{"id":6791,"date":"2013-11-25T10:35:28","date_gmt":"2013-11-25T18:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6791"},"modified":"2013-11-25T10:35:28","modified_gmt":"2013-11-25T18:35:28","slug":"facts-democrats-and-the-jfk-legend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/facts-democrats-and-the-jfk-legend\/","title":{"rendered":"Facts, Democrats and the JFK Legend"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The mythologizing of John F. Kennedy in the 50 years since his death has\u00a0verified\u00a0the adage in John Ford\u2019s\u00a0The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: \u201cWhen the legend becomes fact, print the legend.\u201d The\u00a0JFK\u00a0legend recycled all these years is of a liberal icon, the glamorous martyr\"470px-John_F._Kennedy,_White_House_photo_portrait,_looking_up\" whose violent death has validated and sanctified big government, redistributive\u00a0economic\u00a0polices, and quasi-pacifist internationalism. The facts, however, belie this myth, which also obscures the true significance of JFK\u2019s brief administration.<\/p>\n

In reality,\u00a0Kennedy was not a liberal in today\u2019s sense of the word, but a conservative\u00a0Democrat, a\u00a0Cold-War warrior and tax-cutter, as documented by Ira Stoll in\u00a0JFK,\u00a0Conservative.\u00a0Far from the civil rights saint portrayed in the legend, his support for civil rights legislation was lukewarm, driven by the momentum for desegregation started\u00a0before him\u00a0by Truman\u2019s desegregation of the armed forces,\u00a0and codified by Eisenhower in the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights acts, the first civil rights legislation since 1875.\u00a0In fact,\u00a0Kennedy believed that\u00a0over-hasty progress on civil rights would alienate the conservative\u00a0Southern wing of the Democrats. That\u2019s why he advised Martin Luther King against his groundbreaking March on Washington in August of 1963,\u00a0and\u00a0put little effort into passing additional civil rights legislation.<\/p>\n

Nor was\u00a0Kennedy\u00a0a\u00a0tax-and-spend\u00a0liberal. The Revenue Act of 1964, one of Kennedy\u2019s economic goals he proposed before his assassination, cut tax rates by 20% across the board, based on\u00a0an argument redolent of the much-derided \u201csupply-side\u201d economics\u00a0promoted\u00a0by Ronald Reagan. As Kennedy said in a 1962 speech, \u201cThe final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system . . .\u00a0I am not talking about a \u2018quickie\u2019 or a temporary tax cut, which would be more appropriate if a recession were imminent. Nor am I talking about giving the economy a mere shot in the arm, to ease some temporary complaint. I am talking about the accumulated evidence of the last 5 years that our present tax system . . .\u00a0exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peace time; that it siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power; that it reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly,\u00a0despite attempts to claim Kennedy as a\u00a0promoter\u00a0of d\u00e9tente and coexistence with the Soviet Union, he was hawkish on confronting the Russians, vowing in his inaugural\u00a0address, \u201cLet 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.\u201d\u00a0In his famous speech in Berlin on June 26, 1963, he sounded like\u00a0liberal bogeyman\u00a0Ronald Reagan. \u201cThere are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin,\u201d Kennedy orated to a million Germans.\u00a0He continued,\u00a0\u201cThere are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress\u00a0.\u00a0. .\u00a0Let them come to Berlin.\u201d He taunted the Russians by saying that democratic citizens \u201chave never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.\u201d\u00a0And he called communism \u201can offence not only against history\u00a0but an offense against humanity.\u201d When Ronald Reagan spoke in these terms,\u00a0the liberal admirers of Kennedy called him a war-mongering\u00a0simpleton.<\/p>\n

Nor does the historical record support the view that Kennedy intended to reduce U.S. involvement in Vietnam.\u00a0In his brief tenure he increased U.S. advisors from 900 to 16,000, which makes the reduction of a 1000 before his death less impressive. There is nothing in his Cold War hawkishness to think he would unilaterally surrender in a geopolitical duel with the Soviet Union and China\u2013\u2013not when he fomented rebellion in Cuba and plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro, or when he took this country to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile crisis\u00a0over weapons that did not substantially alter the strategic nuclear balance.<\/p>\n

Finally, Kennedy\u2019s \u201cbig government\u201d initiatives like the Peace Corps and the program to send a man to the moon within a decade were subordinated to his Cold War aims.\u00a0Even desegregation was in part a response to the\u00a0negative effect on the U.S.\u2019s\u00a0image as a bastion of freedom and equality compared to the oppressive Soviet Union.\u00a0As\u00a0the Independent Institute\u2019s\u00a0Ivan Eland writes, \u201cHe believed the Peace Corps program would win back some of that lost public-relations ground\u00a0in those parts of the globe. Kennedy didn\u2019t care about space exploration, but instead viewed the moon program through the lens\u00a0of\u00a0U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War.\u201d To make Kennedy a pacifist-leaning internationalist requires long residence in the Oliver Stone fever-swamps.<\/p>\n

As a result of this legend, many today believe\u00a0that JFK was one of the best presidents in history, as routinely asserted in presidential popularity polls that\u00a0consistently\u00a0put him in the top 10, and occasionally rank him first or second. Once again, the facts don\u2019t\u00a0support this estimation. As Joseph Epstein wrote recently, \u201cJohn F. Kennedy turned out to be a most mediocre president. He was at best hesitant in his support of the civil rights movement, the clearest moral event of the second half of the twentieth century. Nor did he pass any domestic legislation of major importance. In foreign policy, he made a great mess of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and with a less than ept bit of brinksmanship brought the Soviet Union and the United States as close to nuclear war as they ever got. He was the man who first put the American toe in the swamp of Vietnam, though his successor Lyndon Johnson would take the heat of liberal history for that misbegotten war.\u201d\u00a0Epstein could have mentioned as well the disastrous decision to remove\u00a0South Vietnamese President Ngo\u00a0Dinh\u00a0Diem, which damaged the counterinsurgency efforts against the Viet Cong\u00a0guerrillas and cadres. We can quibble with some\u00a0parts\u00a0of Epstein\u2019s\u00a0evaluation, but the liberal icon\u00a0of presidential excellence\u00a0for the most part is made\u00a0of rhetorical tinsel and greasepaint.<\/p>\n

Equally important to dismantling that icon is recognizing the other significant developments that followed the Kennedy assassination. Kennedy was the first modern president whose image, constructed from the new media of mass communication like television and monthly magazines\u00a0like\u00a0Life, was more important than his thin record of accomplishment. The mythmaking began even before his death, with those\u00a0glossy\u00a0photographs and video footage of the\u00a0glamorous\u00a0young president and his\u00a0stylish\u00a0bride wafting through \u201cCamelot\u201d and supposedly elevating the intellectual and artistic tenor of the White House. This process accelerated after his assassination, when courtiers like Ted Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote\u00a0hagiographies\u00a0that\u00a0created the image\u00a0forever\u00a0frozen by Kennedy\u2019s\u00a0gruesome\u00a0death, forever\u00a0captured\u00a0on Abraham Zapruder\u2019s\u00a08-millimeter\u00a0footage.\u00a0Movies and television shows over the last half-century have repeated and reinforced this\u00a0sentimental\u00a0myth, gliding over Kennedy\u2019s political failures and sexual peccadillos. Indeed, the\u00a0celebrity\u00a0legend has become\u00a0historical\u00a0fact.\u00a0But the\u00a0larger\u00a0legacy of this\u00a0mythmaking is that now,\u00a0fabricated image and slick\u00a0marketing\u00a0(see\u00a0Scott Thomas\u2019s\u00a0Designing Obama)\u00a0have replaced experience and knowledge in qualifying someone for the presidency, as the current occupant of the White House demonstrates.\u00a0Moreover, the Kennedy myth has validated the imperial presidency in which manufactured charisma and glamour justify violating the Constitution\u2019s separation of powers\u2013\u2013once more illustrated by Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

More\u00a0important, the true record of Kennedy\u2019s political beliefs stands as a marker for judging just how far\u00a0left the contemporary Democratic Party\u00a0has veered.\u00a0Though Kennedy was a mediocre president, he was\u00a0still a conventional centrist and\u00a0anti-communist Democrat.\u00a0But since 1968, the party of Kennedy has transformed itself from a classical liberal party of individual rights,\u00a0citizen autonomy,\u00a0and personal freedom,\u00a0to a\u00a0left-wing\u00a0party that endorses an intrusive, patronizing\u00a0Leviathan state financed by punitive tax rates on producers of growth, and sold to the people with class-warfare rhetoric\u00a0evocative of\u00a0Pravda\u00a0and sweetened with metastasizing character-eroding entitlement transfers.\u00a0Rather than a defender of the First Amendment\u2019s rights to free speech and religion,\u00a0it\u00a0has institutionalized censorship in hate-speech and sexual harassment laws, and declared war on Christianity and Judaism and attempted to drive those faiths from the public square\u2013\u2013excluding of course Islam, the faith of most of the terrorist murderers active across the globe. Instead of championing entrepreneurship and innovation, it has favored economic policies and\u00a0coercive\u00a0regulatory regimes that stifle both.\u00a0And it has become the party of invidious racialist grievance politics that enriches hustlers like Al Sharpton while ignoring the ongoing destruction of black people in blue-state inner cities, even as it transforms a once-noble civil rights\u00a0movement into a divisive grievance\u00a0industry.<\/p>\n

Worst of all, contrary to Kennedy\u2019s robust, if sometimes inept, foreign policy that recognized the true nature of the communist enemy and actively opposed its adventurism, the Democrats are now a crypto-pacifist party of appeasement, retreat, apology, and\u00a0subordination of American sovereignty to feckless and incompetent internationalist outfits like the U.N. and the European Court of Justice. Instead of seeing\u00a0a strong, confident\u00a0America as a power for good in the world and\u00a0an\u00a0enabler of freedom and justice, the Democratic Party considers America as complicit in\u00a0all\u00a0the crimes and oppression troubling the planet, reducing America\u2019s global role to \u201ca partner\u00a0mindful of his own imperfections,\u201d as Obama said, no more exceptional than any other country.<\/p>\n

Obama, of course, embodies perfectly the degeneration of the Democratic Party, and so more than anything else marks how far it has fallen from the beliefs of JFK. For Democrats today to claim\u00a0John\u00a0Kennedy\u00a0as one of their own is not just a violation of historical fact, but a shameful\u00a0masking\u00a0of their own radicalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 The mythologizing of John F. Kennedy in the 50 years since his death has\u00a0verified\u00a0the adage in John Ford\u2019s\u00a0The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: \u201cWhen the legend becomes fact, print the legend.\u201d The\u00a0JFK\u00a0legend recycled all these years is of a liberal icon, the glamorous martyr whose violent death has validated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,187,99],"tags":[884,215,115,177,165,743,1049,265,468,1032,1070],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Lx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5461,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-passions-of-the-left\/","url_meta":{"origin":6791,"position":0},"title":"The Passions of the Left","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 29, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"CIA's new revelations fans the flames of \"progressive\" myths of our past by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The publication of the CIA\u2019s \u201cfamily jewels\u201d \u2014 the record of its domestic spying, hare-brained plots against Castro, and mind-control experiments, among other oddities \u2014 is sure to add fuel to that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5409,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/liberal-racism\/","url_meta":{"origin":6791,"position":1},"title":"Liberal Racism","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 8, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"The assault on skilled, independent, intelligent blacks by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers When Barack Obama accused Hillary Clinton of \u201cplaying the gender card,\u201d the hypocrisy that typically defines our public discourse on race descended into the surreal. Obama\u2019s whole career has been created by and has exploited the perception\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5544,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/where-the-illiberal-is-in-liberalism\/","url_meta":{"origin":6791,"position":2},"title":"Where the Illiberal Is in Liberalism","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 13, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The whining of Democrats and ex-Clintonistas about the \u201cdocudrama\u201d\u00a0The Path to 9\/11\u00a0has given us all another example of liberal mendacity and hypocrisy. Start with the total silence of the usual civil liberties suspects to say a word about this attempt at stifling someone\u2019s First\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5307,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/interpreting-the-returns-of-election-04\/","url_meta":{"origin":6791,"position":3},"title":"Interpreting the Returns of Election ’04","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 4, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"All that razzle-dazzle can't fool average Joe. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Now that, as Hank Williams might put it, it's all over but the Democrats' crying, what are some preliminary conclusions we can draw from this election? The most obvious is that the Democrats are increasingly out of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12140,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-post-trump-constitution\/","url_meta":{"origin":6791,"position":4},"title":"The New Post-Trump Constitution","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 16, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review The Left sees Donald Trump\u2019s comportment, rallies, and tweets as a new low in presidential behavior that justifies extraordinary countermeasures. But Trump\u2019s personal characteristics are idiosyncratic and may or may not become institutionalized by subsequent presidents. And it is not as if liberal icons\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2228,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-lefts-selective-outrage\/","url_meta":{"origin":6791,"position":5},"title":"The Left’s Selective Outrage","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine You know liberals are edging toward a full Jonestown-style meltdown when someone as smart as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman starts losing it. Last week Friedman worked himself up into a paranoiac frenzy over the tone of some of the criticism Obama and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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