Ye-es, ER, if you'll post it here at this website.
As for my next post, . . .
Just before the beginning of the last century, 2 men sat down with the casualty rolls of both the North and the South, in order to try to figure out how many casualties occurred during the American Civil War, and they came up with a figure of 640,000. And that figure held true to this decade, when a different man sat down with a computer, which was not available then, and with algorithms, which may or may not have been available then, and with the 1860 census and the 1870 census, and found what he thought was an undercount of some 17% or a casualty count of 750,000 during the American Civil War.
To be continued . . .
Okay it's long and kind of rough since I never re-wrote it beyond putting down my thoughts circa 2003, but here 'tis....
John Kennedy’s Presidency, November 1963-January 1969In death John Kennedy entered iconic status, and from the time of his murder in November 1963 up to about the late-1980s, when his image became tarnished by stories of his philandering, most Americans tended to perceive Kennedy as elevated to a position among the greatest holders of our nation’s highest office.
When asked to cite those men whose service as President placed them above all others, Kennedy’s name invariably found its way onto that lofty list among such dignitaries as Washington, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts.
Discerning individuals often questioned what among our thirty-fifth President’s achievements in the scant thirty-four months he was in office merited such distinction, but most seemed also to agree that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was at least a competent Chief Executive, and most again found themselves willing to concede that he gave every indication of growing more adept still the longer he occupied the Oval Office.
Given this widespread evaluation, let us begin with two presumptions: the first that Kennedy somehow survived the twenty-second of November 1963, and that he successfully attained re-election a year beyond that. With those variables taken as givens, speculation on what the next five years of the Kennedy Presidency might have given us may go something like this…
After returning home to the White House late on the night of November 22, 1963, a visibly shaken President took a few moments to joke with reporters about his brush with death. Knowing every media outlet the world over would be covering the biggest story since the end of World War Two, the President handled the events in Dallas in a way that garnered near-universal admiration. Even Premier Khrushchev, it would be imagined, might place a call to him, expressing gladness at Kennedy’s miraculous survival after shots fired from a nearby building struck his limousine, missing him by inches. Regaining his composure and making the most of a golden opportunity to court the public in the weeks that followed the “Dallas incident,” Kennedy was often in the spotlight, and polls showed his popularity at record-setting highs.
The man could do no wrong.
1964 came and went. Kennedy handily defeated his Republican opponent, winning forty-one states, and was carried into his second term on a wave of goodwill left over from Dallas the year before, and also due to the fact that the ensuing twelve months had seen a warming of relations with the USSR, an upswing in the US economy, and the arrival of yet another child in his and Jackie’s marriage. The Camelot image was never stronger than it was going into 1965.
Then, the 1960s truly began…
Kennedy, secretly dealing with health issues unknown to the public and involved with several women, found himself in a clandestine feud with FBI Director Hoover, who feared that the Negro Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South and elsewhere had Marxist roots detrimental to the nation. He pressured Kennedy to exercise more restraint in his public support of the cause.
Likewise Kennedy’s Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, virulently desirous of the nomination in 1968, also spoke with Kennedy about the effect the administration’s blank check backing of Martin Luther King might have on white southern voters in the coming mid-term elections.
Kennedy, however, feeling himself invulnerable and very much like a king, paid scant heed to these men and seemed to dare Hoover to make a move against him. Hoover, in possession of blackmailing materials, would never quite act against the President but the tensions were there, and all the while the Civil Rights Movement continued to make headlines and exert a divisive influence on much of America.
Meanwhile across the Pacific in a small southeast Asian nation few Americans could pronounce, Kennedy, who reveled in playing king of his court, was in love with his “pet war” in Vietnam, which was not actually going as well as he’d hoped. Deprived the opportunity to oversee what would have been a popular invasion of Marxist Cuba, Kennedy instead made do with what had begun early in his first term as an almost private conflict in former Indochina which was by his second term drawing in more and more Americans and resulting in more US deaths.
Having formed an elite corps of special forces called the Green Berets, and having actually designed this branch’s uniforms himself, Kennedy had once enjoyed his daily briefings regarding the goings on in that theater of operations as his crack teams of commandos joined regular army “advisors” in bringing havoc to Communist forces. But by 1966, Vietnam was indeed a very big deal for Kennedy and whatsmore it was suddenly competing with the Civil Rights Movement as a lead story on evening news broadcasts.
While still popular with the public, various factors were slowly eroding the image that JFK could do no wrong. People in the south and even elsewhere in the US questioned exactly how far blacks actually ought to come forward, and exactly how far the President was willing to accommodate them. Republicans and conservative Democrats exploited these concerns with some success. Kennedy’s signing of the Civil Rights Act, one very similar to that brought into law under the Johnson administration in our own time, alienated some and drew praise from others, but by its controversial nature alone served to cool much of the one-time universal acclaim Kennedy enjoyed post-Dallas with most Americans privately being unsure exactly how they felt about the act itself.
And then more and more there was the Vietnam question. Yes, polls showed three Americans in four backed US presence in Vietnam, but questions were arising in that direction. How many troops were going to be needed, how long were Americans going to be there, and why was progress toward (a surely inevitable) victory coming so slowly after five years? Was it true a draft was actually being considered?
Kennedy disliked controversy and loved popularity. By mid-1966, with Republicans showing signs of gaining seats in Congress for the first time since the ‘50s, party advisors began to ask Kennedy hard questions. What about Vietnam, where twenty Americans were dying every week? What about Martin Luther King and his effect of cooling support among Dixiecrats in the party’s southern heartland? Some were calling Kennedy a “n****r lover” and accusing him of going much too far in his concessions to blacks. Mightn’t a cooling off or at least a popular distraction be in order? Kennedy, ever charming, though increasingly dictatorial within his party, began to acquire an “us and them” mentality, and rather than placating critics, he shielded himself among sycophants.
“Of course you’re right, Mr. President. Of course you are, Jack.” These were words Kennedy relished hearing.
The final years of the Kennedy Presidency were marked by controversy. Vietnam escalated. Kennedy, never seriously considering a pullout, signed a draft into law among outcries from more than just voters from the far left. The President subtly distanced himself from the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement; having given them legislation that brought many of their goals to reality, he would privately speak of having “done all I can for them” and would in fact not meet with Martin Luther King again as he once so often had.
King’s murder in 1968 genuinely grieved Kennedy, particularly in light of his own brush with assassination, but privately the political animal in Kennedy wondered if somehow it wasn’t for the best that King would doubtlessly go from controversial revolutionary to martyr. His eloquent eulogy at Dr. King’s funeral was re-broadcast around the world and would often be quoted in years to come, joining his first inaugural speech as among the great works of his time in office.
As all this was happening and the President’s poll numbers gradually but never drastically fell, and the Cold War went on unabated. If there were no great flare-ups between East and West, then there was also scant progress made toward bettering world relations. Khrushchev was complacently in control of his sphere of influence and Kennedy his. The fear of nuclear holocaust dropped a notch from its 1950s heights, and even the arms race marginally cooled off.
Still Kennedy had setbacks in other areas: the Peace Corps withered on the vine and was written out of the budget by 1967; the Republicans continued to make gains in Congress and in national polls; most troublesome, in early 1967 Kennedy’s health gave the nation a scare, and he was hospitalized for several days. Spinning his infirmities as “war injuries” the administration went on with barely a misstep but in fact Kennedy was addicted to several drugs, including by then both several pain killers and amphetamines.
The stress of an escalating and stalemated war in Vietnam and the growing outcry against US presence there weighted on Kennedy. To his brothers he remarked that part of him was looking forward to a return to private life. Barely on speaking terms with his Vice President, his adulteries having somewhat alienated his longsuffering wife, his health more precarious than the public was ever allowed to know, and often in unabated pain, the Kennedy of 1968 was no longer the “gay young Senator” of 1960, and it showed.
One bright spot in Kennedy’s life was the American space program, which continued to outpace that of the USSR, and was popular with American public. Kennedy loved hosting Mercury and later astronauts at the White House, and still funded a push to reach the moon before the decade’s end. In fact some would say that by the time of elections that fall---an election in which Republican Richard Nixon defeated Vice President Johnson in a close contest---the space program was the last thing the harried Kennedy had to boast about, except for his three photogenic children.
Departing office in January 1969 with an approval rating in the low-fifties, down from a high of over ninety-percent in December 1963, Kennedy left his successor the bloodbath in former Indochina, where Americans had been carpet bombing North Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian cities for some two years. He left behind a public still divided by the struggles for racial equality and marred by urban riots most voters openly linked to that movement. He left behind an economy far less stable than it had been when Kennedy himself assumed high office after Eisenhower eight years before. He left behind a nation stripped of a portion of its post-1945 confidence.
Far from a legend, no longer even the scion of anachronistic Camelot, Kennedy was viewed as a politician, and not a universally admired one at that. Far older than a mere eight years accounted for, often in pain, frequently under the influence of drugs, Kennedy relocated to New York City, penned his memoirs, entertained lavishly and lived extravagantly through the remaining nine years of his life. His wife never divorced him, but in reality their marriage had long since ended. Only his death from a heart attack in the fall of 1978 saved him from the stories that were to come: stories of his promiscuity, his drug use, his alleged corruption, his egomania. Kennedy was buried in a dignified family plot, near his father, not at Arlington National Cemetery under an eternal flame. In time a few schools and public projects bore his name, mostly in Massachusetts and those parts of the south heavily populated by blacks, but these were a mere fraction of those so dedicated in our reality where JFK died in 1963.
In 2008 Kennedy would not be an icon but rather a past President with a mixed legacy: a legacy of divisiveness but also of charm. Remembered for Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, for continuing the Cold War, but also for the Civil Rights Act, for NASA, for the glamour of Camelot, Kennedy would be ranked by political scientists as a slightly above average leader, coming somewhere in the middle of the pack amid such figures as Grover Cleveland and James Monroe.
Historians on the attack would charge Kennedy with authoring the beginning of the end of the traditional Democratic Party, with alienating many white Democrats, with failing to fulfill his visionary hopes of 1960, with starting the much-hated Vietnam War (which did not end in a US victory), and with opening the door for Republican domination of the Deep South that came in the 1980s and thereafter.
But in the minds of the average American alive during his first administration, these things would be forgotten, for above all else John F. Kennedy would be recalled for having survived a frighteningly near assassination attempt on November 22, 1963.
