Opinions to go Online

It would seem like a relatively modest request. How about making the world somewhat safer for Christmas?  Well, reasonable anywhere but in the partisan agenda-driven Congress.

To date, Sen. Richard Lugar appears to be the only Republican willing to support the new START treaty. That’s the nuclear-weapon pact that would marginally reduce strategic warheads between the U.S. and Russia. Conceivably, that can’t be bad. Even more importantly, it improves our critical relationship with Russia, which is a leverage player in dealing with, among others, Iran. The implications should be obvious.

In effect, the treaty, characterized by President Obama as a “national security imperative,” is being held up by Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz, the Senate Minority Whip. He’s the guy tasked with maintaining Republican party discipline.

The issue with START, it would appear, is not so much the treaty, per se, although Kyl says he wants assurances that the U.S. will upgrade its weaponry. No, Kyl says there are “higher priority items” in the lame-duck session. Actually, it’s a blatantly disingenuous ploy that represents the party-first, country last perception that this is “Obama’s treaty,” and he mustn’t be allowed to succeed. This is part of the political fallout from the zero-sum November elections.

Only problem is that the world just became a little less safe for Republicans too.

Earlier this week we were reminded, once again, of that awful, fateful day in Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It’s now been 47 years. It gets no less horrific.

For many Americans, given our penchant for being history challenged, not enough is known of JFK beyond gruesome Zapruder footage, the Cuban missile crisis and maybe references to Jacqueline Kennedy. Not nearly enough is known, for example, of his Cold War crucible at home, when he was a president often under siege by his own Cold Warriors.

A re-read of his famous “Ask Not” inaugural speech is a reminder that Kennedy was calling for more than selflessness in January 1961. He was also assuming the office–and  priorities–of Cold Warrior-in-Chief. To wit: “…We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

No, Vietnam was not a quantum leap.

But Kennedy had evolved by the autumn of 1963. Confronting Soviet ICBMs 90 miles away in Cuba, realizing the apocalyptic implications for mankind, and having his own young children had been as close to an epiphany as an American politician could get. One that didn’t want to be succeeded by a President Goldwater in 1964.

Shortly before leaving for Dallas, JFK was given a casualty update on Vietnam. Here’s what he then told Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff, the man who would formally announce the president’s death two days later in Parkland Hospital: “After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. Vietnam is not worth another American life.”

Moreover, this was in the aftermath of Kennedy’s issuance of National Security Action Memorandum 263 on Oct. 11, 1963. In it he was making it official government policy to withdraw from Vietnam “1,000 (of the 16,000) U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963” and “by the end of 1965 … the bulk of U.S. personnel.”

It was, in effect, an extension of Kennedy’s (now) celebrated June 10, 1963, “peace speech” at American University. This is where he memorably criticized the concept of a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war” and called for America to “re-examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union.” Kennedy also made the case for not (along with the U.S.S.R.) “devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty and disease.”

“And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity,” underscored Kennedy. “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit the same small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

Warmongers Resist

The generals, still seething over Kennedy’s reluctance to invade Cuba or attack the Soviets while America still held the ostensible upper nuclear hand, were not impressed. Any more than they were by the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty or wheat sales to the “enemy”: the Soviets. The American University speech, ironically, played better in the U.S.S.R. than the U.S.A.

When it came to Vietnam, Kennedy wasn’t seeing light at the end of the tunnel. He was seeing a gusher of American blood, an inevitable byproduct of open-ended discretion conceded to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, featuring the hard line likes of Chairman Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer and Air Force Gen. Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, and their CIA enablers. Even Kennedy’s ambassador to Saigon, erstwhile political foe Henry Cabot Lodge, was working at cross purposes. Some of his advisers, including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and uber trouble-shooter Averell Harriman, were not consistently on board.

In effect, the president, who was becoming increasingly dependent on back-channel contacts with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, was routinely undermined by those who didn’t want to see Vietnam go the way of “neutral” Laos and didn’t want to risk losing more Cold War dominoes. 

But Kennedy would find an ironic ally in retired Gen. Douglas MacArthur. He told the president that “Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined.” JFK reveled in sharing the advice with the Joint Chiefs.

He also valued the counsel of Democratic Sen. Mike Mansfield, who had replaced Lyndon Johnson as Majority Leader. He was known as the Senate’s authority on Indochina. He had also championed the rise of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1955. Then he did a 180. He delivered a devastating report to Kennedy on how the U.S. was being drawn inexorably into the infamous role vacated by the colonial French.

By late November of ’63, JFK had already seen–and foreseen–enough and was encouraged by the test ban treaty and the farmers’ more-than-favorable response to those Soviet wheat sales. By all accounts, he was preparing to decommit American troops to Vietnam.

“There is no doubt that he had shifted definitely and unequivocally on Vietnam,” later lamented Sen. Mansfield, “but he never had the chance to put the plan into effect.”

The rest is tragic history. President Lyndon Johnson wasn’t about to say no to the generals. Or even to Ambassador Lodge. In fact, on Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963, Kennedy had a meeting scheduled with Lodge. To fire him.

Thanks to would-be shoe bombers and underwear bombers, we now have invasive, virtual- flashing security at airports. So what do we do in anticipation of suppository and tampon bombers?

Two things.

First, let’s look on the positive side. American ingenuity to the rescue. Already there is a Las Vegas-based company, Rocky Flats Gear, that is making tungsten underwear inserts that protect privacy during security screenings. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in America.

Second, let’s not demonize profiling. This is about the protection of lives, not the perpetuation of political correctness. Doing everything we can, including the obvious, to help prevent the horrific from happening. How’s that for a priority?

It seems manifestly evident that those who have sought to bring down planes are not a randomly scattered demographic. No need to act like storm troopers or to embarrass anyone, but let’s not preclude common sense from our arsenal of defense measures.

By the way, those tungsten underwear inserts come in his and hers designs: fig leaf or clasped hands, respectively.

Another anniversary is now behind us. November 22 marked 47 years since that horrific day in Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Kennedy retrospectives necessarily focus on that gruesome, Zapruder-chronicled event and, for contrast, on his iconic, “Ask Not” inaugural speech that is remembered as a paean to selflessness. It nostalgically reminds us of what was lost.

What is often overlooked, however, is Kennedy’s less famous, but arguably more important, speech in the summer of 1963, less than five months before his murder. This was his “peace speech” at American University. It underscored a reality that had been evolving since the Cuban missile crisis had forced Kennedy to ponder the abyss of Armageddon. He was no longer the Cold Warrior-in-Chief, although he was under constant siege by those of that prevalent mentality.

While the Joint Chiefs didn’t much like it, especially the part criticizing any “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” JFK also said this on June 10, 1963:

            “And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For  in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit the same small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

That’s also what was gunned down in Dallas. A perspective that transcended Cold War jingoism and nuclear pre-emption scenarios. One borne of having backed off from the Apocalypse the year before. Kennedy was succeeded by Lyndon Johnson, who was in sync with his generals, and Vietnam, which Kennedy demonstrably wanted out of, would escalate into the bloody quagmire that would cost America foreign-policy credibility and more than 50,000 lives.

Secret Service Solace?

As is typical at this time, there are books that accompany the inevitable documentaries. Exhibit A of the former is the Kennedy Detail by former Secret Service agents Clint Hill and Jerry Blaine. Hill was the agent who climbed aboard the presidential limousine after JFK had been shot and crawled along the trunk till he reached the back seat. He had been riding in the follow-up car.

In various interviews, including one on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Mathews, the agents, still visibly moved nearly a half century later, acknowledge regrettably that nothing else could have been done that fateful day. Even, as Hill recalls, had he actually been stationed on the back of the limousine, the line of fire would have still been unimpeded. By the way, it was Kennedy’s preference that agents not station themselves on his motorcade limo.

But there remains something critically relevant unstated — and unasked. And you don’t have to be a conspiracy buff or hard core revisionist to ask it.

Why wasn’t more done BEFORE Kennedy came to Dallas, by then notoriously regarded as the “Hate Capital of Dixie”?

Keep in mind that at literally the last minute, Kennedy had to call off his planned trip to Chicago on Nov. 2. The reason: The Secret Service had arrested two members of a four-man sniper team suspected of plans to kill the president. The other two had escaped. This was the dodged bullet.

Just days before Dallas, rumors were rife about an assassination attempt on Kennedy in Tampa. Unprecedented security, culled from the region to complement TPD, was implemented to protect the president, whose motorcade would pass by, among other buildings, the Floridan Hotel. The likely M.O. of a potential assassin — or assassins — was known.

But JFK still went to Dallas — to help mediate a Democratic Party feud between Gov. John Connolly and Sen. Ralph Yarborough and to help retain its 25 tenuous electoral votes in 1964. But there were plenty of well-documented, dire warnings about Dallas, including from United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who had been roughed up and spat upon in Dallas a few weeks previous.

It was a pragmatic, political given that the Texas trip had to happen. But given the foreboding Chicago and Tampa experiences, how do you permit a classic, sniper-ready ambush with understaffed security; an unmonitored overpass, knoll and buildings; an unobstructed target and a motorcade route that needed to slow to a virtual stop to make its Dealey Plaza dogleg turn?

No, the die had been tragically cast by the time Agent Hill raced bravely to Kennedy’s limo. The time for something to have been done had fatefully — and negligently — passed.