Chomsky and Cockburn: Wrong about JFK and US 1960-64

[oujiQualm]

Hi. I would like to start a civil debate on this topic. If people want to curse in order to feel manly thats ok too. I just hope that the powerfull people do not bannish this thread to the basement, because IT IS NOT PRIMARILY KENNEDYS ASSASSINATION WHICH I WISH TO DISCUSS BUT RATHER US COLD WAR POLICY BETWEEN THE YEARS 1960- AND 1963.

So often these discussions are bracketed by our "portable Siberia" ie typing the words Conspiracy Theory. I would argue that this is a more sophisticated form of Stalinist airbrushing of history.

If the official Z-magazine Chomsky view of Kennedy is correct than surely they can win out in a free exchange of ideas!!!

I am not a naive liberal about JFK. I am 44 and a half, and have had time to read some. I know about the CIA and El Salvador et. al. and think that Obama is nothing more than a media ploy to continue business as ususal et. Cetra.

I say this because it has been the strategy of so many on published-left to immediately play "lefter than thou" and categorize all who disagree with Guru Chomsky as "naive liberals" who believe Obama and the Bendovercrats etc.

I would also like to recommend a new book that has crystalized so much of the latest declassified material from the JFk administration. This book is by
James W. Douglass and is called JFK And the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

This book and many others I have read do not try to deny the cold war quotations and the nature of Kennedy's Missile Gap rightist campaign in 1960. Rather they do something that Chomsky and Cockburn utterly fail to do: put Kennedy's actions and statements in the context of what the JCS-CIA and others in the permanent military industrial bureacracy were doing at the time.

There is so much to discuss about this book and the topic, Im sure we will have an energetic time!

Basically, the argument of the book is that JFK represented a threat to the Cold War. He YES WAS going to end the Vietnam war, but also end the Cold War with the USSR and Cuba.

Sounds, I know, Naive liberal. Well bring it on. I have no doubt that there are lots of JFK quotes and actions that are published whch make it seem like JFK was just another Cold Warrior.

They are HALF CORRECT! It is the other half of the story the, I would argue
"controlled" left in the US is so unaware of in 20008!

[rampantuprising]

why was JFK a threat to the Cold War if he 'supposedly' had planned on ending it?
(if thats a stupid question i'm sorry lol)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

This should be in History, I think.

[oujiQualm]

rampant: he was a threat because many powerfull economic interests loved the Cold War and wanted big land wars to go with it. They would eventually get their wish. Evantually.

Newsweek Time and Chomsky have argued--quoting the evidence very one-sidedly-- that Kennedy was going to expand the Vietnam war. This has been proven false by every academic study of the question since Newsweek and Time ran cover stories on the issue in 1992 ( THATS RIGHT COVER STORIES-- PROTEST TOO MUCH? In 1992?!)

Funny thing Newspeakand Time have not retracted their ridiculous claims and Chomsky hits Kennedy far more than any other pol. As a former Chomsky fan I have come to view this as somewhat suspicious.

[oujiQualm]

Rosa, the reason I put this in learning and not history is in the past the editors have shown a predilection towards grass roots rev movements in history, and when talking of the very out of fashion political history have sometimes seemed a tad sensitive. Perhaps its just my perception.

Also, i think that if this discussion evolves, it will move in an epitomological direction ie involving communications theory and the use of wedge issues to divide the left. But i agree that it could well go in history.

[rampantuprising]

rampant: he was a threat because many powerfull economic interests loved the Cold War and wanted big land wars to go with it. They would eventually get their wish. Evantually.

Newsweek Time and Chomsky have argued--quoting the evidence very one-sidedly-- that Kennedy was going to expand the Vietnam war. This has been proven false by every academic study of the question since Newsweek and Time ran cover stories on the issue in 1992 ( THATS RIGHT COVER STORIES-- PROTEST TOO MUCH? In 1992?!)

Funny thing Newspeakand Time have not retracted their ridiculous claims and Chomsky hits Kennedy far more than any other pol. As a former Chomsky fan I have come to view this as somewhat suspicious.

do you happen to know of a link where i can read chomsky's stance on this? (sorry this is all kind of off topic but i had never heard of all this before)

[oujiQualm]

The Chompers main attack on JFK is called Rethinking Camelot. But he interjects some JFK bashing into almost everything he utters, probably even bedtime stories for the grandkids!

Sorry I read all my chomsky between ten and twenty years ago,when I was nearly young. It should be very easy to find, however. At one point I wondered why the left never took off with writing like Chomsky's. Now I am beginning to understand why!

[Nostromo]

The Chompers main attack on JFK is called Rethinking Camelot. But he interjects some JFK bashing into almost everything he utters, probably even bedtime stories for the grandkids!

Sorry I read all my chomsky between ten and twenty years ago,when I was nearly young. It should be very easy to find, however. At one point I wondered why the left never took off with writing like Chomsky's. Now I am beginning to understand why!

I'm particularly fond of the climax of Rethinking Camelot, the paragraph which begins "Another common belief is that JFK was so incensed over the failure of the CIA at the Bay of Pigs that he vowed to smash it to bits." The reader is then treated to one of the crudest pieces of CIA revisionism yet committed to print: "...the CIA was 'reestablished in White House favor'' and became a significant voice in policy making' under Kennedy."

Chomsky's sources for this astonishing inversion of the Kennedy-Agency relationship? A foreward cobbled together - to a reissue of a book venerating the OSS, no less - by Thomas Braden and Stewart Alsop, the former a career CIA officer, the latter one of its most dependable media assets for decades.

Now that's what I call real dissent!

[oujiQualm]

It is easy to overlook all of the ways that JFK was in conflict with the Pemanent Military Industrial bureacrecy by 1963.

Especially with all of the work done on the "''left media''" to make him seem like "just another Cold War Hawk" as GURU CHOMSKY endlessly bashed him,

There are so many huge and fundemental differences JFK had with ruling elites over both foreign and domestic policy.

Here is one that is lesser-known: a fundemental disagreement over Indonesia policy.

INDONESIA? WHO THE HECK CARES??????

Well consider this: After Kennedy was murdered by the National Security State which still rules this country today, there was a GENOCIDE IN INDONESIA IN which up to 1.25 million people were killed. The CIA was directly involved in providing names to the Indonesian military while this happened.

NOW READ THIS ABOUT JFK AND PRESIDENT SUKARNO WHO WAS THE GUY THE CIA FLIPPED ON IN 1965 BEFORE THEIR BLOODBATH!
--------------

JFK's murder kept him from being the one to make critical decision in Washington that would decide the fate of not only Vietnam but also Indonesia.

As we have seen, when he left for Texas, Kennedy had said he was willing to accept an invitation from President Sukarno to visit Indonesia in the spring of 1964. Such a turn of events, sought strongly by Sukarno, would have signaled in a dramatic way Kennedy's support for independent third world nations. As one analyst pointed out, Sukarno was "the most outspoken proponent of Third World neutralism in the Cold War" Sukarno had himself
coined the term "Third World" at the first Conference of Non-Aligned Nations that he hosted at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955.

Kennedy's support for Sukarno was another sign of how out of step he was with his national security state. Sukarno was a close ally in the Non-Aligned Movement with Ghana's president Kwame Nkrumah, a leading African nationalist whom Kennedy was also helping--to the dismay of advisers opposed to Nkrumah, including even Robert Kennedy. When JFK challenged the National Security COuncil in November 1961 by announcing he had decided to lend Kwame Nkrumah the money for his Volta Dam project in Ghana, he added, "The Attorney General has not yet spoken, but I can feel the hot breath of his disapproval on the back of my neck( note 899, Chapter 6)
However, regardless of who opposed him in his support fro Nkrumah, the president was determined "to dramatize the new American attitude toward non-alignment thoughout Africa" (note 900) Suakarno's invitation to him to vist Indonesia gave JFK the further oppostunity to support hte leader of the nonaligned bloc in Southeast Asia.

A presidential visit to Sukarno would have been a major setback to the corporate leaders with a heavy stake in third world resources, particularly in oil-and mineral-rich Indonesia, where they accused Sukarno of having gone Communist by ekpropriating their holdings. Yet Sukarno had recieved a warm welvvome from Kennedy at the WHite House. In his invitation to JFK to visit Indonesia, Sukarno promised him in return "the grandest reception anyone ever received here" (note 901) In visiting Indonesia, Kennedy would cross a threshold by demonstrating publicly hs long-held support of third world nationalism. In terms of the policies he was forging in Indonesia, Ghana, and the Congo, with their adverse impact on multinational corporations, the presidnet was being seen increasingly as a class traitor and a Cold War heretic
(note 902 Chapter 6)
-------

Immediately after the assassination Johnson surprised former Kennedy staffers by refusing to sign a document that would have enabled further US economic aid to the Sukarno government:

As Kennedy aide Roger Hilsman observed, 'Since everyone down the
line had known that President Kennedy would have signed the deter-
mination routinely, we were all surprised when President Johnson
refused (note 903)

When Johnson repeated his refusal to sign into law the necessary
presidential support for aid to Indonesia at a National Security Council
meeting on January 7, 1964 (904) it became clear that Sukarno no
longer had a friend in the White House. Its new occupant was in fact
hostile to Sukarno and the independent nationalist policies he espoused.
In the months following Johnson's accession to the presidency, the U.S.
government cut off economic aid to Indonesia. (note 905, Chapter 6)
However a significant exception to the end of U.S. funding was military
aid to the Indonesian Army, under the rising control of Major General
Haji Mohammad Suharto (note 906) With the covert support of the US
military, Suharto was preparing to overthrow Sukarno ( JFK and the Unspeakable:Why He Died and Why It Matters, pp. 376-377)

Sukarno had been targetted earlier by the CIA in 1957-58. Now Kennedy was
planning on visiting someone whom the CIA saw as the a communist leader of a nation of 170 million people. The CIA also believed-- using the same monolithic anti-communist logic that lead to disaster in Vietnam, where Kennedy wanted to end US military involvement-- that the Nonaligned movement was just a front for communists.

One has to wonder how the outcome of Indonesia in 1965 would have been different had Johnson not replaced Kennedy.

This very stark contrast between JFK and LBJ's policies in Indonesia is matched by equally stark contrasts between their plans for South America.