The JFK Factor

Joe Lieberman says "When I find among the candidates running this year that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain." This will no doubt offend a lot of liberal sensibilities, especially among Obama fans who have a tendency to compare their guy to the youthful energy and excitement that Kennedy inspired.

But I think there really is truth to the idea that McCain's foreign policy is more JFKennedyesque than is Obama's. The difference is that Kennedy's foreign policy wasn't very good. Under first Truman and then Eisenhower, the United States established a constructive, internationalist approach to policy in Europe -- a strong NATO alliance would ensure that the western bloc didn't fall prey to infighting while also deterring Soviet attack. Combined with a strong bilateral alliance with Japan, the idea, as outlined by George Kennan, was that if the "free world" could stay united and defended it would ultimately outlast the fundamentally unworkable Soviet approach.

In the third world, the Eisenhower administration did develop a taste for imperial adventures, but then first JFK and then LBJ took this much further in Vietnam and no good came of it. As I argue in Heads in the Sand, the Clinton administration mostly, and wisely, followed the internationalist elements of our Cold War policies -- policies that emphasized rule-governed cooperation among like-minded countries rather than coercive efforts to manipulate the destiny of foreigners. The Bush administration came into power and, for some reason, decided that the kind of thinking that gave us the Mossadegh coup and the Vietnam War was what the country really needed and McCain fits firmly into that tradition.

Comments

Had John McCain been President from 1961-1965, he would have sparked off WWIII between the US and the Soviet Union. First, he would have backed the Bay of Pigs Invasion, which would caused the Soviets to intervene and led to a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR. Second, even if McCain did not support the Bay of Pigs invasion, he would have listened to the hawks during the Cuban Missile Crisis and bombed Cuba, which would have also led to a nuclear exchange between us and the Godless Reds. If would never have occurred to McCain to actually negotiate with Khruschev, and promise to take our Polaris missiles out of Turkey in exchange for the Soviets removing their missiles from Cuba.

Posted by eltoro | March 31, 2008 3:01 PM

What about Korea? Granted, it was a UN-authorized war -- sorry, "police action" -- but that was only because the UN authorized it at a time when the Soviets had withdrawn from the UN and China's seat was held by Taiwan. It seems odd to compare JFK and LBJ invidiously to Truman because of their military intervention in Vietnam while not mentioning Truman's intervention in Korea.

Posted by Fred | March 31, 2008 3:06 PM

Remember the movie "The Contender", starring Joan Allen?

Remember her speech at the end?

Good times.

Posted by Jaybird | March 31, 2008 3:07 PM

The difference is that Kennedy's foreign policy wasn't very good.

I basically agree with you. By all accounts I've read, Kennedy's first meeting with Kruschev was a disaster; the weakness and fecklessness he conveyed may have contributed to Krushcev's decision to put missiles in Cuba. Also, Kennedy's decision to go along with the Bay of Pigs was terrible. Finally, he pushed us further into the quagmire of Vietnam.

On the other hand, you have to give him credit for how he handled the Cuban Missile Crisis. That really could have sparked a nuclear war. Kennedy resisted the advice of the militarists and resolved it peacefully.

Posted by Jim W | March 31, 2008 3:14 PM

I actually agree with both MY and eltoro. JFK's foreign policy may be better argued to be McCain's then Obama's. But also, McCain would have been worse than JFK. And domestically they are a lot different. I hope the public at least gets some glimpse of the fact that McCain is a hardcore conservative on both domestic and foreign policy.

Posted by mpowell | March 31, 2008 3:16 PM

"On the other hand, you have to give him credit for how he handled the Cuban Missile Crisis."

Didn't he instigate the crisis in the first place, by putting nuclear missiles in Turkey?

Posted by Fred | March 31, 2008 3:23 PM

I don't think anyone has effectively argued that Obama embraced the same foreign-policy stance as JFK. I think the extent of the comparison was less substantive: personality, rhetorical style, etc.

The McCain-JFK foreign policy analogy is ridiculous. First of all, the circumstances are entirely different. The dynamics of our NATO alliance are different. So too are the dynamics of almost all of our bilateral alliances. And then throw in the dynamics of our justice system in shaping our foreign policies (defining enemy combatants, terrorist nations, etc.) and it becomes impossible to find enough common variables to construct an analogy that makes any sense at all.

If the analogies don't work, why do we keep using them?

Posted by AKBY | March 31, 2008 3:31 PM

Well yeah, JFK and McCain were both born in 1917. Totally natural that they would share some views on the world.

Posted by Jr | March 31, 2008 3:37 PM

Is there some reason to think Lieberman was really talking narrowly about JFK's foreign policy legacy? Other than that I agree with AKBY, JFK's less than three years of foreign policy was obviously dominated by Berlin, Cuba and Vietnam. Maybe he had to be more confrontational somewhat to establish credibility that was assumed with the wartime Truman and Eisenhower, but I do not know how you can say it was some kind of grand deviation or big failure in the context of the times. More importantly, JFK was dealing in the context of enormous U.S. superiority and a defined state sponsored adversary. The fact the McCain is going to act like that is still the reality is the problem.

Posted by doug | March 31, 2008 3:44 PM

Sorry, Matt, but that is a really crazy view of Eisenhower's foreign policy. Eisenhower not only initiated a policy of open air testing of atom bombs (and, it seems, at least one hydrogen bomb) that, by the estimate of a Senate appointed committee of medical experts, probably killed 200,000 Americans (and they were just looking at the effects of iodine isotopes), but, as Tim Wiener's Legacy of Ashes shows, Eisenhower's CIA laid the foundation of the hatred for America that is often felt by people in the third world by a program never before undertaken by our government to subvert other governments, help dicators and death squads, and in every way leave a legacy of crime, injustice, gross peculation and mass murder. It was Eisenhower who ordered the attack on Indonesia that pre-figured the Bay of Pigs, down to the captured American forces being used as prisoner-hostages. It was Eisenhower that initiated the series of massacres in Guatamala, by overthrowing Arbenz, that of course helped make the American domination of Central and Latin America so much worse than anything the Soviets did in Eastern Europe. Eisenhower initiated the policy of exaggerating the enemy's forces to swell a military-industrial complex that has now become entrenched as a welfare system for the GOP.

There's simply no competition. Eisenhower was the worst foreign policy president we have ever had - he makes Bush look good. Every disaster, every imperialist masquerade, every blocked attempt to cut the military down to reasonable size, they all are Eisenhower's legacy.

Posted by roger | March 31, 2008 3:44 PM

"Eisenhower initiated the policy of exaggerating the enemy's forces to swell a military-industrial complex..."

Isn't this the same guy who made one of his last Presidential speeches warning against the military-industrial complex? Isn't that, indeed, where we get the name from? I'm not really interested in defending Eisenhower, but I would like to know how you'd reconcile your statement to his speech.

Posted by Chris O. | March 31, 2008 3:49 PM

Didn't he instigate the crisis in the first place, by putting nuclear missiles in Turkey?

Arguably, yes. It was actually Eisenhower who signed the Jupiter deal with Turkey, in 1959. Kennedy had the option to cancel the deployment, but chose not to. In retrospect, the decision is questionable, but none of that diminishes the credit he deserves for how he handled the ensuing crisis. He showed some serious backbone and cool--headedness in opposition to both the Russians and the Curtis LeMays.

Posted by Ryan | March 31, 2008 3:53 PM

"Is there some reason to think Lieberman was really talking narrowly about JFK's foreign policy legacy?"

Well, he couldn't be talking about personality...cool, young, and charismatic vs. hot-tempered, dull as grass, and old beyond imagination.

Posted by 55 | March 31, 2008 3:54 PM

FWIW, Investor's Business Daily says that Obama is "No Economic JFK". Excerpt:

Along with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, Jack Kennedy — one of Obama's heroes — ranks with the great tax-cutting presidents of American history. His 1963 proposal called for both a huge drop in the top individual income-tax rate and a significant reduction in the cap-gains rate — which then stood at the very same 25% level Obama now talks of increasing it to.

JFK knew a cap-gains rate even as high as 25% would lock up wealth that should flow to more productive investments. "The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions," he pointed out, as well as "the mobility and flow of risk capital . . . the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy."

Posted by Fred | March 31, 2008 3:56 PM

"Eisenhower initiated the policy of exaggerating the enemy's forces to swell a military-industrial complex..."

Isn't this the same guy who made one of his last Presidential speeches warning against the military-industrial complex? Isn't that, indeed, where we get the name from? I'm not really interested in defending Eisenhower, but I would like to know how you'd reconcile your statement to his speech. - Chris O.

I thought it was JFK who started the really big arms build-ups. I've long taken the military-industrial complex speech to at least partially be a warning about JFK (and the looming Vietnam war, escalated in part by JFK and his advisors, inhereted by Johnson).

OTOH, Eisenhower's foreign policy was pretty FUBAR: many of the worst mistakes of JFK were merely him maintaining inhereted Ike-era SNAFUs (and if he would have distanced himself from these SNAFUs, he would have had hell to pay from the hawks *). To a large degree, even though St. Ronnie has been given the credit, pretty much everything we did right during the Cold War (and the very idea of containment -- an idea with which those -- e.g. all the media wanker who set the terms of mainstream debate in this country -- who think the choice in foreign policy is between abject appeasement and militarism that would make Tojo blush -- and that those of us who don't support endless wars must be appeasers -- would do well to familiarize themselves) is the legacy of Truman and his team.

Of course, the Holy Joes of the world wouldn't deny this. They'd just misrepresent Truman -- even if someone like Holy Joe or St. John McCain, at the time, would have called Truman an appeaser (for not wanting to nuke Russia) and hyper-partisan/overly-strident (for not "denouncing" the "give 'em hell" comment to him, etc.)

* in some ways, relative to his times, JFK was rather a cool, peace-lovin' kinda guy ... IIRC from what I've heard historian-types say on the radio, Dean frickin' Acheson thought that JFK wasn't being tough enough during the Cuban missile crisis!

Posted by DAS | March 31, 2008 4:06 PM

You are right 55 if you are inclined to interpret what Joe Lieberman using a sort of occam's razor for mendacity, that the least mendacious, least absurd version is probably what he meant. I do not think that is actually a good test for Lieberman pronouncements.

Posted by Doug | March 31, 2008 4:22 PM

"The one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain," Lieberman said. "It is my fondest wish and my strong belief that a President McCain will bang mob-connected hookers in the White House swimming pool, and that his own vice president will one day describe President McCain's foreign policy as 'Murder Incorporated.' Thank you very much, and God bless America."

Posted by JB | March 31, 2008 4:29 PM

Look at Eisenhower's military spending. It consumed half of the federal budget, and 8.5 percent of the GNP. If we had such a vague memory of the Reagan years that we only attached him to something he'd said about the need for balanced budgets, we'd perhaps think that was actually a Reagan priority. Boy, would we be surprised, then, looking at Reagan's actual budgets!
Similarly, JFK went to the right of Eisenhower on missile procurement, thus pissing the old guy off and making him say the one thing anybody remembers Eisenhower ever saying.

The history of liberal fondness for Eisenhower goes back to the seventies, when Gary Wills, I think it was, blaming JFK for Vietnam, contrasted him with the great Ike. This was so contrarian that it became an irresistible meme among the chattering class. So it is hard, really, to find anybody who will say bad things about Ike now, and it is easy to find people saying bad things about JFK - it is the Slate disease, contrarianism feeding on itself. It just happens to be bullshit.

If you read Bramford's books about the way Ike used SAC, you understand the roots of Doctor Strangelove. Remember, these people thought of war in terms of WWII - thus, risking a million people or twenty million really meant, as George C. Scott's character says, "I'm not saying we won't get our hair mussed. Twenty million tops!"

The person in our politics who most resembles the people around Eisenhower is Dick Cheney. He would have fit right in.

Posted by roger | March 31, 2008 4:37 PM

It's a stupid comparison. The threats facing us now are completely different. It's a fun exercise to think what JFK would do in this situation and what McCain would do in Vietnam, but that's about it.

Posted by Gus | March 31, 2008 4:42 PM

I don't think anyone has effectively argued that Obama embraced the same foreign-policy stance as JFK. I think the extent of the comparison was less substantive: personality, rhetorical style, etc.

Unless one counts Obama himself.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080329/ap_on_el_pr/obama_bush

GREENSBURG, Pa. - Sen. Barack Obama said Friday he would return the country to the more "traditional" foreign policy efforts of past presidents, such as George H.W. Bush, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Posted by Julene | March 31, 2008 5:09 PM

Perhaps Lieberman means that both JFK and McCain have an eye for the ladies?

Posted by Andy | March 31, 2008 5:13 PM

if you actually read through the approach Obama and his foreign policy team take towards foreign affairs, he is actually not JFK at all. Also on another note, Eisenhower warned repeatedly in his 2 terms that the US must never intervene in the Middle East or it would be costly for decades to come.

Posted by kate | March 31, 2008 6:54 PM

I think Matt's argument is only slightly unfair. McCain has been flying around the world giving speeches about how multilaterlist his foreign policy would be. His embrace of the Iraq War and his hawkish rhetoric on Iran do not necessarily signal what kind of diplomatic strategy he would pursue.

Posted by Will | March 31, 2008 6:55 PM

In terms of Vietnam, it seems to me that both Eisenhower and Kennedy deserve pretty similar levels of blame (and probably Truman as well), but that the lion's share ought to go with the obvious candidate: Lyndon Johnson, the one who actually started direct U.S. military involvement in the Vietnamese civil war.

Beyond that, I'd say that we ought to distinguish what was Eisenhower's and what was Dulles's foreign policy - the upshot seems to be that Eisenhower was much smarter on the stuff than Dulles. But Eisenhower was clearly, I think, better on European policy than Kennedy. Eisenhower was generally about maintaining good relations with our European allies, while the Kennedy administration was much more arrogant and wanting everyone to defer to them. And Kennedy's performance in Vienna was a cock-up. On "fucking up the third world" stuff, I'm not sure either of them deserves much glory.

Kennedy really does deserve a great deal of credit for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Whatever the extent to which the Turkish missiles (which had been there for some time) or Kennedy's poor performance at Vienna may have had in inspiring Khrushchev to initiate the crisis, once it began Kennedy handled it just about as well as anyone could have. The consensus of virtually all of his advisors was to attack the missile sites. If that had happened, my understanding is that things would probably have escalated very quickly to full-scale nuclear war, because the Russians had tactical nukes in Cuba that they were prepared to use if the missile sites were attacked. Kennedy withstood all those advisors and risked looking weak by agreeing to a deal about Turkey, but was still firm enough to make Khrushchev blink and be the one who seemed to lose his nerve, by agreeing to the deal without the quid pro quo being made public. That was some skillful diplomacy. LBJ would have listened to Rusk and McNamara and Acheson and Taylor and destroyed the world.

Posted by John | March 31, 2008 6:56 PM

It's a fun exercise to think what JFK would do in this situation and what McCain would do in Vietnam

I'll go out on a limb and say he'd fly the A-4.

Posted by guineapigfury | March 31, 2008 9:06 PM

Matt's historical description is a bit, erm, ahistorical. The military misadventures of the JFK/LBJ years were not departures from the Kennan doctrine but rather illustrations of the Kennan doctrine's limitations when extended to its logical conclusion.

Kennan's iconic observation was that the postwar international economic system's stability was dependent upon the compliance of poorly developed, resource-rich nations whose populations were destined to enjoy only a tiny fraction of the prosperity experienced by large, rich nations with sophisticated finance systems.

As the decades after WWII wore on, some poor nations began to develop in ways that seemed to align more naturally with the Soviet system than with the American system. The fear among policymakers wedded to Kennan's view of the world was that if too many of these resource-rich nations began to fall into close alignment with the Soviets that this would prop up the Soviet system more or less indefinitely.

The Vietnam war happened when American policymakers were unable to accept the fact that their efforts to prevent a small, poor nation from falling out of the sphere of American influence had failed. Miscalculating the strategic value of Vietam (in hindsight, it had almost none), the US upended its own quite successful political and social system in a catastrophic effort to stave off the embarrassing admission that there were limitations to the effectiveness of great-power military might.

Eventually, of course, the US had to admit defeat anyway, and managed to do so before the economic stagnation that resulted from the neglect of useful policymaking during the period when almost all of American political attention was focused in some way or other on Vietnam.

In a sense, Lieberman is right here - McCain and Bush both represent, in a stange sense, a return to the strategic ideas of the Kennedy administration. It's just that those ideas were later discredited by a disastrous war that went on for years after all conceivable justifications for continuing the conflict ran out.

Now, of course, we have a chance for these ideas to be fully discredited all over again, except this time with one of the great strategic prizes in the history of mechanized warfare.

Or, we could elect a Democrat and try to do something constructive.

APS

Posted by Ape Man | March 31, 2008 11:05 PM

Oops:

"Eventually, of course, the US had to admit defeat anyway, and managed to do so before collapsing under the weight ofthe economic stagnation that resulted from the neglect of useful policymaking during the period when almost all of American political attention was focused in some way or other on Vietnam.

Posted by Ape Man | March 31, 2008 11:08 PM

Actually Kennan's view expressed in the Long Telegram, was that Soviet expansionism, was just another form of Soviet Nationalism. He very quickly moved away from containment,to negotiation
;negating his own theory. Late in his dotage, he was using the tenets of the L.T. to argue against intervention in Bosnia. Blaming LBJ can only go so far; as he and Russell opposed Us intervention in Vietnam, back during Dien Ben Phu. In the interim, Lansdale & his friend Diem; who was sponsored by those militant cold warriors like
William Douglas, Van Den Heuvel Sr etc; took charge in South Vietnam; while Ho Chi Minh followed his Leninist if not Stalinist program up North. Eisenhower sent in advisers as did Kennedy, and the Soviets and the Chinese did their part. Why is it there is always a duality; West/East Berlin, Northern/South Korea, China (specially in the 1949-69 period)Taiwan, Cuba,
Miami; and the former is always the bleakest approximation of hell on earth, and the other is a vibrant society. Why do liberals, more often than not, want to understand one, and have contempt for the other?

Posted by narciso | March 31, 2008 11:19 PM

Kennan's meandering views throughout the decades aren't really relevant in the same way as the actual policy doctrine he left behind.

He was of course correct both that the Soviet system was inherently inferior and that there was a great danger that the USSR would be able to expand its influence because paradoxically, the state of the Russian economy (in which very few people were actually living all that well) had some propaganda value when contrasted with the quite obvious fact that lots and lots of Americans were living comfortably off the fruits of the US relationship with various client nations while the citizens of those nations were doing comparatively poorly.

The problem is that no one ever figured out how to overcome popular resistance to foreign domination, a problem that persists to this day.

Put simply, even if it's in a country's objective interests to accept US dominance, if the population doesn't want it there's little that can be done. Eventually that spells trouble for any president who's really committed to preserving and expanding US economic influence in the undeveloped world. Bush is an extreme example, which is why he created the sort of strategic catastrophe in one administration that it took Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon almost two decades to precipitate.

APS

Posted by Ape Man | April 1, 2008 12:24 AM

Re: Ike.

It wasn't just Arbenz, ushering in decades of U.S.-sponsored mass murder and near-genocide in Central America.

It was also Mossadegh. We are still paying for that one 55 years later.

His farewell address was prophetic, but gives him undeserved credit now.

Posted by Eric | April 1, 2008 2:00 AM

Whatever the extent to which the Turkish missiles (which had been there for some time)

Again, no. They were installed only in early 1962. The deal to install them, it is true, was signed in 1959, and the Eisenhower administration had been trying to foist it on the Turks and other allies "for some time". But they had not been there long at the time of the Cuban crisis in October, 1962.

Otherwise, though, I agree with John on JFK's handling of the crisis.

Posted by Ryan | April 1, 2008 8:32 AM

Foreign policy is oftentimes equivocal. The Truman administration was extremely successful in creating a network of alliances in Europe that prevented war with the emerging Soviet bloc. In that manner they continued the successes of the Roosevelt administration. But to a great extent the success in Europe cost us credit in the developing world as our alliances with Britain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal allowed for the continuation of those nations colonial regimes, something that the Roosevelt administration was strongly opposed to. We can't do everything, and we made a choice.

Eisenhower's record seems far more mixed to me than Truman's far more like Kennedy's than Truman's. The biggest thing to note is how much more successful our foreign policy has been with regard to Europe and, say, Latin America than it has with East Asia, South Asia, or the Middle East.

Kennedy came about at a strange time. The generation that fought the Second World War came to power at the moment when the old post-war regime started breaking down. The biggest lesson those men who fought in the Second World War learned was, "Don't appease aggressors" and that lesson was precisely the wrong one to orient a post 1960 foreign policy. Of the three "imperial WWII presidents" Kennedy seems to have been more insightful and had more successes than Nixon or Johnson with regard to foreign policy, but they all suffered from similar failings. Finally, didn't Kennedy bring about a landmark test ban treaty with the Soviets? Let's not forget about that.

Posted by Lincoln Kennedy | April 2, 2008 3:03 AM