JFKs Legacy Deserves A Critical Eye
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JFK’s legacy deserves a critical eye | GUEST COMMENTARY
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By George Liebmann
PUBLISHED:Baltimore Sun August 19, 2024 at 6:03 a.m.
“The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” President John F. Kennedy famously declared in his 1961 inaugural address. He was right to say his inauguration marked a sea change in the country’s presidential leadership, from the temperamentally conservative Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson to the more exuberant Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.
Kennedy’s legacy is defined by the heroic zeal with which he fostered world trade and the Civil Rights Movement, leading to the dismantling of the rigid Southern caste system. But his martyrdom obscures the way his exuberance both domestically and on the world stage put the United States on a downward path and engendered myriad crises that beset the country today.
In 1961, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara conceded that no missile gap existed; the president nonetheless massively increased spending on nuclear weaponry. Kennedy presided over an outburst of spending on fallout shelter building, the American space program and the supersonic transport plane.
The Kennedy years saw the Berlin Wall and the sharpening of divisions in Europe. Rule by Westernizing elites was prescribed in the third world, including American endowment of grands projets. At Kennedy’s “School of the Americas,” the Defense Department educated such Latin American military leaders as Hugo Banzer of Bolivia, Roberto D’Aubisson of El Salvador and Manuel Noriega of Panama.
In the Congo, the Kennedy administration, fearing a communist takeover, supported a kleptocratic government. The fear of Soviet intervention was illusory. So was the U.S. government’s belief that its activities in the Congo would stabilize the country; the ensuing civil wars in the following decades cost as many as 5.4 million lives.
Kennedy’s efforts to take on communism brought about the Bay of Pigs fiasco, intervention in Vietnam, attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and the Cuban missile crisis, which was caused by America’s deployment of Jupiter missiles in Turkey and only resolved by a secret agreement to remove them.
Kennedy approved a telegram that led to a coup in South Vietnam, destroying what order there was and any possibility of a negotiated resolution of the war.
At the time of Kennedy’s death, he had no immediate plans to extricate the United States from Vietnam, rebuffing an initiative by Charles de Gaulle to conduct an international conference.
Kennedy embraced an orthodox Keynesianism, and the chickens came home to roost in the Ford and Carter administrations, with deficits skyrocketing in the 1970s and inflation rising to 13.5% in 1980.
Kennedy fostered public employee unionism; today state and local government pension plans have combined deficits approaching 3 trillion dollars.
Other administration-sponsored legislation broadened the Social Security disability program to include non-permanent disabilities; today, roughly 6% of the population of Baltimore is receiving disability benefits from Social Security.
The administration’s effort through threat of prosecution to curb steel prices was counter-productive. U.S. Steel’s correct protestation that the price increase was necessary to modernize the American steel industry went unheeded.
The Kennedy administration also sponsored the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. Kennedy promised his plan would reduce the number of institutionalized patients by half; the decline in reality was more than 90%. Only half of the mental health community centers proposed under the plan were ever built, and none were fully funded. The severely mentally ill were moved from institutions to city streets.
“Kennedy Justice,” as the administration’s crime policy was called, produced competition among Robert Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon to be known as “tough on crime,” giving rise to the excesses of federal drug legislation.
Kennedy’s victory in the first televised presidential election in 1960, along with his win in the 1960 West Virginia primary, also set the stage for elections being determined by volume of spending. We now have elections turning on the sheer volume of publicity.
All told, the legacy of Kennedy’s rhetoric and policy on the world stage is one of dangerous presidential involvement in foreign policy-making and the promotion of an unhealthy and inflamed American nationalism.
The latest players to appear on the political stage in this year’s presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. J.D. Vance, hopefully will forswear American conceit and reject activism for activism’s sake.
Vance has a winning hand if he plays it properly. The electorate has yet to be exposed to the case for a moderate social conservatism, and by experience and education Vance is well-equipped to supply it. His economic views, including distaste for plutocracy and sympathy for antitrust, allow him to distinguish himself from his patron. On foreign policy, he is no neo-conservative. He has the issues that benefited Donald Trump. His challenge is to find a more rational style that will win over the electorate.
George Liebmann (george.liebmann2@verizon.net) is president of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar and the author of various works on law and politics, most recently “The Tafts” (Twelve Tables Press, 2023).
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