JFK and the Neocons, Pt. 3

Jackson and Rumsfeld unite in the Neocon triumph

When President Kennedy was killed, Lyndon Johnson changed his policies rather quickly.  The MSM  determinedly disguised the sea change that was really taking place. David Brinkley omnisciently stated:

It was our responsibility to calm the public—to explain to them the president had been shot, yes; perfectly horrible, yes: but the country lives.  And there’s not going to be any crisis. And I think in doing that, we performed a real service in which we can take some pride….I was very proud of all of us. (Joseph McBride, Political Truth, p. 22)

This compact was made explicit by James Reston in the NY Times. Within 48 hours of Kennedy’s death, Reston wrote, “Policy under the new president…will probably remain very much as it was under Kennedy… there is no urgent need for the new president to take new policy initiatives in the field of foreign affairs.” (ibid, p. 90)

The MSM was in denial about 1.) Johnson being a Truman Democrat in foreign policy, and 2.) That he would not alter any of Kennedy’s Rooseveltian doctrines. During his time as Vice President, Johnson had disagreed with Kennedy on his actions during the Missile Crisis and in Vietnam. Therefore when he came into office he very quickly changed policies, for example in Indochina, the Middle East, and in Congo. (See Oliver Stone’s  film JFK: Destiny Betrayed.) These were all fairly clear and obvious, but people like Reston and Brinkley were somehow oblivious to them.  Even after Senator William Fulbright’s Vietnam hearings began in 1966, and with the exposure of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, there was no admittance that Johnson had knowingly and deliberately altered Kennedy’s Indochina policy.  Even though there was a section in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers that dealt with Kennedy’s withdrawal program (See Volume 2, Section 3). And Peter Scott wrote a pioneering essay about this issue in the Beacon Press version of that compendium.  But because of proclamations by Brinkley and Reston, the MSM had blinkers on their eyes pertaining to this epochal subject.  Even when, in March of 1965, four months after the Warren Commission volumes were issued, Johnson sent combat troops to Vietnam, something that Kennedy refused to do at least seven times in three years. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, pp. 54-65)

But there was a staffer for Senator Fulbright who understood what Johnson had done. Fulbright was not just disturbed by what LBJ had done in Indochina, but also about his 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic. This had also been a reversal of Kennedy’s policy, since JFK had supported the restoration of the democratically elected Juan Bosch. (Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street, pp. 78-79) Fulbright’s Chief of Staff Carl Marcy wrote that what these dishonest interventions had done was:

…turn the liberal supporters of President Kennedy into opponents of the policies of President Johnson, and the rightwing opponents of Eisenhower and Kennedy into avid supporters of the present administration….We have tried to force upon the rest of the world a righteous American point of view which we maintain is the consensus that others must accept. Most of the tragedies of the world have come from such righteousness. (Joseph Goulden, Truth is the First Casualty, p. 166)

What Marcy is describing is the splitting asunder of the Democratic Party and the burying of Kennedy’s legacy by Johnson under a mountain of Cold War propaganda. This split led to the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and also to the rise in the Democratic Party of Senator Henry Jackson of Washington. Jackson was a dyed in the wool Truman Democrat who ran for president in 1972 and 1976. Electorally, he was not successful. But, as we shall see, ideologically he triumphed. And, as much as Johnson—perhaps even more--he ended up transforming the Democratic Party and erasing Kennedy’s policies. But we must first parallel his ascent with that of a Republican congressman of the same era.

Donald Rumsfeld began his rise to prominence under President Richard Nixon. He went from being an Illinois congressman to a presidential counselor with Cabinet level status. Nixon then appointed him ambassador to NATO. After Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford made him his Chief of Staff. Rumsfeld enlisted a former employee of his, Dick Cheney, to succeed him in that position when Ford nominated Rumsfeld to be Secretary of Defense. And it was these two men who provided the first practical outburst of the neocon foreign policy. This was the sidelining of Henry Kissinger from his two positions, essentially running foreign policy, to just one.

It was called the Halloween Massacre. It was motivated by Rumseld in order to ward off attacks from the extreme right by Governor Ronald Reagan.First, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller announced he would not run with Ford in 1976. Then, Bill Colby was replaced as CIA Director by George H. W . Bush. Third, Rumsfeld replaced James Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense. Finally, Kissinger gave up his National Security Advisor position to Brent Scowcroft, keeping his Secretary of State position. Each of these was a move to the right. Yet in his testimony before the Senate for his confirmation as Defense Secretary, Rumsfeld denied having anything to do with Schlesinger’s removal. (See Senate Hearings, p. 44)  Rumsfeld was also against Kissinger’s SALT talks for nuclear arms control, therefore these were not signed until the Jimmy Carter administration. (Slate, 12/02/2002, article by Timothy Noah)

Rumsfeld once said that, at times, “strategic truths” needed to be defended by a “bodyguard of lies.” (News Briefing as Defense Secretary, 9/25/2001)  As we will see, some saw this Machiavellian declaration as a metaphor for the entire neocon movement.  There is another quote that should accompany that one in order to understand Rumsfeld. Its about the Vietnam War. Film-maker Errol Morris asked him about the lessons learned from that conflict. This was his full answer: “Some things work out, some things don’t. That didn’t.  If that’s a lesson, yes, it’s a lesson.” (Slate, article by Fred Kaplan, 7/01/2021) As we shall see, this simple declaration fits in with the neoconservative world view of perpetual war.

Rumsfeld and Cheney had shifted the political spectrum by kneecapping Kissinger and discrediting détente. Because, at the same time he was demoting Kissinger, Rumsfeld was maneuvering behind the scenes to allow the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) to enter CIA headquarters in order to exaggerate and aggrandize the Soviet threat. In fact he was a founding member of that wild propaganda group designed to heighten fears of Soviet military supremacy. (The American Prospect, article by Robert Reich, 12/19/2001). Before he left office under Ford, in a jab at Kissinger, he mildly praised their work.(Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis, p. 203)

Make no mistake as to what was happening. Rumsfeld and Cheney were prepping for the next GOP administration. Which was going to be further right than either Nixon or Ford. The Halloween Massacre, the clipping of Kissinger, the delay for SALT 2 and the takeover of the Russian security threat by the CPD, these all presaged what many were sensing: a return of the GOP to the shape, symbolism and figure of Barry Goldwater. There are two things to note about the roster of players for the CPD. There were some Democrats or former Democrats involved like John B. Connally. Evelyn Dubrow, Henry Fowler, Nathan Glazer, Max Kampelman,  Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Lane Kirkland, Foy D Kohler, Ernest Lefever, Maxwell Taylor and Dean Rusk. Second, Kohler, Taylor and Rusk worked for Kennedy in high positions.

But the real nitroglycerine for the Reagan Revolution in foreign policy was supplied by Jackson. As revealed in Robert Kauffman’s biography, although Jackson and Kennedy were collegial in the senate, when JFK became president, Jackson became distant from some of Kennedy’s policy positions e.g. on Vietnam and arms control. (See Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics, Chapter 7) He did not openly oppose Kennedy on the latter, because he knew the Partial Test Ban Treaty was going to pass. He did the same thing with the ersatz TFX scandal, he maneuvered that behind the scenes in order to protect his funding from Seattle’s Boeing Corporation. (ibid, Chapter 8) And when the Democratic Party broke asunder after 1968, Jackson made his move to be the new Harry Truman. Because, like Rumsfeld, Jackson was strongly opposed to the Nixon/Kissinger pursuit of détente with Russia. (The Nation, 2/26/24, article by Jeet Heer)

It didn’t work for two reasons. First, Jackson was not a dynamic speaker or charismatic campaigner. (Kauffman, p. 6) Second, his foreign policy positions were simply too conservative to raise any money from the big Democratic donors. For instance, Jackson had nothing but antipathy for Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.  McNamara devised the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) in order to prevent atomic war.  That is, if both sides had enough atomic weapons to destroy each other, this would prevent each country from trying for a first strike, since a second strike would be possible. Jackson despised this policy since he opposed nearly all nuclear arms treaties.  But secondly, as Kauffman notes, he felt that it was possible for Russia to win an atomic war against the USA.

It is at this point, with that last statement, that we must address the philosophical  underpinnings of what would end up being the binding ties between Rumsfeld’s personal beliefs and those of Jackson’s staffers since, as we shall see, they would politically unite.  That  belief system entails the world view of academic Leo Strauss, the intellectual godfather of neoconservatism. 

As Straussian scholar Shadia Drury observes, for all his talk about Plato, Strauss really favored Machiavelli: “that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice.” (Open Democracy, 10/15/2003, article by Danny Postel) This, of course, overlaps with Rumsfeld’s belief in its “need for secrecy and the necessity of lies.” (ibid). Strauss believed in this since the general public would not go along with a rule by elites, thus the natural complement to it was to protect those in power from later reprisals upon exposure.

As Drury elucidates, “The effect of Strauss’s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few.”  Strauss thought that liberal economics…

“…would turn life into entertainment and destroy politics.” Therefore “only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and creature comforts.. Life can be politicized once more and man’s humanity can be restored.” (ibid)

 As Drury then observes: the concomitant for this system is a  “strong nationalistic spirt” in allegiance to the state: its culture and its values are the world’s best, and others are inferior--in other words American Exceptionalism. Strauss’s nascent neocon system was then taken up by Irving Kristol in his books Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, and also in Reflections of a Neoconservative. To Kristol and his fellow Straussian, Harry Jaffa, America was the Zion that will light up the world. The capper is this: “if America fails to achieve her national destiny, and is mired in perpetual war, then all is well. Man’s humanity, defined in terms of struggle to the death, is rescued from extinction.” (Op. Cit., Postel) This is why a fellow neocon, Norman Podhoretz, wrote a book Why We Were in Vietnam, justifying that disastrous war which Kennedy was withdrawing from at the time of his death.

As Jeff Sachs interpreted it in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the neocons think they can do whatever they want to do.  (See the Carlson show from May 28, 2024 on YouTube).

The above is about as anti-Kennedy as one can get. Far from perpetual war, Kennedy refused to go to war in Cuba—even when he had two opportunities to do so—he also refused war entry into Laos, and Vietnam.  He did not believe in American Exceptionalism, as he foresaw a multi-polar world, including the rise of former Third World states. He thought America could cooperate with those rising states.  In fact, far from Perpetual War, in his American University speech in June of 1963, he was propagating for Perpetual Peace.  Unlike Jackson he was pro arms control.  And unlike the Neocons Kennedy did not favor wars of choice, e.g. Iraq.

Although Jackson did not succeed in the presidential primaries in either 1972 or 1976, his neocon legacy was assured anyway.  Why? Because as Kauffman notes in his book, so many of his employees went on to serve under Ronald Reagan.  People like Richard Perle who detonated the Gorbachev/Reagan Iceland arms agreement; Eliot Abrams, author of Reagan’s brutal Central American policy: Paul Wolfowitz, later architect of the disastrous invasion of Iraq; Jeanne Kirkpatrick who found a way for America to back rightwing dictators and not feel bad about it; and finally Frank Gaffney, a man who was so against arms control that Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci packed up his things and threw him out of the Pentagon. (Washington Post, 11/23/87)

Thus was the neocon legacy of Henry Jackson.  I doubt if any of it would have happened if the Kennedys had lived.