhere. Graduation for the Hot Springs High School class of 1964 took nearly a week. Between the “Silver Tea” held at the home of the student council president’s parents, the commencement sermon given by Carolyn Yeldell’s father, and the class picnic on Lake Hamilton, it was a whirlwind of activity for Billy Clinton. Though he had “only” placed fourth in his graduating class, he got to give the graduation benediction--which is now thought of as his first political speech. quote:Dear Lord, as we leave this place and this era of our lives, we ask your blessing on us while we stand together for the last time as the Hot Springs High School class of 1964. Our high school days are no more. Now we must prepare to live only by the guide of our own faith and character...Sicken us at the sight of apathy, ignorance and rejection so that our generation will remove complacency, poverty and prejudice from the hearts of free men. Even at the tender age of eighteen he could give a hell of a speech. More Fancy Book Learnin’  In the fall of 1964, with the aid of several scholarships, Bill Clinton entered Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. For those of you not familiar, this is basically the training ground for future diplomats and U.S. State Department personnel--as well as some foreign heads of state. King Felipe VI of Spain is a notable alumnus, as is former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski--but it also claims former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and former CIA director George Tenet as well. On second thought, a couple of those names, eh...not so sure they should be canonized. Anyway, the first thing the orientation committee did? It enlightened the incoming freshmen on how the various professors graded and where they could drink in DC at age eighteen. College is always the same, no matter where you go, I swear. The Jesuits ran a strict curfew and dress codes: students were in their dorms at 8:30 and lights out by 11pm. No women were allowed in the dorms, and there were no public displays of affection on campus. Ironic that they’re considered the “liberal” order of priests now. That said, the East Campus, where Bill Clinton’s school was located, was a melting pot compared to the homogeneous College of Arts and Sciences (96 percent male and Catholic). Women and wealthy foreign students enrolled alongside Bill and his fellow freshmen at the Institute of Languages and Linguistics and the School of Business Administration, which shared the East Campus with the Foreign Service School. Bill took to the place like a duck to water--in 1964 and 1965, he won elections for class president, and from 1964 to 1967 he served as an intern and a clerk in the office of this man:  Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-AR) was the senior senator from Arkansas at the time. Fulbright’s Senate record is a bit mixed--while he was a staunch multilateralist who supported the creation of the United Nations after the Second World War (he’d come to the Senate in 1945), he was also a segregationist and a signatory to the Southern Manifesto (Google this, it’s gross as poo poo). However, his efforts to establish an international exchange program and his opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War led to the creation of the fellowship program that bears his name, the Fulbright Program (if you’ve ever heard of a Fulbright scholar, this is what it means). Upon graduating from Georgetown in 1968, Bill Clinton interviewed for--and was granted--a Rhodes Scholarship to University College in Oxford, England. Interestingly enough, the Rhodes program was bandied about as a joke by Clinton and his fellow Georgetown graduates--students from the South were thought of as unworthy hayseeds. That said, when Clinton received word that he’d won, he called his mother, sobbing, and asked her through his tears, grinning ear to ear, how she thought he’d look in English tweed. Jokester. He began his studies at Oxford reading for a Bachelor of Philosophy in philosophy, politics, and Economics, but eventually switched to a Bachelor of Letters degree in politics and a Bachelor of Philosophy in politics (the graduate degrees at Oxford work a bit differently than they do here in the United States...any Brit goons reading this wanna help me out? I didn’t understand it when I researched it). Why the switch? Well, because he wasn’t expecting to get a second year. 1968 was the height of the Vietnam War--the year of the Tet Offensive, in fact--and American boys were being drafted for what was being called “Lyndon Johnson’s War” like hotcakes. I could go on for pages and pages about Clinton’s life at Oxford. It was similar to life at Georgetown--he immediately made friends and became the big man on campus, earning his second and third year due to...well, the thing I’m about to talk about next. Interlude: Draft Dodger? Clinton received two draft deferments while he was in England, both in 1968 and 1969. He always thought he’d make a poor soldier--he’d initially thought of joining the ROTC program at Georgetown, but he cut a poor figure in a uniform and was bad at taking orders--but it wasn’t until he was at Oxford that his feelings about the war manifested in full. They’d been shaped by his mentor, Senator Fulbright--and Fulbright had broken early with President Johnson on the war, believing it was foolhardy to keep throwing American kids into the meat grinder for no appreciable gain. Bill participated in Vietnam War protests--he’d let his hair grow out a little, and according to one of his friends back in Hot Springs, Duke Watts, he’d showed up to a dinner meeting wearing sandals--and he organized a Moratorium to End the War in October 1969. Bill knew he’d possibly lose his draft deferment when he returned to the States to study law and started looking for ways to join the National Guard and the Air Force back home in Arkansas. Unfortunately, he was unsuccessful, and he also decided against joining the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas, writing a letter to the office in charge of the program explaining that his opposition to the war made it dishonorable for him to use escape valves like the Guard, Air Force, or ROTC. He said he would not volunteer, but he’d go if he was drafted. Luckily for young Clinton, he received a high draft number--311--and subsequently was not drafted (the highest number drafted was 195). So where did this theory that Clinton dodged the draft come from? Well, Colonel Eugene Holmes, the Army officer who’d processed Clinton’s ROTC application, suspected that he’d attempted to manipulate the system to avoid the draft and avoid serving. I’m not sure why he thought this, given that Clinton couldn’t choose his draft number. According to Holmes, though: quote:I was informed by the draft board that it was of interest to Senator Fulbright’s office that Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, should be admitted to the ROTC program...I believe that he purposely deceived me, using the possibility of joining the ROTC as a ploy to work with the draft board to delay his induction and get a new draft classification. This has been bandied about as a conspiracy theory since Clinton first ran for President in 1992--that he dodged the draft to avoid Vietnam. Putting aside the fact that thousands of Republican politicians, themselves young scions of powerful families, probably used similar methods to avoid fighting in the war, Clinton at the very least did not turn around and support sending other people to fight. gently caress off, wingnuts. Yale  At the same time he was writing to Colonel Holmes, Bill Clinton was sending another letter home--his application to Yale Law School. I like how David Maraniss characterizes this time in Clinton’s life: quote:Luck and fate always seem to appear at the edge of the road as Bill Clinton drives along his highway of ambition, two friendly hitchhikers, thumbs out, ready to be picked up for stretches here and there when other passengers appear less attractive. Usually there are less mysterious ways to explain how he got to where he wanted to go. But in the fall of 1970, luck and fate not only went along for the ride, they crowded him out of the driver’s seat and took over the steering wheel. How else to explain the combination of circumstances that awaited him when he moved to Connecticut to begin law school? After Oxford, Clinton was anxious to launch a political career--and there were few better places to do so than from the hallowed halls of Yale Law. He didn’t want to head back to Arkansas without a degree from an elite institution; he’d be better assured of a place in a top-tier law firm, and another year at Oxford seemed overindulgent. Clinton viewed the University of Arkansas’ law school as less esteemed than Yale, and perhaps he was right. Yale Law would offer answers to every need he had--political, academic, social...and personal, as he would soon find out. Maraniss talks a bit about the “fraternity” at Yale Law: quote:The prevailing sentiment at Yale Law was that you truly had to put your mind to it to flunk out. It was, as one professor said, a very tough country club to get into, but once you were in, you were in. With that surplus of academic freedom, Clinton needed only a political campaign to round out his days. It was here where Clinton would meet the vast majority of the people that would follow him for the entirety of his political career. The U.S. Senate race was heating up that year, and one of the candidates was Joseph Duffey. Normally I would show you a picture at this juncture, but I was unable to find one despite my best efforts. Professor Joseph Duffey was a peace activist and an ethics professor at Hartford Seminary, and Connecticut activists thought of him as the spiritual successor to Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy--two of the most strident national anti-war activists of the age. Clinton jumped on board when the student volunteers for Duffey’s campaign rolled in in 1970--and the young man who got Clinton into the campaign? None other than a McCarthy campaign vet named Tony Podesta. If that name sounds familiar, it should--his brother John has held several U.S. government positions including White House Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, as well as Counsel to the President under Barack Obama. At Yale, Clinton was clean-shaven again. Oh, did I forget to mention that? Yeah, when he left Oxford, he looked like this:  More on the young lady standing next to him a bit later, guys  . Clinton would shave and regrow the beard a few times--his mother didn’t like it, telling him that his baby face suited him better, but friends told him he should keep it because “he looked like Jesus--well, he thought that was wonderful!”When Duffey won the primary in August 1970, Bill threw himself into the campaign along with several other names you might recognize: Lawrence Kudlow and Michael Medved among them. Most of my readers know these names, but for those of you who don’t, these young idealistic liberals ended up switching sides and becoming neoconservatives. Kudlow now works for Trump, and Medved is (or was) a fairly prominent conservative talking head. Clinton, however, worked to make himself known to the Duffey organization, something he had to put a lot of effort into--after all, the campaign wasn’t predisposed to trust the abilities of a law student from Arkansas with the sleepy, soft Southern accent. Nevertheless, they allowed him to be their ambassador to the people working for the losing primary campaigns--and he won them over with ease. Duffey was impressed. “Bill knew what he was doing. He could talk to anyone,” he said later. Clinton made a habit of being underestimated. When he first called Mickey Donenfeld, the campaign coordinator in conservative Milford, CT along Long Island Sound, Donenfeld felt her heart sink. “Hah, ahm Bill Clinton and ahm the third congressional coordinator,” he said. Donenfeld was dreading working with what she was sure would be a sleepy, laid-back young man, but Clinton surprised her. “He spoke funny,” Irv Stolbert, leader of New Haven’s Reform Democrats, recalled, “but aside from that he was easy-going and bright, and it didn’t take him too long to figure out the area.” The Senate race was weird that year--I should mention that. It was a three-way race: Duffey was the Democratic nominee, the Republican was Lowell Weicker, Jr. and the incumbent, Thomas Dodd, was running as an independent after Democrats kicked him out of the party for misusing campaign funds. If the last name sounds awfully familiar, it should--Dodd’s son, Christopher, would go on to hold that Senate seat for 30 years starting in 1981. Dodd, for his part, maintained connections within the party, undermining their support for Duffey. Duffey forces realized that there was a lot of long-standing devotion in blue-collar districts for Senator Dodd, based on the years of help he’d given families in hard times. Democratic voter allegiances were split, as was organized labor and other nominally Democratic constituencies. It didn’t end well. Weicker won with 41.7% on Election Day, with Duffey finishing second at 33.8% and Dodd playing spoiler at 24.5%. What’s more, I think that in the ashes of this political defeat was where the seeds of the New Democrat philosophy were sown: Clinton spent the weeks afterwards discussing with Duffey and his new political mentor, Anne Wexler, about how new politics could avoid alienating middle America. Any of this sounding familiar to you? There were a number of people, like I said, that Clinton met at Yale that would follow him for the rest of his life. Among them were Tony Podesta, Robert Reich...and the topic of my next section. From Across The Room Clinton, like most law students, spent a lot of time in the Yale law library--and it was there that he met someone who would change the course of his life. Thing was, she’d already seen him--ever since she’d observed him boasting about the size of the watermelons he used to grow back home in Hope--and she’d resolved to gather more information about him, in her usual unobtrusive fashion. The way Bill tells the story is a bit more melodramatic, however. One day, the woman in question was sitting at a table piled with books, journals, and notepads in the reading room--a huge wood-paneled chamber with high ceilings and Gothic-arched windows. Off in the middle distance, Clinton was loitering with a friend, Jeff Glekel, an editor for the Yale Law Journal. Ostensibly, the two were talking, but Clinton was staring at the studious young woman surrounded by her books. Glekel was attempting to get him to join the Journal’s staff--with the promise of a position in a powerful Manhattan law firm or a spot on the law school’s faculty after he graduated. Clinton declined. He said he planned to go home and run for political office, but he remained inattentive--he was still staring at the young woman across the room. Imagine his surprise when she got up, marched across the room to his table and said, “Look, if you’re going to keep staring at me and I’m going to keep staring back, we should at least introduce ourselves. I’m Hillary Rodham.” Her bold approach stunned Clinton, rendering him sputtering and barely able to remember his own name. Yes, this is when Bill met Hillary, and for all the right wing smear campaigns and attacks on her features, Hillary Clinton was no slouch in the looks department. Take a look at young Hilldawg for a second.  I KNOW, RIGHT?! Hillary Rodham was a no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone graduate of Wellesley College by the time she met Bill Clinton. Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1947, her family moved to Park Ridge when she was three. The Rodhams were Republicans in a sea of Democrats--Hillary herself, as we all know, was a Goldwater Girl during Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated 1964 Presidential campaign. But thanks to her young, socially conscious teachers both in high school and at Wellesley, she began to hear the call of liberalism very quickly after that. On their first date, Bill and Hillary went together to sign up for second semester classes--but when they got to the front of the line, the registrar looked at Bill and asked him what he was doing there. “You registered yesterday!” he said. Afterwards, they went for a walk--and Bill managed to charm a custodian into opening the college art museum for them, despite the fact that it was closed that day. In return, he and Hillary helped them pick up some trash on campus. From then on, the two were “inseparable”, according to friends. Hillary, according to her friends, had some hard edges even then--but Bill was the rare guy who was “not afraid of her”, as she told them. Hillary Rodham was whip-smart, she had a reputation as one of the sharpest students on the Yale campus, and her utter refusal to be cowed or “tamed” seemed to both attract and frighten Clinton at the same time. Much like what attracted Jack Kennedy to Jackie, Hillary was unlike any of the women he’d ever known back in Hope. He liked her so much that he used to prep his housemates before each of her visits, hoping they’d help to impress her as well. One of Clinton’s housemates recalled that it was a while “before [Hillary] decided he was going to be up to snuff. She had to be encouraged to see that point of view. She was brought out to the beach house to engage in lively conversation. We were all recruited to participate in it.” Hillary recalls admiring Clinton’s sense of place. He wasn’t eager to forget where he came from, something she found rooted him--but she was also not fooled by his “southern boy stuff”, as friend and housemate Don Pogue put it. “She’d say ‘Spit it out, Clinton!’ or ‘Get to the point, will you, Bill!’” when he’d tell stories,” Pogue remembered. Clinton’s friends viewed Hillary Rodham as the perfect counterpoint to his southern charm--her focused, spear-like intellect a counter to his “restless, diffuse mind”, and as such she was the superior student. In one class they took together in spring 1971, Political and Civil Rights, Hillary earned a 78 (one of the highest grades in a very difficult class) but Bill earned only a 70. Fun fact: Hillary also befriended Michael Medved during her time at Yale Law. Funny how these things work. One of her friends, Greg Craig, would eventually become White House Counsel. I could go on for pages and pages about Hillary and Bill’s courtship, but one particular anecdote I think sums up their early partnership. As part of their studies, Yale Law students were required to perform as lawyers either presenting arguments in appellate court or trying cases at mock trials. Run by the Yale Barristers’ Union, one of the campus student organizations, these fake trials were both entertaining and very competitive. They were scripted kinda like an episode of Law & Order, only with, you know, actual legal concepts. Guess who our prosecutors were for the 1972 Prize Trial? Yup! Together, Bill and Hillary had spent months preparing their case, which featured a Southern cop on trial for allegedly beating up protestors during a Kentucky anti-war protest. Observers remember that despite the eloquence of Bill’s initial argument, the evidentiary ruling went against him--a fact that greatly chagrined him. Hillary, on the other hand, kept her laser-focused mind on the case “Hillary was much calmer,” remembers Elliot Brown, the first-year student who wrote the case. “You could see her say ‘Okay, we lost it, let’s move on’.” The pair were up against Michael Conway, a sharp legal mind who would eventually go on to become one of Chicago’s top litigators, and his skill at delivering an argument won over the jury. The defense won the verdict and Conway was awarded the prize. But what observers remember most is how Hillary and Bill operated together. quote:Clinton was soft and engaging, eager to charm the judge and jury and make the witnesses feel comfortable, pouting when a ruling went the other way. Rodham was clear and all business. Alsdorf was struck by the contrasting styles, noting that Rodham was never concerned about stepping on toes whereas Clinton “would massage your toes.” Nancy Bekavac, watching from the back of the room, later said of the pair, “It was like Miss Inside and Mr. Outside. I thought, ‘What is this—Laurel and Hardy?’ Hillary was very sharp and Chicago and Bill was very To Kill a Mockingbird.” This should sound very familiar. The pair would eventually be married in October of 1975, but that was after they both moved to Texas to work on the Presidential campaign of George McGovern in 1972. Some of the people Clinton became acquainted with during his time in Texas should sound familiar: Ron Kirk, Ann Richards, and Steven Spielberg (yes, THAT Steven Spielberg!). This is yet another subject I could write an entire book on, but I don’t think any of you would read it because it would be dreadfully boring. The Governor  I should clear this up--the governor’s race was not Clinton’s first political rodeo. After he graduated Yale, he moved back to Arkansas and became a law professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville--which laid the groundwork for a Congressional run in 1974. His district was very conservative, and the incumbent Republican, John Paul Hammerschmidt, would normally have been an unbeatable opponent. I say “normally”, because in 1974, Republicans in general were not in particular favor with the public. Would anyone care to guess why?  If you guessed “this guy”, you are correct! Anti-incumbent (particularly anti-Republican) sentiment was strong during those midterm elections, given that they’d come only months after Richard Nixon had resigned the Presidency in disgrace--and Gerald Ford had poured gasoline on the fire by pardoning him. Clinton ran a very strong race against Hammerschmidt, winning 48% against an incumbent who, two years earlier, had been elected with 77% of the vote. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, Billy. Incidentally, during much of this, Hillary was holed up in an office on Capitol Hill--she was one of almost 40 lawyers tasked with constructing a case for removing Nixon from office, a task which was rendered moot when Nixon beat them to the punch. Hillary followed Bill to Arkansas and, after passing the state bar exam, was introduced to the law school faculty at a reception--and she so impressed them that she practically had a job before she walked out the door. But I digress. The loss didn’t matter. Clinton’s ardor for politics hadn’t been dampened one bit. And 1974 was a banner year for Democrats, because it elected a bunch of names that should be very, very familiar to you: Gary Hart (Sen-Colorado), Jerry Brown (Gov-California), Michael Dukakis (Gov-Massachusetts), Paul Simon (Rep-Illinois), Paul Tsongas (Rep-Massachusetts), and Tom Harkin (Rep-Iowa). It was a good time (ostensibly) to be something other than a Republican. In 1976, Bill was back on the statewide race stage. The state Democratic Committee was run by an old friend of his, another person you might recognize--Mack McLarty from back home in Hot Springs (his father owned the other major car dealership aside from Roger Clinton’s). He took an unpaid leave of absence from UA to run a statewide campaign for Attorney General--a race he knew would offer slightly less of a challenge. Another loss could damage his ego and his young political career, and he was happy to learn that one of the most formidable candidates was not running within weeks of his announcement. Clinton’s connections up and down the state both from his Congressional campaign and his work on the McGovern campaign gave him a huge leg up on his competition--and after winning the primary, he cruised to election as Arkansas’ Attorney General, at the tender age of 30. Yes, Bill Clinton was the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of his time, believe it or not. As the Attorney General, however, Clinton was already thinking of moving on to the next objective--and oddly enough, it was the death of Elvis Presley in 1977 that seemed to give him the most motivation. From Maraniss’ book: quote:Elvis was more than a slick-haired crooner in the Clinton family culture. He was a cherished icon. Clinton’s mother idolized Elvis and Bill, two southern charmers with sleepy eyes and soft voices and talents beyond their backwater roots. Clinton memorized the lyrics to many of Elvis’s songs as a teenager, and even during the sixties, when the King seemed out of style, there was some part of Clinton that held on to that corner of his past. Elvis’s death left Clinton transfixed. He visited the home of a longtime supporter, Marilyn Speed, after his speech, and did not want to leave and miss any of the television coverage. Terry Kirkpatrick, who traveled with him that day, remembered that the end of Elvis was all her boss would talk about : “All the way home on the plane he talked about it. He talked about the passing of an era. His youth. What a wasted life. It moved him deeply.” Later in 1977 Clinton met with a young New York political consultant. This particular young man had some revolutionary ideas about how polls could be used to shape rhetorical arguments in campaigns, and he’d been soliciting new clients across the nation. His name? Dick Morris. Yup. Bill Clinton met Captain Shrimptoast himself during his tenure as Arkansas Attorney General. Morris agreed to poll both the governor’s and Senate races for Clinton in 1978--incumbent Democrat John McClellan would be leaving the Senate that year--and though Clinton expressed a preference for the Senate, given that their terms were six years compared to the Arkansas governor’s two, Morris’ data showed that the primary would be immensely difficult. Two top-tier candidates, including Clinton’s predecessor as AG, Jim Guy Tucker, and current Governor Thomas Pryor were already in the race. However, it also showed that he’d win the governor’s race with ease. When Governor Pryor took Clinton with him to Hot Springs to deliver a speech, he told the young attorney general that if he ran for the governorship, he could break Orval Faubus’ record for most consecutive terms (Faubus had served six terms, 1955-1967). Though Clinton displayed a heightened interest and began asking Pryor about life as governor, he privately knew he had no interest in breaking Faubus’ record in Little Rock. So he announced for governor--and he immediately came under fire, despite earning support from both labor and business and being hailed by the Arkansas Gazette as “the only truly distinguished figure” in the race. Anyone wanna guess why? Hilldawg, of course. Opponents assailed him for having an assertive wife who would not adopt his last name--Hillary Rodham had not taken Bill’s last name as of 1978, despite the fact they were married. Internal campaign memos have surfaced since that noted the “Name business” as they called it, had surfaced in stories about Hillary by that point. One of Clinton’s primary opponents, an old turkey farmer (I swear I’m not making this up) named Monroe Schwarzlose, groused about Hillary’s law degree. “We’ve had enough lawyers in the Governor’s Mansion. One is enough, two would be too much.” Another candidate, Frank Lady, blasted Hillary for her membership in a private law firm (Hillary was a member of the Rose Law Firm, one of the oldest and most powerful law firms in Arkansas). Bill rose to these attacks with righteous anger. Exploding at Lady, he said that Lady’s “religious convictions tell him it is wrong to lie, but he does it anyway.” Displaying that volcanic temper he’d become famous for in later years, he offered a very emotional defense of Hillary Rodham. “If people knew how old-fashioned she was in every conceivable way...she’s just a hard-working, no-nonsense, no-frills intelligent girl who has done well, who doesn’t see any sense to extramarital sex, who doesn’t care much for drink, who’s witty and sharp without being a stick in the mud. She’s just great.” Not the greatest defense, but I guess in 1970s Arkansas it sounded a lot better. Anyway, Clinton didn’t worry much about his primary. He’d clinched it, and as of the final months of 1978 he was on the precipice of true greatness. At 32, he was the governor-apparent of Arkansas...and then his past came back to haunt him. In the final week of the campaign, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force named Billy Geren held a news conference on the steps of the state Capitol in which he accused Bill Clinton of dodging the draft. Charging that Clinton had received a deferment in 1969 in exchange for a promise to join the University of Arkansas ROTC program, then reneged and returned to Oxford for another year of study. Clinton fired back. He’d never received a draft deferment, he said, because he’d canceled the agreement and re-entered the draft pool before it had been granted. When reporters tracked down Col. Eugene Holmes, the former head of the program, Holmes could not recall Clinton’s case--and without substantiation, the story fizzled. But David Maraniss asserts that Geren had a stronger case than anyone knew. quote:He had heard about the letter that Clinton had written to Colonel Holmes from Oxford in which Clinton thanked the officer for saving him from the draft. But Geren could not find a copy of the letter. Ed Howard, who had been the drill sergeant on the ROTC staff and had left the service to sell real estate in Malvern, recalled that Geren called him at home late one night shortly before the press conference. “He told me they were looking into Clinton dodging the draft,” Howard said. “He knew that I knew about the Clinton file and the letter. He was trying to get me to help them. He wanted me to tell the press that I knew about it.” The only thing that stopped them was Howard being a Clinton supporter and subsequently refusing to help Geren smear him. The day after the press conference, however, when Howard read Clinton’s response, he was upset that Bill had denied ever receiving a deferment. “I was disappointed with Bill...and angry--again,” he recalled. Rumblings of future trouble, no doubt. Nevertheless, Clinton swept election night, winning nearly 63% of the vote. He was the youngest governor in Arkansas history--and, indeed, the youngest governor in the entire nation in four decades. As Maraniss says, though: quote:The omen of future trouble came in a congratulatory note from President Carter, who wrote to Governor-elect Clinton: “You and I will succeed in meeting the goals for our country by working closely together to serve those whom we represent.” End of Part 1. In Part 2, we’ll discuss Bill Clinton’s tenure as Governor...and his campaign for President, probably.
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Jan 31, 2019 03:55
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OP updated!
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Jan 31, 2019 04:21
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Grouchio posted:I hope someone can make a presidential CYOA as soon as New Years. (My hands are tied; I've got job prep coursework to do and a birthday to celebrate) We had an LBJ one, we need a 2nd term survival CYOA as Nixon.
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Jan 31, 2019 10:35
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No mention of Juanita Broaddrick? Or you saving that for later for the full dive into his sexual misconduct? Also, another unflattering detail: The museum that the Clintons went to for their first date was closed because of a labor dispute. As some critics later suggest, they technically crossed a picket line. On its own, quite innocuous; but considering what the couple later did to the Democratic Party, a bit symbolic for their detractors on the Left for how their partnership started. Random anecdote: Two of Bill and Hillary's classmates at Yale Law were Robert Reich and Clarence Thomas. In Frontline's The Choice 2016, Reich claims (against Bill and Hillary's recollection) that he introduced the two together. Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Jan 31, 2019 |
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Jan 31, 2019 16:21
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Echo Chamber posted:Random anecdote: Two of Bill and Hillary's classmates at Yale Law were Robert Reich and Clarence Thomas. In Frontline's The Choice 2016, Reich claims (against Bill and Hillary's recollection) that he introduced the two together. One of his teachers was Robert Bork, and according to Clinton he was an rear end in a top hat even then.
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Feb 1, 2019 17:19
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In honor of Presidents' Day, I would like whatever remains of my audience to know that I am STILL WRITING. Working now on Bill Clinton's tenure as governor, and the update will close with him being elected President. Happy Presidents' Day, everyone.
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Feb 18, 2019 06:23
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:In honor of Presidents' Day, I would like whatever remains of my audience to know that I am STILL WRITING. Who would've thought this thread was still going a year later? Happy Presidents' Day everyone! Hope y'all learned some stuff.
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Feb 19, 2019 00:41
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