Eldritch wrote:Normally I'm not much of a Chris Matthews fan, but it was refreshing this afternoon to see one of the many know nothing, right wing, radio talk show "Bush apologists" get called on his patently pathetic lack of historical knowledge and context.
Calling him a "blank slate," Chris Matthews chewed right wing radio host, Kevin James, up—and then spat him out.
**SPLAT**
If you're short on time, fast-forward to the 4:10 mark on this video, where the confrontation begins in earnest—but if you have the time, then you might find the entire clip worthwhile:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK0d8ENS__c
Even Wikipedia has weighed in with this:leading Matthews to state: "if you don't know what ______ is about then don't talk about it." ...
Kevin James is a bully—but today he met his match. And then some.
Chris Matthews should heed the advice he gave Mr James.
Why Mr. Hardball Found JFK Elusive | Consortiumnews
...What is particularly surprising is that, early on, Matthews writes that one of the things that attracted him to Kennedy and made him write this book was JFK’s management of the Missile Crisis. (See p. 9) But then why ignore The Kennedy Tapes? Since it is, from the American side, the most complete chronicling of the crisis we have today.
It is made up of the actual transcribed tapes that were made during those dangerous thirteen days when the world stood on the precipice of nuclear war. Any true historian always consults primary sources recorded during the actual event as his baseline. You can then supplement that with things like interviews after the fact, or memoirs written later. Matthews’s curious choice in historiography tells us something about his book.
What further illuminates Elusive Hero is its imbalance. The book is 406 pages long. Yet Matthews’ discussion of Kennedy’s presidency does not begin until page 321. Which means he deals with those rather eventful years in just 85 pages.
How can an author adequately describe things like the Congo crisis and the murder of Patrice Lumumba; the Laotian crisis; the construction of the Berlin Wall; the Bay of Pigs disaster; the debates over whether or not to insert combat troops into Vietnam; the tank faceoff at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin; the launching of the Peace Corps; the siege at Ole Miss over James Meredith; the Freedom Riders; the launching of the Mercury mission; Kennedy’s attempts to reconcile with Sukarno of Indonesia; and his bold and unprecedented firings of CIA Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell and Director of Plans Richard Bissell in just 85 pages?
And, incredibly, my list stops at the end of 1961! There’s almost two years to deal with yet. To give just one point of actual comparison: Ted Sorenson’s biography Kennedy is over 800 pages long. Yet he begins his discussion of Kennedy’s presidency on page 255.
So here is my question to Matthews: If you were a playwright, would you spend, say, 90 minutes of exposition in Act I and only 30 minutes for the tension-building and explosive climax in Acts II and III? Why would you do such a thing?
Matthews’s problematic approach might have some value if the author was trying to relate past formative events to later presidential decisions. That is, what did Kennedy do as a younger man that impacted his policy decisions while he was president? But this is what Matthews really does not do.
Resisting Vietnam
Take, for example, Kennedy’s consistent refusal to commit combat troops into Vietnam. This 1961 decision was made despite the fact that almost all his advisers urged Kennedy to do just that. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 138) It is a choice Kennedy never wavered on while he was in office.
Yet, it was reversed by President Lyndon Johnson in early 1965, just 14 months after Kennedy’s assassination. And Johnson’s decision was backed by former President Dwight Eisenhower. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 206)
Now, any fairly inquisitive biographer would want to delve into this question. That is, why did Kennedy adamantly refuse to do what both his predecessor and his successor had no qualms about doing? Matthews does little delving or explaining. In fact, he does not even note the difference.
For instance, in Richard Mahoney’s work on Kennedy, he makes the young congressman’s trip to Saigon in 1951 a keystone of his milestone book JFK: Ordeal in Africa. He spends four pages dealing with both the journey and its aftermath. And he quotes Kennedy’s brother Robert as saying that this excursion had “a very, very major” impact on JFK’s thinking. (Mahoney, p. 12)
That’s because, while in Saigon, JFK met a man who was working for the State Department named Edmund Gullion, who had such an impact on Kennedy’s thinking about the Third World that President Kennedy brought him into the White House in 1961. There, Gullion became a central figure in Kennedy’s policy on the huge Congo crisis and other African and Asian trouble spots like Laos and Vietnam.
A Prescient Warning
The reason for Kennedy’s faith in Gullion related to the fact that he had explained to the young Kennedy that France could not win in Vietnam because they had no one to match the nationalistic appeal of Ho Chi Minh. And Gullion impressed upon Kennedy that this war was not about Communism versus capitalism; it was about colonialism versus independence.
Ho’s emotional appeal to the latter convinced tens of thousands of Vietnamese to the point that they would die rather than stay a colony of France. The French could never win that kind of guerrilla war of attrition.
So when Kennedy returned to America he expressed these ideas in a speech he gave in November of 1951: “This is an area of human conflict between civilizations striving to be born and those desperately trying to retain what they had had for so long.” He then added, “the fires of nationalism so long dormant have been kindled and are now ablaze. … Here colonialism is not a topic for tea-talk discussion but is the daily fare for millions of men.” (Mahoney, p. 14)
Any responsible biographer who had spent so many pages on Kennedy before he became president would understand that this Gullion acquaintance would be important to Kennedy’s future thinking on Vietnam. So what did Matthews do with these important materials?
First off, he completely omits the 1961 debates in the White House over the commitment of U.S. troops to Vietnam, an omission that is quite a feat in itself. As Gordon Goldstein notes, Kennedy’s advisers brought it up no less than nine times. Each time, Kennedy beat it back. (Lessons in Disaster, pgs. 52-60)
And Kennedy himself made the parallel to 1951. He told Arthur Schlesinger, “The war in Vietnam could be won only so long as it was their war. If it were ever converted into a white man’s war, we would lose as the French had lost a decade earlier.” (ibid p. 63.) Therefore, the linkage is made explicit.
It is telling to note that Matthews does include this exchange between JFK and Schlesinger in his book – but he edits out the part I have quoted. (Matthews, p. 393) As per the 1951 trip to Southeast Asia, Matthews treats it only cursorily. He deals with its impact on Kennedy in two paragraphs. (ibid, p. 119) And notably, he never even mentions the name of Edmund Gullion...
Matthews’s Motives
The question now becomes: Why does the author perform this consistent biographical distortion and misrepresentation on key episodes?
After reading the book and taking 12 pages of notes, it is my conclusion that Matthews had an agenda. That agenda was made pretty clear in his previous book, Kennedy and Nixon. And it continues here, in slightly more disguised form.
Matthews wants the reader to believe that JFK was not all what he is cracked up to be, that he was really just a classic Cold Warrior who wasn’t all that different from Nixon. This, of course, has been the message of most of the Establishment and the mainstream media from approximately the time of Oliver Stone’s film JFK in 1991. (And strangely, the message coincides with alleged icons of the traditional Left like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn.)
As shown above, the problem is that one can only make that argument by either distorting things, or completely omitting them. And Matthews is systematically rigorous in omitting key points.
For instance, in JFK: Ordeal in Africa, the reason Mahoney illuminates Kennedy’s thinking on Third World colonialism is as background to his actions in Congo in 1961. There, Kennedy pretty much reversed Eisenhower’s policy on Patrice Lumumba versus the Belgian colonialists.
And, in fact, Gullion played a key part in this reversal. There, Kennedy did something that would be considered exceptional today: He allied himself with Lumumba’s followers at the United Nations under the great Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjold and against the Belgian colonizers.
In fact, CIA Director Allen Dulles understood that Kennedy would be sympathetic to Lumumba. This is why it appears that he hurried up the CIA’s assassination attempt on the African leader so it would occur before Kennedy was inaugurated. (John Morton Blum, Years of Discord, pgs. 23-24)
Dulles was correct in that analysis. For a photo snapped by a White House photographer at the moment Kennedy got the news of Lumumba’s death reveals his face contorted in anguish. Amazingly, there is not one single word about either Congo or Lumumba in Matthews’s book.
Misrepresenting Cuba
On Cuba, Matthews does go into the Bay of Pigs disaster (pgs. 331-38). He says, that “Quickly, in the aftermath, Kennedy asked for the resignations of both Dulles and [CIA Director of Plans Richard] Bissell.” (Matthews, p. 332) This is not accurate.
First, he asked for their resignations plus that of Deputy Director Charles Cabell. Secondly, he did not ask them to resign, “quickly in the aftermath.” And by leaving that fact out, Matthews omits why Kennedy took the unprecedented step of terminating the entire top level of the CIA.
By the time of the firings, in late 1961, Kennedy had read the CIA’s own internal report on the debacle, written by Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick. He also read one he commissioned himself. This was done by General Maxwell Taylor. They were both quite harsh on the CIA’s planning and execution of the ill-fated operation.
In fact, Kirkpatrick’s report states that the CIA’s excuse for the failure, that Kennedy canceled the D-Day air strikes — which, predictably, Matthews uses against Kennedy here — was not tenable. In fact, these strikes were contingent upon the establishment of a beachhead, something that did not happen. (Peter Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, pgs 127-28)
But as Kirkpatrick pointed out, this question about the D-Day air strikes is really a distraction from the real point. He wrote, “It is essential to keep in mind that the invasion was doomed in advance, that an initially successful landing by 1, 500 men would eventually have been crushed by Castro’s combined military resources strengthened by Soviet bloc supplied military personnel.” (ibid p. 41) Kirkpatrick goes on to estimate the combined size of all of Castro’s forces at over 200, 000 men, plus Soviet armor, tanks, mortar and cannon.
So the question then becomes, did the CIA actually think the invasion would succeed? Or did they have a hidden agenda? Many years later, scholar Lucien Vandenbroucke shed light on this key question in an important article for Diplomatic History (Fall, 1984), after discovering — among the papers of Allen Dulles at the Princeton Library — coffee-stained notes made by Dulles.
The notes were the remnants of an article the Director was going to write about the Bay of Pigs. In them, Dulles confessed that he and other CIA officers drew Kennedy into a plan they knew violated the President’s preannounced rules of engagement, namely that there was to be no direct intervention by American forces.
Although Dulles understood that this stricture doomed the plan, he went ahead with it anyway, deceiving Kennedy by telling him it would work on its own, as a similar CIA plan had succeeded in Guatemala in 1954. Dulles admitted in these notes that what they were really banking on was that the emerging “realities of the situation” would force Kennedy into violating his own pledge.
Or, as Dulles wrote, “We felt that when the chips were down — when the crisis rose to reality, any action required for success would be authorized rather than permit the enterprise to fail.” How Matthews missed this crucial article by perhaps the disaster’s most important participant baffles me. Especially since it figures in Jim Douglass’s excellent and popular book JFK and the Unspeakable, which was published back in 2008.
Further, Matthews criticizes Kennedy for not knowing that the only escape from the beach was to the Escambray Mountains, 80 miles away, and through a very heavy swamp. (Matthews, p. 332)
What the author does not explain is that Dulles would not let Kennedy take the operational plans home overnight for study, even though he asked to do so. (Kornbluh, p. 53) In light of Dulles’s later confession, one has to wonder if the CIA Director understood that if a former military man had studied these plans at length and at home, he probably would have pulled the plug very early, thus depriving Dulles of his hidden agenda. By cutting out those two points, Matthews forecloses that conclusion for the reader...
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/03/wh ... k-elusive/
