American Experience's 2013 "JFK" documentary

PBS' American Experience had a new two-part, four-hour documentary on John Kennedy this year. Both parts are available to view at JFK American Experience; accessed 11/22/2013

JFK, Part 1:

JFK, Part 2:

There are two especially notable things about this two-part documentary. One is that it doesn't indulge in tabloid sensationalism. It discusses Kennedy's drug consumption, which was related to controlling his Addison's Disease and his chronic and serious back pain, as important biographically and focuses on its potential policy implications. In his initial meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961, he was heavily medicated. That may have impaired his ability to make the impression he wanted on Khrushchev. But the documentary also makes clear that Khrushchev was pursuing a confrontational strategy, so it's likely any such effects were no more than marginal.

The documentary also sensibly mentions his chronic womanizing as a biographical fact. But it doesn't dwell on it or treat us to a parade of real or alleged romantic partners.

The other especially notable feature is the way the documentary does a good job of showing how various major experiences shaped his nuanced view of foreign policy. As a college student, he had spent time travelling in Europe and doing research, which culminated in a thesis which was published as his first book, Why England Slept (1940). The JFK Presidential Library has an online version of the manuscript for the book. He understood clearly that Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy had failed - though his father the Ambassador to Great Britain was very much in the isolationist camp prior to Pearl Harbor.

And the film makes clear that Kennedy was an enthusiastic Cold Warrior, as a Congressman and Senator, as a Presidential candidate and as President. It's a reminder of how broad a bipartisan consensus there was around often uncritical-minded Cold War assumptions prior to the mass disillusionment with the Vietnam War.

But this doesn't mean there weren't disputes that went beyond accusing the other party of insufficiently militant policies against the Soviet Union. Part 1 of JFK discusses perhaps the most interesting policy stand that Kennedy took as a Senator, his support of Algerian independence and criticism of French and British colonialism.

The two-part documentary is actually framed around the Cuban Missile Crisis. And it shows how Kennedy's negotiating sense and his thoughtfully critical attitude toward military advice made the successful resolution of the crisis possible. JFK's personal experiences as a sailor in the Second World War and especially the genuinely bad advice hie got from his glorious generals over the Bay of Pigs invasion saved him from any sense of idolatry toward advice from generals and admirals. The JFK film refreshingly treats the Missile Crisis as a difficult balancing of military confrontation and sensible diplomacy. It's too often seen as a victory for testosterone posturing.

The website has links to several additional resources on Kennedy's life and Presidency.

Tags: cuban missile crisis, john kennedy

Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Fred Kaplan is the author of The Wizards of Armageddon (1983), an important book that tells the story of the people (mostly men) who John Kenneth Galbraith labelled the "nuclear Jesuits", the grand theories of nuclear strategy like Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter and, for a while, Daniel Ellsberg. It's a very helpful book in understanding the preventive war strategy applied by the Cheney-Bush Administration in the Iraq War - and on a smaller but significant scale by President Obama in Yemen. Andrew Bacevich explains that connection in The New American Militarism : How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005).

Kaplan takes issue with Robert Caro's treatment in latest volume of his seemingly endless biography of Lyndon Johnson of the most dangerous nuclear confrontation in history to date, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Caro's latest volume is title The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 4: The Passage to Power (2012). Caro has a strong reputation among our star pundits, who are no doubt gratified by the gossipy tidbits he serves up in abundance.

Kaplan apparently shared this admiration until now. In What Robert Caro Got WrongSlate 05/31/2012, he writes that Caro's multi-volume biography "ranks among the towering achievements in literary biography." Even of the latest volume, he says,"it is a terrific read. Caro paints palpable scenes and draws vivid characters."

However, he writes of volume 4, "Caro’s treatment of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis—and of the roles that Johnson and the Kennedy brothers (especially Robert Kennedy) played in the crisis — is, on several levels, simply wrong." A big criticism, about which I'll say more below.

But first, I'm puzzled how Caro's reputation survived vol. 2, Means of Ascent (1990). Kaplan himself notes that it, "while deeply flawed, is a seminal study in corruption." Gary Wills reviewed the book in the New York Review of Books 37/7 (04/26/1990 issue) in a piece called "Monstre Désacré" and noted some of those "deeply flawed" aspects. This part made a big impression on me, from which I took the insight (which may not have been exactly what Wills intended) that biographers of unpleasant characters need to find a way to love their monster:

In 1944 Laurence Olivier began a run as Sergius in Shaw’s Arms and the Man, unsuccessfully. When Tyrone Guthrie came by to see the Shaw play, he asked, “Don’t you love Sergius?” Decidedly not, Olivier answered. “Well, of course, if you can’t love him, you’ll never be any good in him, will you?” Olivier called this the “richest pearl of advice in my life.” Years later he could point to the exact spot outside the theater where he had received this pearl, after which he loved—and played—the hell out of Sergius.

Robert Caro needed a Tyrone Guthrie at some earlier stage of this long run with the life of Lyndon Johnson. "Love that stooge?" Olivier had asked Guthrie; but Sergius is simply a blusterer. It is easy enough, with effort, to love a vain child. Monsters are another matter, and Lyndon Johnson was clearly a monster of ambition, greed, and cruelty. What’s not to loathe?

But it rots the soul to entertain, too long, an unmixed contempt for any human being, even the worst. There is something eerily obsessive about Caro’s stalking of his villain. It is the inverse of gilding the lily, this continual tarring of the blackguard. Johnson’s treatment of his wife was bad enough, one would think, that Caro need not exaggerate it. Yet Caro reserves information where it would partly exonerate, and produces it only when it further incriminates. We are told, early on, how Congressman Johnson flew home to his district on his patron’s corporate airplane while his wife had to drive the long trip with their belongings. Though Caro admits that "Lady Bird disliked flying," he tells us that the principal reason for "this disparity in the Johnsons’ travel arrangements," which proved that "he treated her like the hired help," was Johnson’s parsimony where she was concerned.

That volume covered Johnson's successful 1948 Texas Senate race, in which he defeated former Governor Coke Stevenson. Johnson won a narrow victory with the help of some questionable vote counting, earning him the enduring nickname of Landslide Lyndon.

But while no amount of context can excuse vote fraud, the context was that Texas politics was corrupt as all hell, and Stevenson in at least his gubernatorial campaign seems to have indulged their own share of it. So far as I'm aware, neither of the two campaigns ever had a legal judgment against them on vote fraud, and the Senate accepted Johnson's election as legitimate. Historians, of course, are not restricted to drawing conclusions that have specific legal decisions to support them. Wills concludes, "Indeed, the history of the area suggests that if Johnson had not 'stolen' the vote, Stevenson would have won by just as artificial a majority." This kind of cautionary framing is important for a situation like Texas or Deep South states from roughly 1875-1965. Segregation and white supremacy produced some very deep-seated corruption in politics. Even Caro indicated that his hero Stevenson would have been ready to buy the same votes if he had been able to.

Stevenson was a nasty old fundamentalist and segregationist, but Caro presents him in saintly images. "Though Caro likes to present himself as a simple fact collector on a giant scale, he is actually a mythmaker, and what he gives us in this book is a night-marishly inverted fairy tale, one in which the dragon slays Saint George," Wills wrote. He refers to:

... the idyllic scene of Coke Stevenson’s retirement that ends the book. Married again, adored and adoring, at peace with the land and himself, Stevenson has rescued his humanity from the degrading spectacle Johnson made of Texas politics. One finishes this long volume with the fear, page by page, that Bambi will show up in the final paragraph to lick Coke's cheek.

And Caro leaves out much of the actual larger political context. As Wills observed:

Stevenson's conservatism was not only states'-rights on racial matters but on fiscal ones as well. He took a pay-as-you-go approach to the state’s own budget, and wanted to keep the federal government out. He had always opposed the New Deal—a position Caro seems to prefer to Johnson's inconsistent support for Roosevelt’s programs. But the conflict of 1948 was not just one of campaign techniques. Johnson’s reliance on new means of communication and transportation resembled the "intrusive" technologies that Caro praised in the first volume of this biography, where the New Deal’s rural electrification was concerned.

As all reviewers seem to note, Caro sorts through a vast amount of material in his work, and that will make his long LBJ biography an important reference for a long time to come, I'm sure. But in Means of Ascent, allows his obviously intense dislike for his subject to run wild to the point of distortion by emphasis and omission. Maybe Kaplan's phrase "literary biography" is getting obliguely at a similar point. "Caro paints palpable scenes and draws vivid characters," but his polemical mission may not make those literary portraits as carefully drawn as one should expect in history writing.

I won't try to relate here the various points on which Kaplan shows that Caro has done sloppy work in his treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kaplan outlines what we know about the crisis this way:

The crisis began when U.S. spy planes detected Soviet ships carrying missiles to Cuba, as well as the construction of missile-launchers at secured sites on the island. At first, JFK and his advisers figured they’d have to bomb the missile sites—until they calculated the complexities and risks, at which point Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara suggested a naval blockade of the island as a way to buy time and give Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev a chance to reverse course. After 13 days of shrewd diplomacy, a deal was struck, and the missiles were withdrawn.

In the 50 years since, the story and the lessons of the crisis have gone through a fascinating evolution.* In the first phase, as reported by JFK’s favored columnists (and formalized in the books by palace guards, speechwriter Ted Sorensen's Kennedy and White House gadfly Arthur Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days), JFK won the confrontation through sheer threat of force. As one of the advisers was quoted as saying, "We went eyeball to eyeball with the Russians—and they blinked." (This quote, like much else in these accounts, was pure fiction.)

In the second phase, starting in 1982, on the 20th anniversary of the crisis, some of JFK’s top advisers—McNamara, Sorensen, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, and others—confessed, in a article for Time magazine, that Kennedy had made a secret deal: Khrushchev would take the Soviet missiles out of Cuba, and Kennedy, six months later, would take America’s very similar Jupiter missiles out of Turkey. It had always been known that Khrushchev offered such a deal, but the earlier accounts—including Sorensen’s book, and many other books based on it — had reported that Kennedy rejected it. In fact, the advisers now said, Kennedy accepted it, but told both the Russians and the handful of his own advisers whom he let in on the secret never to tell anyone. (The advisers decided to break their silence because they knew the Kennedy Library was about to release the tapes.)

The third phase began in 1987, with the release of the first tape transcripts, which revealed that the advisers had omitted one key fact in their now-it-can-be-told article for Time: They had all vociferously opposed the trade. JFK stood alone on making a deal with the Soviets - and, in the end, was redeemed.

And Kaplan is apprehensive about what this may promise for the projected fifth and final volume:

Volume 5 of Caro’s series will deal mainly with Johnson and Vietnam, and I’m afraid that his treatment of the Cuban missile crisis in Volume 4 sets the stage for more false lessons. My suspicion, inferred from what really happened in those ExComm meetings, is that JFK would have pulled out of Vietnam—or at least would not have escalated so deeply. The lesson isn't that Johnson marked a departure from Kennedy’s men; it’s that, when it came to questions of war and Communism, JFK himself was departing from the views of Kennedy’s men. It would have been good — it might have made a big difference in world history — if Johnson had known that. And, for the life of me, I don’t understand why Robert Caro made the same mistake.

I'm glad to see Kaplan's criticism. Since Caro's biography is so highly regarded among the punditocracy, its sloppiness may perpetuate itself in many iterations.

Tags: cuban missile crisis, fred kaplan, john kennedy, lyndon johnson, robert caro

Bob McElvaine on John McCain as nuclear crisis manager

Bob McEvlaine addresses the issue of what kind of President John McCain would be on foreign policy, especially in moments of high military danger. His post is a reminder that the Obama-Biden campaign has generally de-emphasized "national secuerity" issues, in line with conventional Democratic consultant wisdom. Even though the biggest such issue right now is the Iraq War, on which the Democrats have by far the more popular position. You have to wonder, if the failure of the private financial system that has produced the acute crisis of recent weeks hadn't occurred, or had been less severe, would Obama's generally cautious electoral strategy have been enough to get him to the lead he appears to have today? (The second image illustrating this post is impressive if a bit uncharacteristically on the apocalyptic side.)

McCain and the Missiles of October by Robert S. McElvaine

Here's a question Americans ought to ask themselves as they assess the presidential nominees and decide how to vote on November 4th: Where would we be today if the president during this week in 1962 had been JSM, instead of JFK? Or maybe the question should be: Would we be today if John McCain had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Opinion surveys indicate that Americans believe that Sen. McCain would be a more effective commander in chief than his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama. As Obama has pulled away to a lrage overall lead and even bigger leads in many areas, McCain still has a lead on national security and terrorism. Many voters are attracted to McCain's quick, decisive, "don't look back" decision-making and fancy that someone who acts in that way will keep them secure.
But would it?

The experience of October 1962 strongly suggests otherwise.

"The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine," Republican Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi said of Sen. McCain in January of this year. "He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."

In an age of weapons of mass destruction, cooler heads must prevail.

♦ ♦ ♦

"To be or not to be?"--that was the question John F. Kennedy faced in October 1962, to a degree no other president ever has.

Forty-six years ago today, on October 15, 1962, the CIA reported to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy that a U-2 spy flight over Cuba had found Soviet missile sites being constructed there.

In the ensuing days, President Kennedy met with a small group of advisers and with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss what to do about missile sites. The Chiefs all urged him, in essence, to shoot first and ask questions later. They wanted a massive air strike. Gen. Maxwell Taylor told the Commander in Chief that military action was essential to maintain American credibility. Air Force Chief Curtis LeMay dismissed a proposed blockade as Munich-like appeasement and threatened to go public with his criticism of Kennedy's weakness if the president did not endorse an air strike. "You gotta go in there and take out the goddamn thing," Marine Commandant David Shoup said after the meeting.

Nor were such bellicose recommendations confined to the military leaders around Kennedy. Most of the "wise men" the president had called together to counsel him in the crisis also urged him to launch an air strike.

Kennedy resisted those pressures and found something else to do about the nest of rattlesnakes the Soviets had exported to Cuba. After the meeting with the Joint Chiefs, he had told his aide Kenneth O'Donnell that if he did what the "brass hats" wanted him to do, "none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong."

"If anybody is around to write after this," the president said to his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, later in the month, "they are going to understand that we made every effort to give our adversary room to move. I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary."

John Kennedy's cool-headed, prudent, think-before-you-act approach to the Soviet challenge averted what would likely have been the calamitous results of the sort of quick, decisive decision-making and action that his military and many of his civilian advisers demanded.

The rest is history, as the saying goes; but had JFK not acted in the cautious manner that he did, the rest might have been not-history.

The bottom line on Kennedy's performance that October nearly a half century ago has been well stated by historian Robert Dallek as "an imperishable example of how one man prevented a catastrophe that may yet afflict the world."

♦ ♦ ♦

Had John S. McCain been sitting where John F. Kennedy sat in 1962, would he have played that heroic role in preventing catastrophe by resisting the "Bomb 'em now and worry about the consequences later" chorus? Would McCain do so under similar circumstances in the coming four years? All the evidence, including his own testimony on how he makes decisions, indicates that he would instead be leading that chorus.

"I make them as quickly as I can, quicker than the other fellow, if I can," McCain wrote of decisions in his 2002 book, Worth the Fighting For. "Often my haste is a mistake, but I live with the consequences without complaint."

McCain is willing to live with the consequences of his hasty mistaken decisions. Are the rest of us?

The Republican nominee's impulsive, shoot-from-the-hip method of making decisions has been on display during the current campaign. Selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate after meeting her twice and without having had her vetted to any significant extent is a prime example of the McCain act-quickly-and-decisively; don't-think-about-it-much approach.

His impulsiveness has been evident in both his lurching back and forth on the condition of the economy (in a few days from "The fundamentals of our economy are strong" to "We are in the most serious crisis since World War II") and his proposals for what to do about it.

In August, at Pastor Rick Warren's religion forum, Sen. McCain was asked a question about how we should respond to evil. Without a moment's hesitation or thought, he responded: "Defeat it!"

Many viewer-voters, quite understandably, preferred such decisiveness to Barack Obama's thoughtful, nuanced answers.

Being decisive can be a good quality--up to a point. McCain, like the man he seeks to succeed and the woman he chose to be in a position to succeed him, suffers from what David Brooks has termed "brashness and excessive decisiveness."

John McCain is trigger happy; Sarah Palin is trigger ecstatic.

McCain loves to gamble. He especially loves shooting craps. A recent New York Times article recounted one night in 2000 when McCain "tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table" for hours. The piece accurately described him as "a lifelong gambler" who "takes risks, both on and off the craps table." Do Americans really want a commander in chief who likes to roll the dice with our future, even our very survival, as the stakes?

Last month George Will wrote of McCain's "impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events," his "impatience," his apparent lack of aptitude to engage in "calm reflection, and his "dismaying temperament." McCain, Will said, has quarrels rather than qualms.

Should John McCain be elected, we'll have more to fear than fear itself.

The horrible economy notwithstanding, the biggest issue of this election in the long run may be whether we will have a long run. This issue can summarized as: It's the judgment and temperament of the man with his finger on the button, stupid!

Promos for the 1973 film American Graffiti asked, "Where were you in '62?" There is strong reason to believe that it is a good thing for the world that John McCain's answer would not be, "in the White House."

[Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. His latest book is Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America (Crown). He is currently at work on a book on America in the 1960s, Oh, Freedom! (Norton).]

Tags: cuban missile crisis, robert mcelvaine, sarah palin