A-fing-men.

in not telling his vice-president that he was ignoring advice from the CIA and DoD. As Robert Dallek's biography of LBJ shows, President Johnson heavily listened to advice from his cabinet because (a) he felt insecure over their qualifications compared to his own, and (b) he thought JFK listened to their advice. LBJ had no idea that JFK had struck a deal with the russians over Cuba, he thought it was the tough posture the US had taken that caused the Russians to back down. If he had known the truth he would have run the presidency more like he ran Congress and trusted his instincts, which would have been better for the country as a whole. LBJ is still a very under-rated president.

PS. Johnson also told his library to "publish everything" including his mistakes over Vietnam. Its a shame that so many present and past presidents do not do the same (I'm looking at you Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and probably the Clinton library when completed).

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/JFK.htm

http://www.swans.com/library/art11/lproy26.html

...someone set the record straight. JFK was no warmonger.

I've grown so tired of reading over and over again the assertions put forth by the elite media and so-called "real historians" that JFK was a cold warrior who would have been pleased to sacrifice thousands, if not millions of lives in wars that may well have escalated into full-out nuclear engagement. This was JFK's worst nightmare.

I'm tired of hearing JFK being blamed for starting the Vietnam war. Anyone who takes time to do the research will find that Vietnam, like Cuba, were covert actions inherited from the Eisenhower administration. (By the way, Ike didn't want to send in ground forces, either. He "passed the buck" on to JFK.)

JFK was vehemently opposed to the notion of America starting a "preemptive war" with any nation. Unless the US was attacked outright, Kennedy was never going to commit our soldiers to war. Wasn't gonna happen. Not on his watch.

Shall we take just a moment here to look at the record of the US Presidents who came before and after him? Who's a warmonger?

Woodrow Wilson - ran and won on a platform of keeping the US out of Europe's war...then turned around and got us into WWI.

Franklin Roosevelt - same peace platform as Wilson. WWII.

Harry Truman - dropped the H-bomb. Very peaceful man indeed.

Dwight Eisenhower - Korean War. (Korea never attacked us)

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon - Vietnam. (same story)

And George W. Bush???? Oh, don't get me started!!!!

JFK's record of keeping this country out of war speaks for itself. He didn't just talk the talk, he walked the walk.

Let us remember that John Kennedy was a war hero in WWII. He had seen his share of action and knew all too well the horrors of war. Let us also remember that JFK volunteered for Navy service, against the wishes of his isolationist father, and at a time when many rich kids with important daddies were ducking active service or using family influence to get nice cushy assignments behind a desk. Instead of doing this, JFK begged his superiors for an assignment right in the middle of the action. And action was what he got when his PT boat was sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands.

JFK's war experience taught him many valuable lessons and he returned from WWI a changed man. A wiser man. A more temperate man. Yes, he was prepared to fight should this country ever experience another Pearl Harbor-like attack, but he certainly wasn't going to be swept up in the hysterical rush to judgement that so often circulates in diplomatic, military and intelligence circles every time a new perceived enemy pops up on our national radar.

This was, of course, not good news for the CIA/MI and the Joint Chiefs when he didn't take the bait to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. When he resolved the Cuban Missle Crisis peacefully without a shot being fired. Or negotiating a Test Ban treaty with the Soviets. Or when he made the decision to start getting our boys out of Vietnam. And it sure as hell wasn't good news for the warmongers when he spoke at American University of "not just peace in our time, but peace for all time."

JFK was a true President of Peace. I find it astonishing that this man never received the Nobel Peace Prize, while Wilson, Cordell Hull and even (gasp!) Henry Kissinger did. Go figure.

From the article: "JFK, Vietnam, and Oliver Stone" by Gary Aguilar

The years ... have not been kind to those who had stoned the director [Oliver Stone}. “Received wisdom” has been swamped by a tsunami of new and credible scholarship brought about by the declassifications of literally millions of pages of government secrets. The impetus for their release came directly from Stone, who publicly nagged about the absurdity of the government saying the case was “open and shut” while suppressing mountains of the evidence.

No doubt to the dismay of Stone’s detractors, a strikingly different and more favorable – even more Oliver Stone-like - view of Kennedy has recently emerged. In March 2005, long after similar accounts had been widely reported elsewhere, The Nation [magazine] finally acknowledged that the real JFK, despite his considerable personal peccadillos, was worlds away from the hawkish hooligan The Nation had been peddling for so long.

On March 14, 2005 The Nation reported: “We also now know that Kennedy that same spring [1963] ordered the Pentagon to plan to have all US troops out of Vietnam by early 1965, shortly after what he assumed would be his re-election – and further ordered that the troop pullout begin by the late fall of 1963. But he did not, of course, live to see their withdrawal.” This was an amazing metanoia for the leftist outlet that had not only hard-pitched the opposite a decade earlier, but had also used its letters pages to savagely beanball two well-known advocates of the withdrawl thesis: it’s originator, Peter Dale Scott, and Oliver Stone’s consultant-historian, John Newman.

Tardy or no, The Nation had finally joined the growing consensus of recognized historians and journalists. Naval War College historian David Kaiser, for example, wrote that his book, American Tragedy, documented the “numerous occasions during 1961, 1962, and 1963 on which Kennedy did exactly that [‘stopped the United States from going to war in Southeast Asia’], rejecting the near unanimous proposals of his advisers to put large numbers of American combat troops in Laos, South Vietnam, or both.” That conclusion was not at all what some informed observers had expected to find among the secrets.

University of Alabama historian Howard Jones said that when he began his study he “was dubious” about the assertions of “Kennedy apologists [that] he would not have sent combat troops to Vietnam and America’s longest war would never have occurred.” But “what strikes anyone reading the veritable mountain of documents relating to Vietnam,” Jones admitted to his own surprise, “is that the only high official in the Kennedy administration who consistently opposed the commitment of U.S. combat forces was the president.” “The materials undergirding this [Jones’] study demonstrate that President Kennedy intended to reverse the nation’s special military commitment to the South Vietnamese made in early 1961.”

Echoing Jones, journalist Fred Kaplan wrote that, “the argument that Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam becomes truly compelling only when you place [JFK’s] skepticism about the war in the context of his growing disenchantment with his advisers … .”

Historian Robert Dallek came to much the same conclusion. “Toward the end of his life John F. Kennedy increasingly distrusted his military advisers and was changing his views on foreign policy. A fresh look at the final months of his presidency suggests that a second Kennedy term might have produced not only an American withdrawal from Vietnam, but also rapprochement with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.”

Dallek produced a quote that gives a sense of the newly visible JFK: “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”