Letters to the Editor
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shooter
I was also a in HS, a junior, during the missile crisis. those events from those years are indelible, but we've learned different lessons. Jack Kennedy was deeply flawed, utterly charming, and surrounded by a cabinet that makes Bush's look like special olympics candidates. Jack's "preparation" was entirely groomed by daddy, who made his millions in prohibition, and his real world experience, PT109 notwithstanding, was probably less than Obama brings with him. The year I find most haunting is '68, for reasons too obvious to restate. RFK would have won, easily. but that was taken from us, and not, I think, by chance. The cynicism, disconnection, alienation, and steadily declining voter participation is not an accident. It's what Ike warned against, the military industrial whores defending their money by any means necessary. I find the Clintons entirely too burdened by baggage of their own creation. I voted twice for Bill, but without enthusiasm. My lack of enthusiasm was richly rewarded, with his squandering of our majorities in both houses of congress, his licentious and sexist behavior that set the table for Bush to get close enough to steal the election, his decimation of the safety net for the poor (welfare reform my ass). Hillary is riding his record. She claims it, all Arkansas and DC parts of it, and she gets from that what she deserves: a record as the consummate insider, deal maker, sellout and hack. Bright? Hell yeah. Visionary, or having the eloquence to call a nation to sacrifice (there's a bunch coming, and very soon); no way. She's pedestrian, pedantic, predictable, and calculating. She's Nixon in a pants suit. He had a long record, was very, very bright, and didn't give a damn about anything but winning. If he'd shaved before the teevee debate, he'd have won. Would he have invaded Berlin? Is that the lesson you learned? A strong president is a militarist at heart? How sad. We'll never know what Jack might have been. His first hundred days were decidedly checkered, but he did, undeniably, offer hope. Irrational hope, some might say. going to the moon. How irrelevant to daily American life. But a common goal, and a visionary in the bully pulpit. I'll take a chance on that rather than someone who's already triangulated so many times she doesn't know where she stands, except to keep running no matter what.
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NY shooter
They're going to kick us out of Salon if we hijack the board for Kennedy debates. But until they do this is fun.
Kennedy handled the Khrushchev meeting badly. He certainly should have anticipated the textbook Marxism speech he got in return for his unsolicited theory of foreign affairs. But Kennedy was devoted to the idea of the power of rational minds to reach rational decisions. During his lifetime (though not now) opponents thought he was too detached, too cool, too rational. And they weren't entirely wrong about the early Kennedy.
He was discouraged after the meeting with Khrushchev, but still thought keeping lines of communication open was better than not trying at all. Khrushchev had sent a letter of congratulations after JFK's election, and Kennedy wrote back. After Vienna they exchanged letters, and whether by agreement or by habit they began a secret correspondence which continued throughout JFK's term. The State Department declassified these letters a few years ago, and now all of them - about 350 full pages - are available at the State Department's website.
And they are fascinating for what they include and don't include, and for how they changed. At the beginning they were very formal, very long defenses of their respective political systems. Then they got sort of official, as if they were being ghost-written by diplomats. But after the Cuban missile crisis they became more like real exchanges, and here and there the Kennedy wit even came in. Khrushchev sent a very bristling letter expressing outrage at the way he had been treated by a political cartoonist, and Kennedy sent an answer that was pure JFK: the tradition of a free press prevents me from intervening on your behalf. In fact, political cartoonists occasionally treat me unkindly, as hard as that must be for you and even for me to understand.
Khrushchev's letters were all over the place. He had completed school only through the second grade, and for many of his letters he seemed to rely on a committee of writers. But others sounded dictated, full of disjointed sentences and peasant folklore used to introduce big questions or big challenges. You couldn't read them without getting the idea that this was a brilliant but entirely self educated man, who was trying extraordinarily hard to understand what he was supposed to do on the global stage. It was all learn as you go, and it wasn't smooth sailing. But he was sort of out there without a map, and if he was wrong about a lot of things, he was not dumb, and he was not cynical. He was a true believer in the Revolution, and this managed to come through his letters. He also had a peasant's faith in peasant wisdom, illustrating many of his point with jokes or stories that were supposed to express the soul of a nation. He was especially fond of the scorpion crossing the bridge joke that ends with: I know it doesn't make sense, but that's my nature.
And this is part of the reason why, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Sorensen were able to respond to the friendly letter and ignore the formal letter. They had grown familiar with Khrushchev's slightly eccentric two tiers of communication. There was the official Soviet style letter, full of stiff committee prose, and the Khrushchev late-at-night style letter, rambling on in heartfelt if slightly confusing stream of consciousness. They went with the Khrushchev-dictated letter.
So when Obama says he wants to talk with our adversaries, I'm happy to hear it. Talking doesn't commit you to stronger measures, and doesn't prevent you from acting when you have to act. But anything that gives you a better picture of who this guy is, and why he thinks the way he does has, to help.