Jim DiEugenio (summer 2024 four-part series): "JFK and the Neocons

 Jim DiEugenio on “JFK and the Neocons,” summer 2024

JFK and the Rise of the Neocons – Part 1 JFK and the Rise of the Neocons, Pt. 1 (substack.com)

Part 2 JFK and the Neocons Pt. 2 - by James Anthony DiEugenio (substack.com)

Part 3 JFK and the Neocons, Pt. 3 - by James Anthony DiEugenio (substack.com)

Part 4 JFK and the Neocons Pt. 4 - by James Anthony DiEugenio (substack.com)

JFK and the Neocons Pt. 1

I would like to begin this multi part essay by harking back to the book and mini-series The Untold History of the United States. One of the singular achievements of that Peter Kuznick/Oliver Stone project was its delineation of how American foreign policy changed when Franklin Roosevelt passed away. This is a point that, in historical terms, is hard to underestimate. But for whatever reason, the issue is largely ignored in history textbooks and by the MSM.  In my view this is not being true to the facts. To their credit, Kuznick and Stone did not ignore it.

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Roosevelt’s foreign policy team consisted of himself, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and from 1936-38, his ambassador to the USSR, and Belgium, and later Hull’s special assistant, Joseph Davies.  Davies did not think that the USSR was a real threat to the United States. And in 1943, Roosevelt sent Davies to Moscow to try and arrange a private meeting between Josef Stalin, Roosevelt and Hull. (Elizabeth K. Maclean, Diplomatic History, Vol. 4 No.1) The former ambassador was surprised at how much anti-Soviet hostility there was in the State Department at this time.  After all the Soviets were critical allies against the Axis Powers.

In addition to this, Roosevelt wanted to make anti-colonialism part of the Atlantic Charter.  (Kuznick and Stone, p. 98) FDR’s belief was that the allies could not fight a war against fascism without working to free native peoples from a brutal and backward European colonial policy. (Ibid, p. 112) At a press conference he specifically attacked English colonialism in Africa.  He said that for every dollar they put in they take out ten: it was nothing but pure exploitation of the colonized peoples. (ibid) Roosevelt told Hull there would be a transfer of colonial empires to independence  after the war. (ibid)  Part of the policy was that France should also get out of Africa, and not go back into Indochina. About this last, the president said the French had been there for the better part of a century and the people are worse off now than they were then: “The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.” (Kuznick and Stone, p. 112)

Concerning Iran, Roosevelt declared, “The policy of the US toward Iran is to assist in the creation in Iran of a government based upon the consent of the governed….” (Memo from Patrick Hurley, FDR’s emissary in Iran, 12/21/43) As Robert Dreyfuss and others have pointed out, Winston Churchill did not like this since, as a prime mover in charge of the British navy, England relied on cheap Middle Eastern oil to run its fleet. (See also Anand Toprani, Oil and the Great Powers, p. 31) Churchill once replied about the topic that “British imperialism has spread, and is spreading, democracy more widely than any other system of government since the beginning of time.” (Note from Churchill to FDR, 5/21/44) I think, for instance, Gandhi would have disagreed with that. In fact, as Tariq Ali has written, “Imperialism was Churchill’s true religion….a belief in and promotion of racial and civilizational superiority.” (John Newsinger, Catalyst, 9/20/22)

Roosevelt considered his Big Three meetings as the beginning of a post war alliance between America, England, Russia, and later China.  But he warned at his last Cabinet meeting, “…the British were perfectly willing for the United States to have a war with Russia at any time…to follow the British program would be to proceed toward that end.” (Kuznick and Stone, p. 119) As we will see: Roosevelt was correct on this point.

As most of us know, the conservatives in the Democratic Party did not want to keep Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s vice president for the election of 1944.  They did not like Wallace’s overt populism, his hope of working with the USSR, his championing of minorities and labor unions and his advocacy of decolonization in Africa and Asia. (Kuznick and Stone, p. 138) They knew they could not dethrone FDR, but they thought they could get rid of the bottom of the ticket. As Peter Kuznick notes, Wallace’s enemies included “Wall Street bankers and other anti-union business interests, southern segregationists, and defenders of British and French colonialism.” (ibid) The British intel chief in America, William Stephenson, assigned RAF officer and future writer Roald Dahl to spy on Wallace. He sent back reports that Wallace wanted to roll back British, French and Dutch colonial empires throughout the Pacific.  When Churchill read these reports he could barely believe them. Wallace then learned that the British were applying force to get him off the ticket. (Kuznick and Stone, p. 138) Stephenson made it clear to his contacts in the American government that his country would not be happy if Wallace repeated as Vice President. Stephenson was frank on the issue:

I came to regard Wallace as a menace and I took action to ensure that the White House was aware that the British Government would view with concern Wallace’s appearance on the ticket at the 1944 president elections. (ibid)

Stephenson was a powerful force in the British hierarchy and he maintained offices at Rockefeller Center in NYC.

As Wallace was traveling around Central and South America, his enemies were steeling themselves for an effort to neutralize his candidacy. The active plotters were  led by oil magnate and party treasurer Edwin Pauley, the namesake of Pauley Pavilion at UCLA. (Ibid, p.139) Before removing Wallace, they spent time choosing a man who would replace him; this turned out to be Harry Truman. (Ibid, p. 140) To say Truman was not really ready to assume Roosevelts’ legacy is much too mild; and this key issue has been concealed by the historical establishment and the MSM to a significant degree.

Truman was a product of the corrupt Pendergast Machine in Missouri. He had failed in three businesses, including a haberdashery. In 1934 Pendergast chose to run Truman for a senate seat. When he was asked: Why Truman? Pendergast replied that he wanted to demonstrate that a well-oiled machine could send an office boy to the senate. (Ibid, p. 141)

Before he passed on, Roosevelt had only two meetings with Truman in three months. (Robert Dallek, Harry S. Truman, p. 16) FDR did not even brief Truman on the Manhattan Project. And he certainly did not tell him about his vision of cooperation with the USSR after the war.  Within ten days of his death, at Truman’s first meeting with Stalin’s foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, Roosevelt’s policy was overturned.  Truman was so ignorant of what came before him that he accused the Russians of breaking agreements, about which he had no knowledge. For instance, the Churchill/Stalin agreements on Eastern Europe which mapped out spheres of influence there. (Kuznick and Stone, p. 115) When Davies heard about this U-turn meeting,  he met with Truman and tried to inform him of what Roosevelt’s policy had actually been and how the Russians expected reciprocity with spheres of influence. (ibid, p.124)

But with FDR only a memory, and Cordell Hull retired, Davies was now marginalized.  A militant anti-USSR contingent formed around Truman, partly made up of Truman’s friend from the senate Jimmy Byrnes, new Secretary of State Ed Stettinius and, as Roosevelt had predicted, Winston Churchill.  They convinced Truman to continue his hard line toward Russia and to use the atomic bomb.  In fact, in a matter of weeks, Truman thought Stettinius was too mild, moved him to the UN, and replaced him with an unqualified Byrnes. One could argue that this was the real beginning of the Cold War.

As many military men have observed, e.g. Dwight Eisenhower, Georgi Zhukov, Douglas MacArthur, Chester Nimitz-- there really was no need to use atomic weapons against a defeated Japan.  But when General Leslie Groves sent a report to the president about the success of the Trinity test it elated Truman and Byrnes, who were about to meet Stalin at Potsdam. As Churchill noted, this report changed Truman’s demeanor, he now commandeered the proceedings. (Kuznick and Stone, p. 163) Strategically, what it did was to preempt the agreed upon invasion of Japan from the west, which Roosevelt and Stalin had agreed upon at the Yalta Conference. The fact that FDR had agreed to this as a complement to Operation Downfall--the American invasion of Japan from the east--seems to indicate that he was not as eager as Truman to use the atomic alternative.  This likely emanates from his vision of cooperation, not competition, with Stalin after the war. In fact, the need to defend Truman on this horrendous decision has led people like MSM historian David McCullough into serious intellectual problems. (See Philip Nobile’s article, “The David McCullough Nobody Knows” at History News Network.) As Christopher Nolan accurately depicted in his film, when Robert Oppenheimer visited Truman at the White House, he told the scientist that Russia would never develop the atomic bomb.  To say Truman was wrong does not begin to estimate his miscalculation.

As Roosevelt predicted, it was Churchill’s ambition to wreck his post war vision, and to jump start a battle between Moscow and Washington.   Little did he know that Truman was going to help him. In March of 1946, in Fulton Missouri, with Truman sitting right behind him, Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.” The fact that Truman escorted Churchill on a train ride in his home state so Churchill could make that speech now broke the Cold War into a gallop that was pretty much unstoppable.

In Indochina, Truman again reversed Roosevelt’s policy about France reentering into Vietnam. In February of 1950, he and his then Secretary of State Dean Acheson, condoned the French attempt to bestow upon Bao Dai administrative powers in Vietnam. Acheson said this was backed by countries of the world “whose policies support the development of genuine national independence in former colonial areas…”

This was nonsense. It enraged Ho Chi Minh. He understood that it symbolized that America would now overtly support the French attempt to occupy Vietnam with Bao Dai as their mandarin. Which is what happened about three months later. France asked for financial aid and military equipment in this endeavor, which they got. As the Pentagon Papers notes, this was the beginning of the US involvement in the war.  Later that year the US set up a Military Assistance Advisory Group in Saigon to aid the French. (Pentagon Papers, Volume I, pp A-7, A-8)

It should be added that a year after, in 1951, Truman approved Paul Nitze’s NSC-68, a scare paper, which vaulted the Cold War into stratospheric heights, beyond George Kennan’s 1946 containment policy. Most historians consider that document to be a complete exaggeration of the aims of the USSR, mainly because Nitze, unlike Kennan believed in rollback.  It even included the following: “The issues that face us are momentous, involving fulfillment or destruction not only of the Republic but of civilization itself.”

Let me give the final word on this monumental issue to a man who had a front seat at the event. When author Robert Sherwood interviewed Churchill’s advisor Anthony Eden, he criticized both Truman and Churchill in ways that could have harmed his future aspirations. So he asked Sherwood not to print his comments until after his death. Eden said that the horrible turning point of the whole Moscow/ London/Washington relationship stemmed directly from the death of Roosevelt. He told Sherwood about FDR’s remarkable and subtle ability to handle the Russians, and the massive respect they had for Roosevelt. He concluded that if Roosevelt had lived and “retained his health he would never have permitted the present situation to develop…..Roosevelt’s death therefore was a calamity of immeasurable proportions.” (Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances, pp.1- 2)

If you ever wondered why Republican hacks like George Will and Condi Rice like Truman, this is the reason.

In Part 2: Kennedy Excavates Roosevelt

JFK and the Neocons Pt. 2

Kennedy Returns to Roosevelt

                         

When John F. Kennedy was first elected to congress in 1946, it is safe to say that, from the adduced record, he could be labeled a Truman Democrat. As author John Shaw notes in his book Kennedy in the Senate, the young congressman assailed President Truman and the State department for the alleged loss of China to communism. He also seemed to abide by George Kennan’s doctrine of containment and the domino theory.

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But Kennedy’s views on these matters changed markedly in the fifties. Most commentators would say this began with his visit to Vietnam in 1951. There he met with reporter Seymour Topping and diplomat Edmund Gullion.  They both told him that France would not win the war and if America took up that cause, the same thing would happen: we would be on the wrong side of history.  According to Bobby Kennedy, who accompanied him on that journey, this input had a deep impact on his brother’s thinking. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 12)

This was reflected in some speeches and radio talks Kennedy did. For instance he said in the senate in 1953 that the Vietnam War could not be won unless the people “are assured beyond a doubt that complete independence will be theirs at…the war’s end.” (Speech of 7/1/53). Kennedy then offered an amendment to a military aid bill making “…continuing US military support for the French war effort contingent on French agreement to grant Indochinese independence.” The Eisenhower administration defeated the motion.

In 1954, Kennedy heard about Vice-President Richard Nixon’s attempt to herd public opinion into an intervention to save France at Dien Bien Phu. This included the possible use of atomic weapons. Kennedy harshly criticized this as wreckless and futile: “no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” (Speech of 4/6/54) In reaction, 24 hours later, President Eisenhower invoked the domino theory as a specter hanging over Indochina if America would depart. Therefore, John Foster Dulles now formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to protect all of Southeast Asia.

Kennedy would not let up and he decided to make this foreign policy dispute a campaign issue in 1956. At a speech in Los Angeles, Kennedy made his strongest attack yet on the orthodoxies governing both parties:

…the Afro-Asian revolution of nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the determination of people to control their national destinies…In my opinion, the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution….has reaped a bitter harvest today—and it is by rights and necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-communism. (9/21/56)

After this, Adlai Stevenson’s office asked that the senator not make any more foreign policy statements for the candidate’s campaign. (Mahoney, p. 18) Kennedy pressed onward with his critique of John Foster Dulles and his dual penchants of ringing the world with alliances and attacking the Soviets with a string of bromides e.g. ‘godless Communism” “the Soviet master plan”.  He called these slogans “false in context or irrelevant to the new phase of competitive co-existence in which we live.” (ibid, p. 19)

The showdown in the creeping confrontation came on July 2, 1957 with Kennedy’s epochal Algeria speech. Kennedy seemed to be looking for a place where he could attack Foster Dulles Eisenhower and Nixon on the issue of colonialism vs nationalism in the Third World, while also bringing up the shadow of America’s support for the French defeat in Vietnam.  He reportedly spent about a year researching and writing this senatorial polemic. His wife translated certain articles from the Spanish and French. I will not go into detail about the speech, since I have written about it on this site already. (See “Kennedy’s Great Algeria Speech”). But I will say that if controversy and attention were the senator’s aim, it paid off in spades. For example, the New York Times called the speech, “the most comprehensive and outspoken arraignment of Western policy toward Algeria yet presented by an American in public office.” (7/3/57)

I would go further than that.  It was probably the boldest and most important speech given by a senator in the decade. The simple message was that the USA should not back European colonialism anymore; that phase should be concluded. France had 400,000 men in Algeria but, as in Indochina, they could still not win a guerilla war. Kennedy said America should have two goals on the issue: to save the French nation, which was splitting apart over the war, and to free Africa.  In other words, in the midst of the Cold War, Kennedy was courageously and imaginatively harkening back to Franklin Roosevelt. (The entire address is in the book The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allen Nevins, pp. 66-80)

The speech created a firestorm. It was so candid and hard hitting that not only did the White House reply with howls of protest, but even Democrats—like Adlai Stevenson and Dean Acheson—were critical of Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy was so angry with Acheson that she bawled him out while waiting for a train at New York’s Penn Central Station. (Mahoney, pp. 20, 21) 

Kennedy was taken aback by the negative reaction. His office hired a clipping service, and out of the 138 newspaper editorials and columns, the ratio was 2-1 against. The senator was so surprised by this wave of negativity that he called his father and asked him if he had made a major miscalculation.  Joseph P. Kennedy told his son that he didn’t realize how lucky he was. Because the Algerian conflict would only worsen, and in several months everyone would look back on him like he was some kind of seer. (ibid, p. 21)

Which is what happened.  Five months later, Kennedy was on the cover of Time magazine. The inside story was titled “Man out Front”.  This result had also been predicted by British writer Alistair Cooke. Cooke noted that by such a full bore attack on the Republican obeisance to European colonialism in such a brutal, ugly civil war, Kennedy’s somewhat shadowy figure was now spotlighted all over Europe. But more importantly, he had now made himself the Democrat who the Republicans had to ‘do something about”. As Cooke concluded concerning the upcoming presidential race of 1960, “It is a form of running martyrdom that Senators Humphrey and Johnson may come to envy.” (Toledo Blade, July 14, 1957)

Three months later, Kennedy repeated the themes of his Algeria speech in an article for Foreign Affairs magazine. (October, 1957, “A Democrat Looks at Foreign Policy”) In 1958, Kennedy took out a full page ad in the New York Times for the book The Ugly American and he sent a copy to every senator. That book billed itself “as the inside story of how we’re losing the Cold War.” (JFK Revisited, by James DiEugenio, p. 377). The authors noted that if all the USA had to offer in The Third World was a demonic anti-communism then we might as well retreat to our own shores and build Fortress America. (Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World, p. 23)

To demonstrate that this was not rhetoric, during the 1960 primary campaign, Kennedy was rather simple and straightforward about why he was running.  In recruiting Harris Wofford as his civil rights advisor, he said that the most likely Democratic alternatives were either Lyndon Johnson or Stuart Symington. But if either of them was the nominee, we might as well elect Dulles or Acheson.  Because it would be the same tired cold-war foreign policy all over again. (Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 37). As we shall see, Kennedy was utterly correct about Johnson.  And on the eve of the Democratic convention, Harry Truman went on TV to denounce Kennedy and endorse someone like Johnson or Symington, among others. (ibid, p. 49)

Let us now turn to some of the things that Kennedy did once in office that were in keeping with Roosevelt. As mentioned previously Roosevelt and his emissary Patrick Hurley wanted Iran to be a free and independent country after World War II. Like Roosevelt, Hurley had little sympathy with British imperialism. He wrote in a report to FDR that the British must be made to accept “the principles of liberty and democracy and discard the principles of oppressive imperialism.”  He then advised that America must aid Iran in building infrastructure and communications. (“Hurley’s Dream” by Abbas Milani, at Hoover Digest)

Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson pronounced Roosevelt’s ideas about Iran as “hysterical messianic global baloney.” (ibid) After he resigned, Iran Ambassador Henry Grady criticized Acheson for not following through on Hurley’s large aid package and also letting England more or less run its own policy there. (Grady, “What Went Wrong in Iran” Saturday Evening Post, 1/5/52) We know what the results of that were: the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh and the reinstatement of the Shah.

The Kennedy State Department, led by Iran specialist John Bowling, analyzed the political forces there at the time and concluded that it would be likely favorable to support a nationalist Mossadegh restoration.  Kennedy was so opposed to the Shah that he even considered a forced abdication and rule in the interim by a regency under his son. But the ultimate decision was that there was simply not enough popular support left to return Mossadegh. (Devil’s Game by Robert Dreyfuss, pp. 224-25) Therefore, Kennedy insisted instead that the Shah reform his government to make it less despotic and more democratic. Thus the White Revolution was formed.

In Indochina, it was too late to make Vietnam into an independent country. John Foster Dulles had eliminated that option by splitting Vietnam in half and having Edward Lansdale install Ngo Dinh Diem as dictator in the south. But due to some archival releases in the nineties, there is little serious doubt today that Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam at the time of his assassination.  The May 1963 declassified record of Robert McNamara’s Sec/Def conference in Hawaii, where he was requesting withdrawal schedules from each agency—State, CIA, Pentagon—proved this.  (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 126) It was so convincing  that even the New York Times had to admit Kennedy was planning to get out of Indochina at the time of his murder. (12/23/97)  

If there was a sliver of doubt left, John Newman in JFK Revisited closed it down. Newman listened to McNamara’s exit debriefs. There, McNamara said he and Kennedy had decided that once their advisory mission was over, America was getting out of Vietnam. And it did not matter who was winning or losing at the time; America could not fight the war for Saigon.  (James DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, p. 187)

A third example of a restoration of a Rooseveltian policy is Kennedy’s attempt to forge a détente with Moscow after the Cuban Missile Crisis. No author has illustrated this in as much detail as James Douglass. Kennedy was aided in this effort by Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins and Pope John XXIII. In fact, before Cousins visited Nikita Khrushchev in late 1962 Kennedy told him, “…I don’t think there’s any man in American politics who’s more eager than I am to put Cold War animosities behind us and get down to the hard business of building friendly relations.”  When the Russian leader heard this, he replied, “If that’s the case, he won’t find me running second in racing toward that goal.”(Douglass, p. 340-42; this issue is also dealt with in the film JFK: A President Betrayed) It was this opening which lead to what Kennedy thought was a crowning achievement of his presidency: the Partial Nuclear Test Ban treaty of 1963.

It tells us much about what happened afterwards that first, Khrushchev was blinking back tears when he paid his respects to Kennedy’s memory at the American embassy in Moscow. (DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, p. 81) Secondly, that Bobby Kennedy wrote a letter to Khrushchev after his brother’s death telling him that their attempt at détente would now be put on hold due to Lyndon Johnson’s closeness to big business. But it would resume when he resigned as Attorney General and later ran for president. (Douglass, pp. 380-81)

As we shall see, this was only the beginning of several momentous and permanent changes.

 

 

 

 

JFK and the Neocons, Pt. 3

When President Kennedy was killed, Lyndon Johnson changed his policies rather quickly. The MSM determinedly disguised the sea change that was really taking place. David Brinkley omnisciently stated:

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It was our responsibility to calm the public—to explain to them the president had been shot, yes; perfectly horrible, yes: but the country lives.  And there’s not going to be any crisis. And I think in doing that, we performed a real service in which we can take some pride….I was very proud of all of us. (Joseph McBride, Political Truth, p. 22)

This compact was made explicit by James Reston in the NY Times. Within 48 hours of Kennedy’s death, Reston wrote, “Policy under the new president…will probably remain very much as it was under Kennedy… there is no urgent need for the new president to take new policy initiatives in the field of foreign affairs.” (ibid, p. 90)

The MSM was in denial about 1.) Johnson being a Truman Democrat in foreign policy, and 2.) That he would not alter any of Kennedy’s Rooseveltian doctrines. During his time as Vice President, Johnson had disagreed with Kennedy on his actions during the Missile Crisis and in Vietnam. Therefore when he came into office he very quickly changed policies, for example in Indochina, the Middle East, and in Congo. (See Oliver Stone’s  film JFK: Destiny Betrayed.) These were all fairly clear and obvious, but people like Reston and Brinkley were somehow oblivious to them.  Even after Senator William Fulbright’s Vietnam hearings began in 1966, and with the exposure of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, there was no admittance that Johnson had knowingly and deliberately altered Kennedy’s Indochina policy.  Even though there was a section in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers that dealt with Kennedy’s withdrawal program (See Volume 2, Section 3). And Peter Scott wrote a pioneering essay about this issue in the Beacon Press version of that compendium.  But because of proclamations by Brinkley and Reston, the MSM had blinkers on their eyes pertaining to this epochal subject.  Even when, in March of 1965, four months after the Warren Commission volumes were issued, Johnson sent combat troops to Vietnam, something that Kennedy refused to do at least seven times in three years. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, pp. 54-65)

But there was a staffer for Senator Fulbright who understood what Johnson had done. Fulbright was not just disturbed by what LBJ had done in Indochina, but also about his 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic. This had also been a reversal of Kennedy’s policy, since JFK had supported the restoration of the democratically elected Juan Bosch. (Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, pp. 78-79) Fulbright’s Chief of Staff Carl Marcy wrote that what these dishonest interventions had done was:

…turn the liberal supporters of President Kennedy into opponents of the policies of President Johnson, and the rightwing opponents of Eisenhower and Kennedy into avid supporters of the present administration….We have tried to force upon the rest of the world a righteous American point of view which we maintain is the consensus that others must accept. Most of the tragedies of the world have come from such righteousness. (Joseph Goulden, Truth is the First Casualty, p. 166)

What Marcy is describing is the splitting asunder of the Democratic Party and the burying of Kennedy’s legacy by Johnson under a mountain of Cold War propaganda. This split led to the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and also to the rise in the Democratic Party of Senator Henry Jackson of Washington. Jackson was a dyed in the wool Truman Democrat who ran for president in 1972 and 1976. Electorally, he was not successful. But, as we shall see, ideologically he triumphed. And, as much as Johnson—perhaps even more--he ended up transforming the Democratic Party and erasing Kennedy’s policies. But we must first parallel his ascent with that of a Republican congressman of the same era.

Donald Rumsfeld began his rise to prominence under President Richard Nixon. He went from being an Illinois congressman to a presidential counselor with Cabinet level status. Nixon then appointed him ambassador to NATO. After Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford made him his Chief of Staff. Rumsfeld enlisted a former employee of his, Dick Cheney, to succeed him in that position when Ford nominated Rumsfeld to be Secretary of Defense. And it was these two men who provided the first practical outburst of the neocon foreign policy. This was the sidelining of Henry Kissinger from his two positions, essentially running foreign policy, to just one.

It was called the Halloween Massacre. It was motivated by Rumseld in order to ward off attacks from the extreme right by Governor Ronald Reagan. First, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller announced he would not run with Ford in 1976. Then, Bill Colby was replaced as CIA Director by George H. W . Bush. Third, Rumsfeld replaced James Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense. Finally, Kissinger gave up his National Security Advisor position to Brent Scowcroft, keeping his Secretary of State position. Each of these was a move to the right. Yet in his testimony before the Senate for his confirmation as Defense Secretary, Rumsfeld denied having anything to do with Schlesinger’s removal. (See Senate Hearings, p. 44)  Rumsfeld was also against Kissinger’s SALT talks for nuclear arms control, therefore these were not signed until the Jimmy Carter administration. (Slate, 12/02/2002, article by Timothy Noah)

Rumsfeld once said that, at times, “strategic truths” needed to be defended by a “bodyguard of lies.” (News Briefing as Defense Secretary, 9/25/2001) As we will see, some saw this Machiavellian declaration as a metaphor for the entire neocon movement.  There is another quote that should accompany that one in order to understand Rumsfeld. Its about the Vietnam War. Film-maker Errol Morris asked him about the lessons learned from that conflict. This was his full answer: “Some things work out, some things don’t. That didn’t.  If that’s a lesson, yes, it’s a lesson.” (Slate, article by Fred Kaplan, 7/01/2021) As we shall see, this simple declaration fits in with the neoconservative world view of perpetual war.

Rumsfeld and Cheney had shifted the political spectrum by kneecapping Kissinger and discrediting détente. Because, at the same time he was demoting Kissinger, Rumsfeld was maneuvering behind the scenes to allow the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) to enter CIA headquarters in order to exaggerate and aggrandize the Soviet threat. In fact he was a founding member of that wild propaganda group designed to heighten fears of Soviet military supremacy. (The American Prospect, article by Robert Reich, 12/19/2001). Before he left office under Ford, in a jab at Kissinger, he mildly praised their work.(Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis, p. 203)

Make no mistake as to what was happening. Rumsfeld and Cheney were prepping for the next GOP administration. Which was going to be further right than either Nixon or Ford. The Halloween Massacre, the clipping of Kissinger, the delay for SALT 2 and the takeover of the Russian security threat by the CPD, these all presaged what many were sensing: a return of the GOP to the shape, symbolism and figure of Barry Goldwater. There are two things to note about the roster of players for the CPD. There were some Democrats or former Democrats involved like John B. Connally. Evelyn Dubrow, Henry Fowler, Nathan Glazer, Max Kampelman,  Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Lane Kirkland, Foy D Kohler, Ernest Lefever, Maxwell Taylor and Dean Rusk. Second, Kohler, Taylor and Rusk worked for Kennedy in high positions.

But the real nitroglycerine for the Reagan Revolution in foreign policy was supplied by Jackson. As revealed in Robert Kauffman’s biography, although Jackson and Kennedy were collegial in the senate, when JFK became president, Jackson became distant from some of Kennedy’s policy positions e.g. on Vietnam and arms control. (See Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics, Chapter 7) He did not openly oppose Kennedy on the latter, because he knew the Partial Test Ban Treaty was going to pass. He did the same thing with the ersatz TFX scandal, he maneuvered that behind the scenes in order to protect his funding from Seattle’s Boeing Corporation. (ibid, Chapter 8) And when the Democratic Party broke asunder after 1968, Jackson made his move to be the new Harry Truman. Because, like Rumsfeld, Jackson was strongly opposed to the Nixon/Kissinger pursuit of détente with Russia. (The Nation, 2/26/24, article by Jeet Heer)

It didn’t work for two reasons. First, Jackson was not a dynamic speaker or charismatic campaigner. (Kauffman, p. 6) Second, his foreign policy positions were simply too conservative to raise any money from the big Democratic donors. For instance, Jackson had nothing but antipathy for Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.  McNamara devised the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) in order to prevent atomic war.  That is, if both sides had enough atomic weapons to destroy each other, this would prevent each country from trying for a first strike, since a second strike would be possible. Jackson despised this policy since he opposed nearly all nuclear arms treaties.  But secondly, as Kauffman notes, he felt that it was possible for Russia to win an atomic war against the USA.

It is at this point, with that last statement, that we must address the philosophical underpinnings of what would end up being the binding ties between Rumsfeld’s personal beliefs and those of Jackson’s staffers since, as we shall see, they would politically unite. That belief system entails the world view of academic Leo Strauss, the intellectual godfather of neoconservatism. 

As Straussian scholar Shadia Drury observes, for all his talk about Plato, Strauss really favored Machiavelli: “that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice.” (Open Democracy, 10/15/2003, article by Danny Postel) This, of course, overlaps with Rumsfeld’s belief in its “need for secrecy and the necessity of lies.” (ibid). Strauss believed in this since the general public would not go along with a rule by elites, thus the natural complement to it was to protect those in power from later reprisals upon exposure.

As Drury elucidates, “The effect of Strauss’s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few.”  Strauss thought that liberal economics…

“…would turn life into entertainment and destroy politics.” Therefore “only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and creature comforts.. Life can be politicized once more and man’s humanity can be restored.” (ibid)

 As Drury then observes: the concomitant for this system is a  “strong nationalistic spirt” in allegiance to the state: its culture and its values are the world’s best, and others are inferior--in other words American Exceptionalism. Strauss’s nascent neocon system was then taken up by Irving Kristol in his books Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, and also in Reflections of a Neoconservative. To Kristol and his fellow Straussian, Harry Jaffa, America was the Zion that will light up the world. The capper is this: “if America fails to achieve her national destiny, and is mired in perpetual war, then all is well. Man’s humanity, defined in terms of struggle to the death, is rescued from extinction.” (Op. Cit., Postel) This is why a fellow neocon, Norman Podhoretz, wrote a book Why We Were in Vietnam, justifying that disastrous war which Kennedy was withdrawing from at the time of his death.

As Jeff Sachs interpreted it in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the neocons think they can do whatever they want to do.  (See the Carlson show from May 28, 2024 on YouTube).

The above is about as anti-Kennedy as one can get. Far from perpetual war, Kennedy refused to go to war in Cuba—even when he had two opportunities to do so—he also refused war entry into Laos, and Vietnam.  He did not believe in American Exceptionalism, as he foresaw a multi-polar world, including the rise of former Third World states. He thought America could cooperate with those rising states.  In fact, far from Perpetual War, in his American University speech in June of 1963, he was propagating for Perpetual Peace.  Unlike Jackson he was pro arms control.  And unlike the Neocons Kennedy did not favor wars of choice, e.g. Iraq.

Although Jackson did not succeed in the presidential primaries in either 1972 or 1976, his neocon legacy was assured anyway.  Why? Because as Kauffman notes in his book, so many of his employees went on to serve under Ronald Reagan.  People like Richard Perle who detonated the Gorbachev/Reagan Iceland arms agreement; Eliot Abrams, author of Reagan’s brutal Central American policy: Paul Wolfowitz, later architect of the disastrous invasion of Iraq; Jeanne Kirkpatrick who found a way for America to back rightwing dictators and not feel bad about it; and finally Frank Gaffney, a man who was so against arms control that Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci packed up his things and threw him out of the Pentagon. (Washington Post, 11/23/87)

Thus was the neocon legacy of Henry Jackson.  I doubt if any of it would have happened if the Kennedys had lived.

JFK and the Neocons Pt. 4

 As many authors have noted, once President John Kennedy was killed, Lyndon Johnson altered several of his policies.  Most spectacularly in Vietnam, but also in the Dominican Republic, Congo, the Middle East, Indonesia, and further, JFK’s attempts at détente with Cuba and Russia. Concerning the latter, Bobby Kennedy sent emissary William Walton to Moscow to convey the message that his brother’s pursuit of détente with Khrushchev would now be placed on hold.  Since LBJ was too close to big business for it to continue.  (David Talbot, Brothers, p. 32)

Bottom of Form

In some ways Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger continued what Johnson did. For example, those two men dropped more bomb tonnage over Indochina than LBJ. And they expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia. The latter produced catastrophic results since it eventually brought to power the Khmer Rouge, and the slaughter of as many as 2 million Cambodians. And as with Johnson in the Middle East, these two men also tilted toward Israel and away from Egypt, an issue we will deal with later.

But important to this series, and as mentioned previously, the first manifestation of the Neocon revolution was with the Rumsfeld/Cheney Halloween Massacre. Which included the clipping of Henry Kissinger’s wings and his replacement as National Security advisor by Brent Scowcroft.  This was reportedly done to fend off attacks from the right due to the expected candidacy of Governor Ronald Reagan for president. Afterwards, Rumsfeld was angered because Kissinger was still trying to complete an arms proposal agreement with Moscow in December of 1975. (Slate, 12/02/2002, article by Timothy Noah)

But it was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that the neocon revolution erupted. And this was due to the transfer of members of Senator Henry Jackson’s staff into the Reagan administration.  There were at least five instances of this occurring: with Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Frank Gaffney.  Reagan’s own conservative beliefs, plus the schooling of those five from Jackson, caused American foreign policy to take a rightward turn that would effectively bury whatever was left of Kennedy’s foreign policy. Perle and Gaffney were opposed to arms control. Perle later wrote a thinly disguised novel explaining why he was against the landmark Reykjavik arms elimination proposal of 1986. (Richard Perle Hard Line, 1992). Both Perle and Wolfowitz studied under one of Jackson’s gurus on atomic weapons, Albert Wohlstetter. (James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 28-31) Wohlstetter argued that the Russians were actually ahead in building a nuclear arsenal. (Foreign Policy, summer and autumn 1974) The articles also carried a subtext criticizing Nixon and Kissinger’s attempts at  détente, implying it favored Moscow.  These essays clearly helped launch the Committee on the Present Danger and their intent to show that somehow the Russians were militarily superior to the USA.

With all this as ballast, when Reagan took office he started a colossal defense buildup. He revived the B-1  bomber, started the B-2 bomber—which was three times the cost of the B-1 or 929 million per plane.  This was when pilots still favored the F-111 Aardvark, a fighter bomber. (William Vassallo at history.net) Reagan also began to build the MX missile; these were three incredibly expensive projects. He also installed Pershing missiles in western Europe. In the spring of 1983, Reagan introduced a project that was wildly extravagant--even for him--in both concept and expense. He called it the Strategic Defense Initiative; Ted Kennedy called it Star Wars. This was a space based “shield” that would somehow protect America from an incoming first strike from Russia.

Reagan paralleled this massive expenditure with a rhetoric that would make it seem credible.  In 1982, before the British Parliament, he said that Marxism-Leninism would soon be on the ash heap of history. (Lou Cannon: President Reagan, pp. 271-72) The following year, in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, he called the USSR the evil empire. His administration did not accept George Kennan’s concept of containment. He felt America should be on the attack, for example, aid to the mujahideen forces through Pakistan.  That policy began under Jimmy Carter but it was greatly expanded under Reagan and CIA Director Bill Casey. In the long run it ended up backfiring with the rise of the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.

In Central America, as opposed to Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, Abrams oversaw wars in both El Salvador and Nicaragua. Those we were backing were largely rightwing thugs who helped popularize the term death squads.  In the former, that war included the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the infamous El Mozote massacre—which Abrams attempted to downplay and camouflage before congress. (Raymond Bonner, The Atlantic, 2/16/19) In the latter, it culminated in the Iran/Contra affair which, as exposed by reporters Robert Parry and Gary Webb, included the American backed Contra forces marketing cocaine through drug trafficker Ricky Ross in Los Angeles. And also selling arms to Iran to release American hostages.

But as poor as this record was—for example, the MX and B-1 discontinued production, and tens of thousands of civilians perished in Central America—the neocons were still convinced of their righteousness. Thus in 1997 began the Project for the New American Century. Its statement goal was to promote a Reagan type policy of military power and moral clarity in foreign policy. Here is what made the PNAC bracing.  Its founders were William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Kagan writes for the Washington Post and advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. His wife is Victoria Nuland who first served under President Clinton and then advised President Obama on Ukraine. As Robert Parry noted, perhaps no single person was more responsible for the war in Ukraine than Nuland. (See Consortium News, 2/26/22, “The Mess that Nuland Made”) This included the shunting aside of two peace agreements offered by Moscow. Reportedly, a third was sabotaged by British former PM Boris Johnson. (Responsible Statecraft, story by Connor Echols, 8/2/22).

It is simply impossible to ignore the fact that many of the PNAC members encouraged regime change in Iraq. They did this with President Clinton in 1998, well before the 9/11 attacks. Just before the 2000 election, they said the change would come about slowly unless there was “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.” Which occurred on September 11^th while there were  members like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and seven others in the administration. Within 24 hours Rumsfeld wanted to make Iraq a target. (ABC News, March 7, 2003, “Were 1998 Memos a Blueprint for War?”)

No one should ignore this fact: Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton voted for the war resolution against Iraq. And Biden was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee at that time in 2002. As did Clinton, he bought the excuse of Weapons of Mass Destruction. (Vox, 10/15/19, article by Tara Golshan and Alex Ward.) It should be noted that Bernie Sanders opposed that resolution. In fact, advised by Kagan, it is hard to find a place where Hillary Clinton was not a hawk, and this extended into her stay as Secretary of State. Consider the following:  Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. (Foreign Policy, article by Micah Zenko, 7/27/16)

Let us never forget what happened in Libya. This was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s brainchild, augmented by UN Ambassador Susan Rice and NSC member Samantha Power. (Middle East Monitor, 10/15/20) Can anyone imagine John Kennedy using NATO to bomb an African country? Operation Unified Protector contained over 9,000 strike sorties.(Final Mission Stats, published by NATO, 11/2/11) In two excellent essays, University of Texas professor Alan Kuperman strongly criticized this as a gross overreaction to Muammar Gaddafi, one that ignored diplomacy as an option.(Foreign Policy, March April, 2015) Clinton made her aim clear by saying, “We came, we saw, he died.” (Consortium News, 2/16/16)

We all know what happened.  Libya descended into a failed state in which sales of arms and slaves were oft seen public spectacles. As Gaddafi had warned Tony Blair, Al Quaeda was part of this civil strife. (The Guardian 1/7/2016) The end result was the murder of American Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi on September 12, 2012.

It was also Hillary Clinton who pushed Madeleine Albright--then ambassador to the UN--on her husband as Secretary of State. Albright worked under National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski during the Carter administration.  After retirement she served on the board of the CFR and the New York Stock Exchange.

In 1998 Albright, after keeping the murderous sanctions on Iraq, argued for military action there. (CNN Report, February 18, 1998) The next day on The Today Show, she said “If we have to use force, it is because we are America, we are the indispensable nation.  We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future….” This is the kind of arrogance that got America into both the Vietnam and Iraq debacles.

But the Cold War strophe that really marked Albright as a neocon, and which she managed to convince Bill Clinton about, was the expansion of NATO eastward after the collapse of the USSR. (Jeff Sachs interview with Tucker Carlson 5/8/24) This was in 1990 after Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed to unify Germany after a promise of no expansion eastward of NATO. George Kennan, perhaps the most illustrious Russian diplomat/scholar, called this a mistake. So did Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry. It proceeded anyway, and Hungary, Poland and Albright’s own Czech Republic were in the first round of NATO expansion. Through later rounds of expansion, NATO now numbers thirty countries. The important thing to note is this: Russia is not a communist country anymore, and there is no Warsaw Pact.

One of the stupidest things Albright ever said occurred on Sixty Minutes with Lesley Stahl. She stated  that the sanctions on Iraq, which reportedly took the lives of 500,000 youths, were worth it. That was so dumb she had to take it back.  But here is another one: “Peace is not a gift, it must be earned and re-earned.  And if it is to last, it must be constantly  reinforced.”  There are approximately 400,000 casualties in Ukraine plus a 100 billion dollars down the sewer over this Cold War mythology, which Joe Biden endorsed all the way.

Let me close with something that Barack Obama initially denied he had done and depicted himself as resisting Hillary Clinton about. (CNN Report of 9/29/14 by Dan Merica) Not satisfied with what happened in Libya, Clinton—as bad a Secretary of State as Albright—wanted to attack the Assad regime in Syria. What is so odd about this is that Assad was and is a secularist, not a Moslem fundamentalist; not nearly as extreme as, for example, the Saudi regime. But yet on Sixty Minutes, Obama said that arming the Syrian rebels in their fight against President Bashar al Assad ”would have been counterproductive.”

Here is the problem with that.  From the best information we have, Timber Sycamore, the huge CIA program to overthrow Assad, had already been proposed at the time and then approved in 2013. Partly because Israel wanted it to begin. Needless to say, this ended as another complete failure, in two senses.  First, many of the arms supplied by the CIA ended up in the hands of the Nusra Front which was Moslem Fundamentalist all the way. Secondly, Moscow did not want that kind of regime near its border. So it began a large and relentless air campaign against the rebels, supporting Assad.  The CIA operation was suspended in 2017. (New York Times, 8/2/17, article by Mark Mazzetti)

This is a key difference between the neocons and JFK.  Kennedy did all he could to forge a relationship with a powerful secularist leader in the Middle East, Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Because JFK thought that he could westernize and modernize the Middle East through Nasser.  As early as his famous 1957 Algeria speech he had warned about the dangers of Moslem fundamentalism. Which finally did explode in Iran in 1979.  Like Nasser, Assad does not wear a hijab, he wears a suit. Like Nasser, Hafez al Assad—Bashar’s father-- went to war against the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Do I even have to mention Israel? Kennedy was the last president who threatened to cut off all funding to Israel. He wanted to enforce the United Nations’ Joseph Johnson Resolution, which demanded that the refugees of the Nakba be repatriated. Does any American politician even think of that today? Consider also that Nasser and Kennedy exchanged many letters--it may be as many as ninety if one believes the Egyptian sources—and Nasser could not sleep when he heard Kennedy was dead.  He then broke relations with the Johnson administration on the eve of the 1967 war. In this writer’s opinion, if Kennedy had lived, the 1967 war would not have happened.

As the reader can see, the Democrats today have become an extension of the Neocon/Henry Jackson/Harry Truman faction of the party.  In almost all respects: In its attitude toward Russia, arms control, the use of NATO, the almost unspeakable horror in the Middle East, the senseless overthrows of Saddam Hussein and endless war in Ukraine. The Kennedy/ Roosevelt faction has become extinct,  something like a museum piece that only certain commentators, like Jeff Sachs, manage to keep alive.

But the worst thing about all this is the warning that Kennedy gave us; for example in his 1957 Algeria speech.  America, he said, should not be on the wrong side of history.  But as previously noted, as Bill Fulbright’s staffer Carl Marcy wrote, that is what has been happening, since Johnson and down until today. That is what these neocon policies have lead us to. For all the talk about American Exceptionalism, the rise of BRICS undermines that mythology. They have become a formidable geopolitical bloc, one which spans much of the globe and 45% of the world’s population. When China’s Belt and Road Initiative is complete, they will be even more formidable.

The neocons were wrong.  This is not a unipolar world. John Kennedy warned us about that.