1963 and 2016: fanatical segregationists creating their own version of reality

James Silver's Mississippi: The Closed Society, originally published in 1964, was an important and influential book on segregation and the civil rights movement in Mississippi. And about the 1963 riot at Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi) when James Meredith was admitted as the first African-American student. (At least knowingly admitted as such. At least one black student had "passed" as white in attending Ole Miss in 1945-6 on a Navy study program.) The University of Mississippi Press issued a new edition of Silver's in 2012.

Since the national Republican Party has "Mississippized" itself in the sense of 1964 - maybe "Ross Barneettized" would be a better term after the treason-minded governor that instigated the Ole Miss riot - Silver's description of the social context and mentality of segregation among whites has newly contemporary relevance.

The night of insurrection at Ole Miss has been called the most explosive federal-state clash since the Civil War. Before the work was done, the Army brought more troops to Mississippi than General Washington had ever commanded at one time, and almost as many as General Sherman had had in the environs of Oxford exactly 100 years before. Several hundred reporters from all news and interpretative media concentrated on the Mississippi campus to ferret out the facts about what had actually taken place and to inquire into the background of the state's turmoil. By and large the reporting was accurate and the interpretation sound and temperate. Those who wished to know have had spread before them a reasonably trustworthy record of events.

This is true for all the world except Mississippi. With their long history of being on the defensive against outside criticism, and with their predisposition to believe their own leaders can do no wrong, the people have been almost completely deceived. The closed society intuitively and immediately projected (in fact, it had foreshadowed) the orthodox version that the insurrection came as the inevitable result of federal encroachment, deliberately planned by the Kennedys and callously incited by [federal Chief Marshal] McShane when he called for tear gas. What did happen in front of the Lyceum Building in that crucial hour before eight o'clock on the night of September 30? Truth cries out that the orthodox Mississippi view is false, that cleverness in shifting the culpability for defiance of law from those creating the violence to those enforcing the law could only succeed among a people suffering from a touch of paranoia. [my emphasis]

Silver notes that there were calls by Mississippi officials for indictment of McShane and other federal officials. White segregationists were very concerned to maintain "law and order" when it came to black people. But they were not hesitant to condemn law-enforcement officials who were demanding that white rioters conduct themselves according to the law. White Lives Mattered to Mississippi segregationists.

Silver addresses the use of tear gas:

Whether Chief Marshal James P. McShane was justified in giving the order to fire at precisely the moment he did is a question for the professionals to answer. It is relevant, however, that between 40 and 50 faculty members and their wives later testified that the marshals had undergone for at least an hour a constant harassment of obscene language and a minute-by-minute heavier barrage of lighted cigarette butts, stones, bottles, pieces of pipe, and even acid. It is a small matter whether the gas should have come fifteen minutes earlier or later, but it is rather ironic that a full-scale insurrection should get under way at the exact moment that the President was appealing to Mississippians on radio and television for fair play, in the name of Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar. [my emphasis]

I've previously described L.Q.C. Lamar as "a genuine villain who conned gullible Yankees with his 'moderate' talk while fighting for white supremacy and against democracy." JFK had made Lamar one of his "profiles in courage" in his famous book.

Dealing with Ross Barnett, in particular, though, showed Kennedy that his conservative view of Reconstruction was probably deeply flawed. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978) quotes John Kennedy from 06/20/1963 commenting specifically on the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers: "I don't understand the South. I'm coming to believe that [Radical Republican Reconstruction-era Congressman] Thaddeus Stevens was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them."

"Them" in this case being hardcore Southern segregationists.

Silver rightly notes, "The President had no alternative except the use of federal power when the execution of the order [to admit Meredith] was prevented by state force." That authority was clarified during the Civil War. But even in 2016, their are still political descendants of John Calhoun who would reverse that verdict. Unless they wanted to use federal troops against black communities, immigrants or labor, of course.

Schlesinger also provides this transcript of a telephone conversation between the Governor of Mississippi and the President of the United States:

BARNETT. That's what it's going to boil down to - whether Mississippi can run its institutions or the federal government is going to run things ....
KENNEDY. I don't understand, Governor. Where do you think this is going to take your own state?
BARNETT. A lot of states haven't had the guts to take a stand. We are going to fight this thing. . . . This is like a dictatorship. Forcing him physically into Ole Miss. General, that might bring on a lot of trouble. You don't want to do that. You don't want to physically force him in.
KENNEDY. You don't want to physically keep him out. ... Governor, you are a part of the United States.
BARNETT. We have been a part of the United States but I don't know whether we are or not.
KENNEDY. Are you getting out of the Union?
BARNETT. lt looks like we're being kicked around - like we don't belong to it. General, this thing is serious.
KENNEDY. It's serious here.
BARNETT. Must it be over one little boy - backed by cominunist front - backed by the NAACP which is a communist front? ... I'm going to treat you with every courtesy but I won't agree to let that boy to get to Ole Miss. I will never agree to that. I would rather spend the rest of my life in a penitentiary than do that.
KENNEDY. I have a responsibility to enforce the laws of the United States .... The orders of the court are going to be upheld. As I told you, you are a citizen not only of the State of Mississippi but also of the United States. Could I give you a ring?
BARNETT. You do that. . . . Good to hear from you. [my emphpasis]

Silver's account is also a reminder that rightwing whining about the so-called liberal press has been around for a while:

In the more than a year since then [the riot], politicians, editors, judges, lawyers, educators, churchmen — all the makers of public opinion — have continued the hypocritical tirade of misrepresentation and deceit. It does impress people who are attuned to hearing nothing else and want to hear nothing else. In the 1963 campaign, every gubernatorial candidate started out with a deep hatred for the Kennedys, and the man who screamed the loudest is now Mississippi's governor. While warming up in Florida for the main event, Paul Johnson, then lieutenant governor, spoke on the subject, "The Cause of Freedom Won at Oxford and We Have Just Begun to Fight." President Kennedy, it would seem, had tried "to subvert the foundation pillars of this great government," backed by a "kept segment" of national press, television, and radio grinding out "its slanted story, half truths and prejudiced propaganda." [my emphasis]

And the unwillingness of those fabled moderate Republicans to stand up against Trump and his overt white supremacist Presidential campaign also has a familiar ring to those who have some knowledge about Mississippi-style segregation. Silver writes:

There are moderates in Mississippi who look upon the future with some degree of optimism because increasing numbers of colored citizens are becoming eligible to vote. Unquestionably the promise of tomorrow has some merit, but not because of the assistance of [white] men of good will. The voter registration drives are all conducted by local Negroes and "outside agitators" of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, NAACP, and other organizations. In the courts the chief defender of firstclass citizenship for colored Mississippians is the U.S. Department of Justice. The Mississippi Civil Rights Advisory Committee, which seeks to protect the rights of all Mississippians, has found it well nigh impossible to recruit members.

The most unreasonable and cruel tirade James Meredith had to endure came from a [Memphis] Commercial Appeal columnist. Having, at least privately, expressed some sympathy for a much-maligned individual, this man of good will pounced upon Meredith's first apparent false step (his criticism of the U.S. Army), denouncing him as an "ignoble failure" who had betrayed his race and damaged its reputation beyond calculation. The column was filled with innuendo, falsehood, and bad judgment. Its author, who laid claim to an "overload of grief, compassion and charity," demonstrated hp had none of these qualities when he refused to rectify in any way his character assassination of an innocent man. Once again, the pious, self-righteous man of irresponsibility had failed miserably, even in a mild crisis. [my emphasis]

To quote Arlo Guthrie, "Some things change, you know. Some things don't."

JFK and withdrawing from Vietnam, again

Godfrey Hodgson revisits one of the perennial what-if questions of US history in The ’60s great what-if: What would John F. Kennedy have done about Vietnam? Salon 06/07/2015.

Hodgson takes a skeptical position on whether JFK would have withdrawn from Vietnam.

But he had ordered a reduction in the number of US troops there. And I think the evidence leans toward the conclusion that he intended to continue to pull back from that war.

Jaime Galbraith did an article several years ago making that case. He based it not only on Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's memoirs but also on John Newman's JFK and Vietnam (1992) and Howard Jones' Death of a Generation (2003). Both of which are good reads as well as good history.

I blogged about this in my first few months of blogging, JFK and Withdrawing from Vietnam 11/24/2003.

Galbraith's articles and related material from that time on this topic include:

Kennedy, Vietnam and Iraq Salon.com 11/22/2003

Exit Strategy: In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam Boston Review 09/01/2003

In a letter to Boston Review, Noam Chomsky challenged Galbraith's position, Letters from Chomsky and Galbraith on JFK and Vietnam 12/01/2003.

Galbraith said in his response:

In October 1963 there were 17,000 U.S. military “advisers” in Vietnam. They were doing some fighting, and taking some losses, but in the main their mission was to train and assist the South Vietnamese army, which was more than 10 times larger. They faced an insurgency involving as yet few North Vietnamese forces. U.S. withdrawal at that time would not have meant the early collapse of South Vietnam. It would not have ended the war—except from the point of view of direct involvement of U.S. soldiers.

It is therefore reasonable that, into the early fall of 1963 when official military forecasts were still fairly optimistic, the administration should simultaneously plan to “intensify the war effort” and plan for withdrawal of our soldiers. Three key facts that have since emerged are these. First, the official optimism was disbelieved at the very top of the Kennedy administration, notably by McNamara. Second, Kennedy set a course for a decision to withdraw, from which he was not deterred by what then became a deteriorating official military prospect. This explains Kennedy’s concern, evident on the tapes, that the withdrawal be implemented in low key and not be tied to the perception of military progress. Third, the decision to withdraw was taken and then carefully, but not altogether completely, edited out of the record available to historians until the late 1990s. [my emphasis]

Galbraith also notes:

Kennedy’s October 1963 decision to withdraw happened. But Kennedy was nevertheless prepared to leave U.S. soldiers in harm’s way for two more years, mainly (I believe) to reduce the political consequences of pulling them out before the 1964 election. This should have, as my essay states, an ambiguous effect on his reputation.

George Herring in his Ameria's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (2nd edition 1986) wrote:

Sometime in the early summer of 1963, [South Vietnamese leaders Ngo Dinh] Diem and
[Ngo Dinh] Nhu began to explore the possibility of a settlement with Hanoi which would result in an American withdrawal from Vietnam.
Kennedy appears to have been thinking along the same lines. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had initiated long-range planning on troop levels in 1962 to ensure a balance between the Vietnam commitment and America's other global requirements, and in 1963 had produced a plan calling for a phased withdrawal of American advisers to begin later in the year and to end in 1965. The plan seems to have reflected the Pentagon's persisting optimism about progress in containing the insurgency. Some members of Kennedy's staff have since argued, however, that the President's approval of it indicated his determination to avoid an open-ended commitment. Indeed, Hilsman and White House staff member Kenneth O'Donnell claim that by the summer of 1963 Kennedy had recognized the futility of American involvement and was prepared to liquidate it as soon as he had been reelected. "If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam," he reportedly explained to Mansfield, "we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands." The extent to which Kennedy had committed himself remains unclear, but the plan for a phased withdrawal does seem to reflect his growing concern about Vietnam and the increasingly strained relationship with Diem. (pp. 94-5)

In the end, though, whether Kennedy would have withdrawn all troops from Vietnam is by definition a matter of speculation. John Prados in Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (2009) is cautious on the question, arguing that "concrete evidence for the Kennedy withdrawal is sparse and subject to interpretation." He then notes, "There is, however, hard proof for a McNamara withdrawal." (p. 78) Prados notes that Kennedy authorized escalation of CIA operations in Laos in 1963 and his public statements in the weeks before his death, Kennedy was explicitly saying withdrawal would be "a great mistake" and reaffirming his support for the infamous and always badly mistaken "domino theory."

As I said, it seems to me that the bulk of the evidence argues that Kennedy in late 1963 had the intention to withdrawn US troops from Vietnam. But it was a very fluid situation and the Cold War consensus in both parties heavily favored supporting the Southern Vietnamese government in that conflict. And, obviously, Kennedy could have changed his mind as time progressed and conditions changed.

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

Rick Santorum's revisionist history on separation of church and state

Joan Walsh and Charlie Pierce have recently taken on Rick Santorum's dishonest revisionism about John Kennedy's position on freedom of religion and the separation of church and state.

Here's Rick "don't-look-at-my-dog-that-way" Santorum, from Meet the Press transcript for February 26, 2012:

MR. GREGORY: Senator, you called that in the past a, quote, "horrible speech" in part because you felt that he was too rigid about the separation of church and state. There's a concern within the party, and certainly to a lot of other voters, where your faith ends and your presidency would begin.

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: Yeah. The original line that you didn't play that got--that President Kennedy said is, "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute." That is not the founders' vision, that is not the America that, that made the greatest country in the history of the world. The idea that people of faith should not be permitted in the public square to, to, to influence public policy is antithetical to the First Amendment which says the free exercise of religion--James Madison called people of faith, and by the way, no faith, and different faith, the ability to come in the public square with diverse opinions motivated by a variety of different ideas and passions the perfect remedy. Why? Because everybody's allowed in. And the idea that people of faith have to keep it a private affair, my goodness, what does that mean, that the only place that--the only thing you're allowed to bring to the public square is secular ideas or, or not, or things that are not motivated by faith? Look at all of the great movements in this country that led to great just--you know, to, to righting wrongs that exist in this country, the slavery movement, the, the, the civil rights movement, all led by people of faith bringing their faith into the public square that all men are created equal...

MR. GREGORY: Fair enough. OK, but....

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: ...and they have God-given rights. So this idea that we need to segregate faith is, is, is a dangerous idea. And, and we're seeing the Obama administration not only segregating faith but imposing the states' values now on churches, which is even a bigger affront to the First Amendment. [my emphasis]

One of the Christian Right's favorite complaints is a variation of the endless White People's Whine that them mean libruls are pickin' on us. In this version, Santorum complains that John Kennedy wanted to drive "people of faith" out of "the public square". (Just as an aside, does anyone ever encounter that phrase "the public square" being used by anyone except Christian Rightists whining about how Christians are persecuted in America?)

Santorum has been using several variations of this JFK spiel over the last several days.

Charlie Pierce addresses this in Rick Santorum Goes After JFK Esquire Politics Blog 02/27/2012. Pierce makes it a point to say after the first mention of Rick Santorum in any of his posts, "and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick he is?" He says this of Pierce's JFK story:

Leave aside for the moment that Santorum's argument there is a bunch of dead leaves pretending to be a tree. Nobody — N-O-B-O-D-Y — is arguing anything like the kind of positions that Santorum alleges there. It certainly doesn't follow from anything Kennedy said in 1960. All Kennedy was doing was trying to convince the theological goobers who ministered to thousands of Southern Democrats — the very people who eventually would evolve into the Republican base with whom Santorum is currently pitching woo — that he wasn't going to be taking orders from John XXIII once they elected him. While unquestionably eloquent, Kennedy's speech was also a masterpiece of pure realpolitik, a calculation just as political as the one, say, that Rick Santorum made in voting for No Child Left Behind.

But it's important not to forget history just because Rick Santorum likes to play mumbledy-peg with it. Kennedy's speech came late on September 12, late in what would be a historically close campaign. He needed the votes of the people to whom those ministers in Houston spoke every Sunday, and a great number of them actually believed that, once inaugurated, Kennedy would receive his marching orders from the Vatican. The reason that whole thing sounds silly now is because Kennedy gave that speech in Houston in which he said, "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute." Rather than saying that people of his faith "had no role in the public square," Kennedy in his speech made possible the inclusion of Catholics in our national affairs at the highest levels by denying the power of the most prominent myth that had kept them out, the myth of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" that Samuel Burchard had hung on the Democratic party in 1884, the myth that had crushed Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential candidate, in 1928.

Actually, that Rum Romanism and Rebellion slogan was used against the Democrats even in the 1850s, referring to the religious affiliation and perceived drinking habits of Irish immigrants and to the seditious tendencies of the pro-slavery Democratic Party back then.

Joan Walsh also took this one on in Santorum’s JFK story makes me want to throw up Salon 02/26/2012:

Let me start by saying: Santorum sounds literally hysterical. It’s a troubling sign of the GOP’s desperation that he’s virtually tied with Mitt Romney for the lead in the 2012 primaries. It pains me to actually have to take him seriously.

Of course, there’s no place in Kennedy’s speech where he said “people of faith are not allowed in the public square,” or anything close to that, and Santorum’s saying it three times doesn’t make it true. ...

It is absolutely clear that Kennedy accepts “people of faith in the public square” – his goal is to make a place for people of every faith in our public life. Kennedy doesn’t even go as far as Christian right hero Reagan, who actually said the separation of church and state protects the right of non-believers, too.

Kennedy doesn’t say he won’t consult with faith leaders; he says he won’t take “instruction on public policy from the Pope.” In fact, he confided in and took advice from Archbishop Philip Hannan, whom he befriended when he was first elected to Congress; Hannan gave the eulogy at Kennedy’s funeral. Sadly, Hannan died last September, after a long career as Archbishop of New Orleans, or else he might be able to refute Santorum from experience.

She returns to it in She returns to it in We don't need truth vigilantes Salon 02/27/2012, in which she look at the sad, lazy reporting on this in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Tags: john kennedy, santorum, separation of church and state

A dubious manifestation of "civility" on Michelle Bachmann's religio-political beliefs

I have to wonder if some liberals aren't so wedded to the idea that religion shouldn't matter in politics that they fell compelled to pretend that it doesn't matter. Even in the face of a political movement that dominates today's Republican Party and has clear theocratic goals. But the democratic tradition of separation of church and state didn't evolve over centuries by advocates of democracy pretending that actual clerical grabs at secular power just weren't taking place.

What made me think of this was this surprising Huffington Post piece by Jason Linkins, Michele Bachmann Asked If She Is A 'Submissive Wife' At Iowa GOP Debate 08/11/2011. Bachmann has publicly stated her position on the submission of wives to their husbands. As recently as 2006, she told a church congregation, "The Lord says: Be submissive, wives. You are to be submissive to your husbands." She has specifically said that as a young woman, she decided to become a tax attorney because her husband directed her to do so and she believed that a Christian woman should be an obedient wife.

It's a perfectly legitimate question whether she would allow her husband's preferences to determine her official actions as President. Fundamentalist fears in 1960 that John Kennedy would be taking political order from the Pope may have been founded on polemical misunderstandings of the Catholic Christian faith. But given the role that the Church had played in relation to the Italian Fascist and German Nazi regimes, and then its intense conservatism in the postwar period, together with the Vatican's position that the Catholic Church should be state church, had also produced considerable criticism and valid skepticism among liberals in the period between the end of the Second World War and 1960 as to the Catholic Church's role in politics.

Kennedy addressed the question about Church control of the American government during the Presidency for which he was campaigning in an address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on 09/12/1960:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President -- should he be Catholic -- how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all. [my emphasis]

It's difficult to imagine even an Democratic Presidential candidate today making such straightforward assertions of his belief in secular government. They would feel obliged to couch it in praise for "people of faith" and the good works of "faith-based organizations."

I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment's guarantees of religious liberty; nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so. And neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test, even by indirection. For if they disagree with that safeguard, they should be openly working to repeal it.

I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all and obligated to none, who can attend any ceremony, service, or dinner his office may appropriately require of him to fulfill; and whose fulfillment of his Presidential office is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual, or obligation.

... I do not speak for my church on public matters; and the church does not speak for me. Whatever issue may come before me as President, if I should be elected, on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject, I will make my decision in accordance with these views -- in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

But if the time should ever come -- and I do not concede any conflict to be remotely possible -- when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do likewise. [my emphasis]

Can Michelle Bachmann make such a straightforward statement of her religious independence? Can she tell us directly how her statement that her religious conscience demands that wives must "be submissive to your husbands" affects her willingness to act as the elected President sworn to defend the secular Constitution of the United States?

When conservative Byron York posed a version of the question to her in the Iowa debates last night, she gave the anodyne response that to her and her husband Marcus, "submission" means respect:

I respect my husband. He's a wonderful godly man and a great father. And he respects me as his wife. That's how we operate our marriage. We respect each other. We love each other. And I've been so grateful that we've been able to build a home together. We have five wonderful children and 23 foster children. We built a business together and a life together, and I'm very proud of him.

Which is the kind of sugary description of family life one would expect to hear at some Christian fundamentalist counseling retreat from a nice Christian lady giving her "testimony" of her marriage. With of course a few obligatory references to ups and downs and the occasional argument.

But in plain English, "submission" doesn't mean "respect." It means subservience and obedience. And Bachmann's response doesn't address the relevant and legitimate question: would Bachmann follow orders from her husband if he directed her how to exercise her responsibilities as President of the United States? We're talking about the most powerful political office in the world, whose occupant can launch a nuclear war on command based on her own authority. She stated publicly and clearly that she made her first major career choice based on her husbands direction in accord with her understanding that she was Biblically commanded to be "submissive" to husband Marcus. She should be willing and able to say exactly how she understands that Biblical command affecting her decision-making as President of the United States. Repeating for the thousandth time that she's had five kids and 23 foster children doesn't answer that question.

And how does Jason Linkins at the supposedly progressive Huffington Post react? He scolded that naughty conservative Byron York for even asking the question!

As I said at the time of the Post profile, "Bachmann's really comfortable being her own woman. She gets by in the House's "boy's club" just fine. When she wanted to issue a response to the State Of The Union address that would steal away from her party's official response, she asked for neither permission nor forgiveness. If Bachmann's been spending her career doing her husband's bidding rather than her own, it's not remarkably apparent." I'm honestly surprised this even came up as a question.

Of course, in the case of the first part of her career as a tax attorney, she has said explicitly and publicly that she undertook it against her inclinations at the direction of her husband in accordance with her understanding of a Biblical obligation of wives to be submissive to their husbands. And this is the religious ideology of the conservative Protestant groups with whom Bachmann so closely and so publicly associates herself.

But Jason Linkins doesn't find it "apparent" that anyone should ask a candidate for President of the United States about such a thing!

This is not a question about her denominational affiliation, much less about her acceptance of the Christian faith. It is a question about her own publicly-expressed view that wives are required by God to be "submissive" to their husbands even in their career decisions.

Tags: jason linkins, michelle bachmann

Apologizing for being liberals?

Back in the days of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, when what we now know as the "culture war" was spawned, liberals weren't just being trashed by conservatives. They were also actively criticized by antiwar activists, civil-rights and Black Power supporters, and others who saw themselves as part of the New Left. The Gene McCarthy/Robert Kennedy trend within the Democratic Party coalesced around George McGovern's candidacy, advocating a "new politics", which meant a break from many of the assumptions of "Cold War liberals".

Much of that criticism was justified. Democratic Party liberals in the postwar era advocated anti-lynching laws, supported Truman's desegregation of the military and backed Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1957 (LBJ was Senate majority leader then). But it took the pressure of the civil rights popular movement, including those rude and unruly African-Americans young people who sat in at the lunch counters and so forth, to push them the Democratic and Republican liberals (the latter once existed) to embrace the decisive Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And even then, the liberal Democrats shared their Party with the Southern segregationists.

And the Vietnam War was very much a liberals' war almost as much as conservatives' in the early years. It was very obviously the Kennedy and Johnson administration who vastly expanded the American war effort in Vietnam from the covert ops of the Eisenhower years to massive military presence at the time Johnson left office.

So there's lots of critical analysis that can and should be done on those years and the failures of the American liberalism that actually existed in practice. Even in these days, I feel the need of some extra identifier like "Jacksonian democrat" to remind myself that real existing liberals can fail to defend democratic and pro-labor causes with the partisan zeal they deserve. Two sad recent examples: the minority of Congressional Democrats (yes, it was only a minority) who voted for the October 2002 Iraq War resolution, which provided political cover but not legal authority for the invasion Bush launched in March 2003, and the reluctance by many liberals to raise a stink to high heaven about the Cheney-Bush torture policy.

But I don't think it's necessary for liberals to apologize or repent for things they never did. Or to concede conservative talking points about the failings of The Liberals which have only the narrowest of factual bases.

Eric Alterman does some of the best work around on the shortcomings of today's Establishment press. He's a well-informed, critical-minded liberal and a good writer, including his Altercation blog. But he also seems to be unable to shake off an aversion to anyone identifying him with those dirty [Cheney]ing hippies of "culture war" lore.

TPM Cafe has a discussion going this week on Alterman's current book Why We're Liberals. I've linked some of the individual contributions below. Joan McCarter responds to an argument of his that seems to echo a number of the factually-challenged assumptions of the "culture war" slams on liberals:

I'm a liberal, and an unapologetic one. I won't apologize for the liberal past of my forbearers [sic]. I won't apologize for the fight against poverty. I won't apologize for demanding a rational foreign policy that kept the U.S. a respectable member of the family of nations. I won't apologize for standing up for a woman's right to make her own decisions about her health care. I won't apologize for believing passionately in the right to privacy for all Americans.

I particularly won't apologize for the fight for civil rights. I certainly won't apologize for being appalled and repulsed by the fact that torture has been added to our nation's repertoire of "intelligence gathering tools." And I won't apologize for having full-throatedly opposed George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, a war based on lies.

This position makes sense. Someone who advocates those ideas doesn't need to apologize for the images that conservatives conjure up in their heads to demonize liberals. Otherwise, you quickly slide into the "FOX liberal" mold, e.g., "I'm a liberal on most things, but ...", "Liberals need to start reaching out to people of faith instead of ignoring them ...", etc.

The experience of the Iraq War in particular has lead me to a far more critical view of US policies in the Cold War period's than before the war, or at least a far more critical mood. And also more skeptical of military interventions, even in concert with allies or for "humanitarian" or genuinely democratic causes. Both liberals and conservatives need to get a far more realistic view of the limits of American military power, become far more skeptical about war and defend international law (including for the US) with far more dedication.

I definitely have a critical view of real existing Democratic liberals in those regards. But when it comes to agreeing with the criticism that liberals are "elitist" coming from partisans of the Republican Party, whose core operative principle is to free billionaires from the burden of having to pay taxes to support their country - that I'm not so inclined to do.

But McCarter seems to have some honest-to-Andrew Jacksonian impulses when she writes:

Again, liberals have made mistakes, but they pale in comparison to what the Republicans have wrought. Out of control deficits and a devastated economy. Another quagmire of a war and what's worse, a war we entered on the basis of lies. A destroyed international reputation. A failing infrastructure. Torture. It's less important that we treat our opponents with respect than that we shine a bright light on the depth and breadth of the mess they have created.

Sounds about right to me.

At TPM Cafe, Alterman quotes a passage from a speech of John Kennedy's during his 1960 Presidential campaign, suggesting plausibly that Democrats today could make good use of the same approach:

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal"? If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then . . . we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the -people--their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties--someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

While we're on the subject, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in his 1960 election pamphlet for JFK, Kennedy or Nixon: Does it make any difference? offered the following perspective on how healthy democratic practices at home are essential to foreign policy strength, as well:

Above all, [Kennedy] realizes that national strength includes much more than armies and weapon systems. It depends essentially on long-run factors - on the education and health of our people, on the guarantee of their equal opportunity, on the growth of our economy, on the development of our resources. These all seem to him wise and necessary objects of national investment. Nor does he feel that such things can be postponed to some more propitious time. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to solve our problems. As Lippmann has said, "Once you've failed to educate a child, you've failed, and you can't make that up later." Kennedy's view, it is clear, is that affirmative Presidential leadership is desperately required - to bring about, through the traditional democratic means of Congressional action, a better allocation of our resources; to assure equal rights to all our citizens; to revolutionize the moral tone of the country; to inaugurate the new epoch of national progress. ...

Kennedy is surely right. It is no accident that America has had its most effective moments of world leadership when our foreign policy has expressed a visible reality of American performance. The words of Wilson and Roosevelt went straight to the minds and hearts of the people of the world, while the words of Eisenhower and Nixon fall on deaf ears, not because Wilson and Roosevelt had better words (though this was the case too), but because their words were underwritten by their deeds. The fact that Wilson and matters to the world. It was Wilson's New Freedom which validated his Fourteen Points, as it was Roosevelt's New Deal which validated his Four Freedoms. The effect of TVA, for example, on the imagination of aspiring peoples everywhere has been incalculable. It is Adlai Stevenson's record as an American liberal which makes his the most influential American voice to the outside world today. But what is authentic idealism on the lips of men who have won the right to talk about freedom and opportunity and social justice becomes the sheerest moralism and hypocrisy when uttered to the world by people notably indifferent to such things in their own land. Men who address righteous sermons to the world while at home they tolerate [Joseph] McCarthy and Little Rock [violent resistance to desegregation] and West Virginia poverty and the rest are bound to strike others as ineffectual figureheads or sanctimonious frauds. (my emphasis)

Republican polemics now commonly try to contrast the "tough" JFK foreign policy with the allegedly weaker version of today's Democrats. But Kennedy never embraced the crazy, militaristic idea that negotiating with a potential adversary was not only wrong but weak and cowardly. Much less the notion that war and the threat of war were the only meaningful tools in dealing with actual or potential adversaries.

Where Does American Liberalism Stand Today? by Eric Alterman 05/19/08

About those "Mistakes" by Joan McCarter 05/20/08

Tags: eric alternman, jfk, john kennedy, joan mccarter, liberalism

JFK and Withdrawing from Vietnam

James Galbraith is fast becoming one of my favorite writers on economic and political topics. He's a professor at the University of Texas and the son of the famous economist and social commentator (John) Kenneth Galbraith, who is now in his mid-90s.

He has recently published two articles examining the evidence that John Kennedy had decided in 1963 to withdraw American troops from Vietnam by the end of 1965, and makes a convincing case that he did.

Kennedy, Vietnam and Iraq Salon.com 11/22/03

Exit Strategy Boston Review Oct-Nov 2003

The Salon article talks more about the broader context of the decision; the Boston Review article gives more of the details on the historical record. Despite the title of the Salon piece, one of the things I like about both articles is that he is cautious in drawing current lessons from that historical moment. A refreshing change from the endless superficial historical analogies we've heard in connection with the Iraq War. As he puts it in Salon:

What is the importance of all this for us today? At some level, it is less than one might suppose. Kennedy's decision to withdraw U.S. advisors from Vietnam is not, in my view, the Rosetta Stone of the past 40 years. And because it was the right decision then certainly does not mean that it would be the right decision, right now, for Iraq. It is simply a stubbornly denied fact, which needs to be fitted into the larger mosaic of unresolved history of that time. It is a test of our own willingness to face history as it was.

He also highly recommends two books on the topic: JFK and Vietnam (1992) by John Newman and Death of a Generation (2003) by Howard Jones.

Tags: james galbraith, john kennedy, vietnam war