Did Joe Biden Doom the Democratic party?

Part One: Prelude to a Disaster and its After Effects

In my last column I wrote of my disappointment about appearing before congress. Not because I did not appreciate the opportunity to testify on the JFK case. I did. But because I had difficulty comprehending the actions taken by the Democratic side of that committee. I had expected them to all be there, stay the whole time, and ask pertinent and intelligent questions. Nothing of that kind happened. The result was contrary to my expectations. It was the Republicans who asked the most pointed questions and stayed the longest. In fact, if anything, the Democrats were antagonistic to the panel, which consisted of Jeff Morley, Oliver Stone and myself.

As I noted, this struck me as being notably off kilter. (As I write this, Morley is conducting a podcast with Michael Shellenberger about this same oddity.) After all Kennedy was a liberal Democrat. He once made a speech about what it meant to be a liberal:

If by a “liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties—someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is that they mean by a liberal, then I’m proud to say I’m a liberal.

This was not just boilerplate. Kennedy believed in these things plus the power of the government to make them happen. Kennedy was the first president to sign an affirmative action order and he began working on it the day he was inaugurated. As Donald Gibson showed in his book Battling Wall Street, Kennedy was a Keynesian president in economics. When Kennedy took office, the highest marginal tax rate was 91 %. JFK thought that was too high and he wanted it lowered to the 65-70 % range. But more importantly, his cuts were aimed at using deficits to stimulate demand. Just before he was killed, he declared to chief economist Walter Heller: we will first have your cut and then my expenditures program. And that was also aimed at stimulating demand. As Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” (See Robert Schlesinger, US News and world Report, 1/26/11)

In a notable essay by Timothy Noah, he proved that Kennedy’s proposed tax cuts were not aimed at the upper classes like those of supply siders are. Kennedy’s proposed cuts—he was not around when the bill was passed—were aimed at the middle class and especially the lower classes. This would stimulate consumer spending, which is what Kennedy wanted to do.(The New Republic, 10/11/12)

I won’t go into Kennedy’s foreign policy at any length, since I have written about this so often previously. But there is no doubt that his initiatives were designed to reverse the program of Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles.(See, for example, the 4 hour Oliver Stone documentary JFK: Destiny Betrayed.) Unlike today, Kennedy was attempting détente with Cuba and the Soviet Union. At the time of his death, there were no wars in progress. Vietnam was an advisory mIssion, from which Kennedy was withdrawing. Perhaps even more relevant, Kennedy was fair minded about the Middle East, which makes him contrary to former President Joe Biden and present President Donald Trump. (See Rick Sterling’s important article at Anti War.com, 12/15/23)

But beyond that, Kennedy was trying to forge a relationship with Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. He did this because Nasser was a socialist and a secularist. He was not an Islamic fundamentalist as the Saudi Arabians are and were. Kennedy thought he could modernize and westernize the Middle East through Nasser. The problem was that both the Israelis and the Saudis knew about this Nasser connection, strongly disagreed with it and did all they could to sabotage any such relationship. For one thing, Nasser thought the oil in the Middle East belonged to all the Arabs, which went along with his idea of a pan Arab confederacy. (Devil’s Game, by Robert Dreyfuss, pp. 90-91)

I think that whichever way you slice it one would have to at least partly agree with Monica Wiesak. In 2022, she wrote a stellar book about the Kennedy presidency. It was titled, America’s Last President. The subtitle of that volume is What the World Lost when It Lost John F. Kennedy. (If you have not read this book, I strongly recommend you do so post haste.)

If one establishes the above and when one adds up all the problems with the Warren Report, why would the Democrats not be on this train? But they weren’t. In fact Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett actually said there were “holes” in the Warren Report’s case. Which is kind of shocking. Because the entire Warren Report is one big hole. There is not one part of that 888 page report that can stand up to scrutiny. It would all collapse in a court of law with a real adversary procedure. And just remember, Crockett is a lawyer!

As I pondered this paradox I went back and I read the preface to Wiesak’s book. One reason she wrote the book is because she was disturbed by all the smear stories about JFK. (see page iv). So she decided to conduct her own research about Kennedy’s presidency. And as she wrote:

The more I learned about his policies, his challenges, his leadership style, and more than anything, his courage, the more impressed I became. I realized that the public image of him as a careless, thoughtless, self-involved playboy obscured the depth of what he was trying to achieve and the intensity of the opposition he faced. I felt cheated out of understanding our true history and, as an extension, out of understanding the world around me.(ibid)

Much of the MSM has purveyed this false image of Kennedy. And they rarely write or broadcast about his achievements. And I think that is part of the problem we may have here.

Secondly, there is the Donald Trump problem. As I mentioned in my previous column, Trump perceived the whole Russia Gate imbroglio as being largely an FBI scheme to hurt his presidency. This is why he fired Director James Comey. I agree with Matt Taibbi that this was a correct interpretation of that whole long three year episode. Except I would include Hillary Clinton as the person who actually started this distraction as a way to deflect attention away from her private email server problems. And we have no less than her campaign manager Robbie Mook’s testimony on that. (Rolling Stone, 3/29/19; CNN Report of 5/20/22 by Marshall Cohen)

Therefore, since the FBI had a rather large role in falsifying the record on the JFK case back in 1963-64, then this would play into Trump’s theme. Which is something the Democrats do not want to do.

But there is a third story here, one which has a long view and a short view. That is, the Democratic Party of today is not what it was back in the Kennedy years. There was a smash up that went on after JFK’s assassination. Because it was not just President Kennedy’s assassination. But it was the way it took place, and also the consequent murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

Concerning the first, people repeatedly ask why did they not just poison President Kennedy to get rid of him quietly? The late Vincent Salandria was the first to reply to this. He said it was done in such a spectacular fashion because it was meant to send two subliminal messages. The first message was, even though its obvious it was a crossfire, you still cannot touch us: that is how smart and powerful we are. Secondly, and related to this, it was designed to warn future presidents that there was a boundary they could not cross.

Let me give two examples of the latter. There was the Raymond Lee Harvey incident in Los Angeles in 1979. Mr. Harvey was supposed to be part of a team, which included a man named Osvaldo Espinoza Ortiz, who were going to fire at Jimmy Carter at the Civic Center Mall on May 5^th. This was initially dismissed as a tall tale. Due to the JFK convergence of the names, that was what the MSM wanted to do. But it was not. When Time magazine consulted with the police, they found there was more than enough evidence to make the claims credible. (Time, May 21, 1979, Newsweek, May 21, 1979, New York Times, May 12, 1979). If the confluence of the two names was a coincidence, it was one of cosmic proportions.

We all know that when Barack Obama ran for the presidency the first time, his main theme was “Hope and Change”. We can all remember he and his wife prancing on stage with Oprah Winfrey. We also can remember three of the Kennedy clan endorsing Obama at American University in January of 2008. This included the late Senator Ted Kennedy, Representative Patrick Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy.

According to former CIA officer Ray McGovern—who I communicated with for this column--some people in the Obama administration were rather disappointed with the achievement of the president in comparison with the Hope and Change theme. When one person asked about the shortfall, Obama told him, “You saw what happened to Dr. King didn’t you?”

To put it mildly, I think Salandria was on to something.

When Joe Biden took office in the White House he placed a bust of Bobby Kennedy in the Oval Office and a large portrait of Jack Kennedy in his study. Although he denied that he had now fulfilled his lifetime ambition, there is ample evidence that this was. (See Branko Marcetic, The Jacobin, 2/22/20) After all, after his first victory for political office, the Kennedy comparisons tumbled forward, as he was called Delaware’s JFK in one newspaper profile. (ibid)

At the time he first ran for the senate, in 1972, Biden assailed Richard Nixon for escalating the Vietnam War: he wanted all American troops out by the end of the year. And the end of all American involvement once POW’s were returned. Ironically, he took gentle jabs at the age of his opponent, Caleb Boggs. After he narrowly won, Biden said something revealing, “The liberals thought I was holding back. Little did they know I’m not that liberal. The conservatives thought I was too liberal.” (Marcetic) In a newspaper profile released early in the next year, Biden compared liberals to lemmings, “every two years they jump off a cliff.”

Once becoming a Washington senator, Biden became a staunch partisan for Israel, developed a friendly relationship with Delaware’s largest employer, DuPont Corporation, and, strangely, told his Democratic colleagues not to go hard on the GOP during Watergate. This was his reason for the last: “the demise of the Republican party means your own demise…means the demise of the two-party system.” Biden initially dragged his feet on Nixon’s impeachment. Instead, he attacked the press and government leakers and wanted restraint from journalists. (ibid)

As the reader can see—unlike JFK and RFK--Biden had become a kind of consensus, inside the beltway politician. About his almost messianic campaign to halt school busing for integration—at times allying himself with Sen. Jesse Helms, Marcetic writes:

…he showed he was willing to go much further, jeopardizing the wider mission of desegregation and sacrificing the continued march of civil rights to stay in power.

This coincided with Biden’s anti-crime and anti-drug bills. Which many liberals thought were unfair to African Americans, but paved the way for President Clinton to follow in his footsteps.

But there was something else happening at this time. The four major assassinations of the sixties had led to the disastrous Chicago Democratic convention of 1968. It was that event—occurring with King and RFK both dead—that led to the protestors raging against not having a true opponent of the Vietnam War to rally behind. That debacle led to the election of Richard Nixon and the continuation of the war. Every historian understands that this was a seminal event. Because from the days of Kennedy, Malcolm, King and RFK, the Democratic party ended up with Governor Jimmy Carter--who Biden backed. In fact, he became the chair of Carter’s Steering Committee. (Marcetic) One could argue that Carter became the first neo liberal president.

Something was happening to the political culture: as the Democrats were turning more centrist, the Republicans were turning more to the extreme right. There used to be both a moderate and liberal wing to the GOP e.g. Jacob Javits, Everett Dirksen. That was becoming gradually extinct. So now Biden moved toward the center on economic issues also. He sponsored a bill calling for the “sunsetting” of federal programs which were not reauthorized after four years.

This political navigation allowed Biden to run for president twice, once in 1988 and once in 2008. He was forced to drop out due to a plagiarism charge the first time, and the second time he was outgunned by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But he did become friends with Obama during the latter campaign, and this allowed him to be selected as his Vice-President. And that eventually gave him a jump start to the presidency.

The problem was he was 78 years old.

(In Part Two, we will focus on Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris, his disastrous debate, and his reluctance to depart the race which all allowed Donald Trump to triumph.)