Kennedy lies
Christopher Hitchens
Washington Like every one else of my generation, I can remember exactly where I was standing and what I was doing on the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly killed me. In October 1962 I was in my first term at an English boarding school, and was at least as ignorant of Cuba as Ken- nedy was. But I have a very vivid recollec- tion of masters standing in unaccustomed huddles: of bluff reassurances from prefects and from (I think) the chaplain. I know that Richard Dimbleby signed off that night with a stiff upper lip injunction to parents to send their children to school the following day, but this didn't apply to !fly dormitory. Such was the relief at find- ing that the next day was not going to be the last that, like almost everybody else, I forgave Kennedy for gambling with my life. Such is the masochism of the human race.
But I have just finished reading an article in the Washington Post, entitled 'How I Remember Jack'. It is written by Senator Edward Kennedy, or at least signed by him. Every important contention in the article is a he. And, already, one can feel all the Ken- nedy hangers-on, in the media and aca- deme, gearing up for a great feast of sentimentality, maudlin grief and false accounting.
The two major lies in Senator Kennedy's article are these, and I quote: 'He [Jack] spent mornings working on Profiles in Courage, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book'. Then: 'He showed us that a President could stand up to the Soviet Union, as he did in the Cuban crisis, without sacrificing the ideals for which this nation must always stand.'
In fact, Profiles in Courage was written by Theodore Sorenson, who also penned Kennedy's flatulent but memorable inaugu- ration speech. And the Pulitzer Prize com- mittee (never less than impressionable as re- cent bogus awards have shown) was lobbied
almost out of existence by Arthur Krock, the establishment journalist who used the whole weight of the Kennedy family to get the Prize for his friend and patron JFK.
In his outstanding book The Kennedy Imprisonment, the historian Garry Wills meticulously documents this episode, as well as the other myths and fabrications which have been popularised by courtiers and toadies like Arthur Schlesinger. Pro- fessor Wills is no fellow-traveller — he started his career as an earnest toiler on William F. Buckley's National Review. But he is impatient with the flattery and stupidi- ty which surround Kennedy's presidency, and he has written a chapter on the Cuba crisis which is imperishable. To summarise it is to diminish it, but here goes.
Kennedy got into trouble with the Rus- sians over Cuba because he was waging a secret war against the Castro regime and lying about it to the American Congress, public and press. He thus had no alternative but to present Russian aid to Cuba as an in- explicable and sinister move. He could not admit that Khrushchev was right when he charged that thousands of American agents were, in Wills's words, 'plotting his [ Castro's] death, the destruction of his Government's economy, the sabotaging of his mines and mills, the crippling of his cop- per and sugar industries. We had invaded Cuba once. Officials high in Congress and the executive department thought we should have followed up with overwhelm- ing support for that invasion.' It is now commonplace in the United States to describe the Bay of Pigs invasion as a 'fiasco'. This description rather euphemises the real event. The attempt to take over and run Cuba, to enlist the sup- port of the Mafia in the assassination of Castro, to poison and devastate Cuban crops and to land a mercenary army on Cuban shores, would have been much more disastrous if it had succeeded than if it had
failed. Kennedy, we now know, was told this by quite close advisers. Yet he persisted in the policy, determined not to be out-done by a smaller country in his first term. And he repeatedly lied about the Soviet motives in supplying missiles to fortify the island so that, as Professor Wills puts it, 'the Ken- nedys looked like brave resisters of aggres- sion, though they had actually been the causes of it'.
In a deft passage of reasoning, Wills con- fronts the argument that the Soviet missiles were a threat to America in any case: `Would he [Castro] launch his missiles in conjunction with a larger Russian attack again, knowing that he could incinerate his island as a side-blow in our response to Russia? Even if Castro had wanted to immolate his nation that way, his missiles would not have helped the Russians might, rather, have been a hindrance, because of the "ragged attack" problem. If missiles were launched simultaneously from Russia and Cuba, the Cuban ones, arriving first, would confirm the warning of Russian attack. Or, if Cuban missiles were to be launched later, radar warnings of the Rus- sian ones firing would let us destroy the Cuban rockets in their silos.'
Kennedy knew all this too. It was his swaggering desire publicly to outface the Russians without publicly admitting his war on Cuba that brought the world to the best view it has yet had of the Gates of Hell. And it was only the restraint of Khrushchev (another fact that Kennedy could not ad- mit) that made the difference between a view and a death. It's well understood now that. Khrushchev lost his job as a result hardly the best news from the Kremlin in the postwar period.
Reviewing behaviour like this, a sycophant like Arthur Schlesinger wrote of the Cuba crisis: `It was this combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so match- lessly calibrated, that dazzled the world,' It may be, and it probably is, a complete waste of time trying to undo the grandiose absurdity of the Kennedy myth. If Ameri- cans knew then what they know now about JFK — that he shared a mistress with a Mafia murderer, that he faked the author- ship of his 'books': that he gave a fictitious account of the wartime PT-109 episode that made him a Hollywood hero; that he dissembled about Vietnam and lied in his sparkling teeth about Cuba — they might not have trusted him as they did. But, knowing all this now, they cannot quite relate it to the man they think they remember. Somehow, the drama of Dallas has sanctified and cancelled everything. All the senior figures in the Democratic Party will be taking part in ostentatious mourning this week. They will also keep sneering at Ronald Reagan as a phoney movie-star more interested in media manipulation and cheap successes than in the serious business of politics and diplomacy. The truth is that Reagan has not, in his entire presidency to date, acted with anything like the gun- slinging idiocy that the boy-hero did.
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