Well, so much for that “agonizing reappraisal” (allowing truth) by the media/Hollywood complex on the Kennedys. Naturally we were asking too much. Apparently the movie Chappaquiddick, which forthrightly—and thus astoundingly! -- showcases a Kennedy’s perfidy, was a flash in the pan.
Recently here at Townhall your humble servant speculated the movie might open a tiny crack for historic truth about Kennedy treachery to seep through. So I quickly slipped in the truth on the Kennedy treachery at the Bay of Pigs.
Alas! Now we’re back in traditional media/Hollywood Kennedy hagiography mode. I refer to this week’s Netflix’s release of “Bobby Kennedy for President.” This documentary by leftist director and Kennedy adoring fan Dawn Porter features interviews with leftists and adoring Kennedy fans Rep. John Lewis, Dolores Huerta and Harry Belafonte—speaking of whom:
“If you believe in justice! If you believe in democracy! If you believe in people's rights! if you believe in the harmony of all humankind—then you have no choice but to back Fidel Castro as long as it takes!”(An exultant Harry Belafonte in Havana while hob-knobbing with the mass-murdering, war-mongering racist whose apartheid regime jailed and tortured the longest suffering black political prisoners in modern history.)
"Without saying (Kennedy) was the perfect person, there's something comforting and inspiring to me about his willingness to try, his willingness to learn, his willingness to not give up…Right now we all need a little dose of not giving up."Said Dawn Porter in an interview. Gosh? Wonder what she might be referring to?
John F. Kennedy’s “facing down the Russians” during the Cuban Missile Crisis is the stuff of media/Hollywood legend. Bobby Kennedy’s role in that “victory” was consecrated in the movie Thirteen Days, which is based on Bobby’s Missile Crisis “memoirs.”
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Sadly, the constant media/academia repetition of the blatant poppycock in Bobby Kennedy’s Thirteen Days affected even “conservatives.”
"Follow Kennedy's Lead to Deter North Korea,"wrote Charles Krauthammer at the time of the first “Korean Missile Crisis” in 2006 while hailing JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Now that's deterrence," Krauthammer claimed, calling for "Kennedy-esque clarity" from the wimpy President Bush of the time.
National Review’s Andrew McCarthy agreed with Krauthammer: "It would be better for President Bush to emulate the Kennedy strategy," wrote McCarthy, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The U.S. message to Kim, he stresses should be no-nonsense and "Kennedy-Clear."
"Kennedy reacted brilliantly and well and solved the problem," gushed Dick Morris to a nodding and receptive Sean Hannity, on Hannity & Colmes that week in 2006.
How quickly we forget! Because the certainty that Khrushchev swept the floor with Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis was a mainstream conservative conclusion throughout much of the Cold War, especially at McCarthy’s National Review.
Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, for instance, represented opposite poles of the Republican establishment of their time.
"We locked Castro's communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal," growled Barry Goldwater about the JFK’s Missile Crisis “solution.”
"Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” complained Richard Nixon. "Then gave the Soviets squatters’ rights in our backyard."
Generals Curtis Le May and Maxwell Taylor represented opposite poles of the military establishment.
"The biggest defeat in our nation's history!" bellowed Air Force Chief Curtis Lemay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal.
"We missed the big boat," complained Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning of same.
"We've been had!" yelled then Navy Chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK "solved" the missile crisis. Adm. Anderson was the man in charge of the very "blockade" against Cuba.
"It's a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy," wrote Alexander Haig. "The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy's men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the America's."
William Buckley's National Review devoted several issues to exposing and denouncing Kennedy's appeasement. The magazine's popular "The Third World War" column by James Burnham roundly condemned Kennedy's Missile Crisis solution as "America's Defeat."
But not for the Soviets. "We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his diaries, “security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey and Italy. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba."
In fact, Khrushchev prepared to yank the missiles before any “bullying” by Kennedy. “What!” Khrushchev gasped on Oct. 28th, 1962, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? “But that is insane!... Remove them(our missiles) as soon as possible!Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” commanded the Soviet premier.
So much for the gallant Knights of Camelot forcing the Russians’ retreat. In fact, the Castro brothers and Che Guevara’s genocidal lust is what prompted the Butcher of Budapest to yank the missiles from their reach.
Considering the U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviets at the time of the (so-called) Missile Crisis (five thousand nuclear warheads for us, three hundred for them) it's hard to imagine a President Nixon — much less Reagan — quaking in front of Khrushchev's transparent ruse as did Kennedy.
The genuine threat came --not from Moscow—but from the Castros and Che. “If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara to Sam Russell of the London Daily Worker, Nov. 1962.)
Castro's regime's was granted new status. Call it “MAP,” or “Mutually-Assured-Protection.” Cuban freedom-fighters working from south Florida were suddenly rounded up for "violating U.S. neutrality laws." Some of these bewildered men were jailed, others "quarantined," prevented from leaving Dade County. The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remained unmolested.
JFK's Missile Crisis “solution” also pledged that he immediately pull the rug out from Cuba’s in-house freedom-fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different "bands of bandits" as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba's countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.
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