Rank'n'file Democratic Party opposition to war tracks back to Vietnam and the 1968 Democratic presidential primary campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy was assassinated and McCarthy was blocked at the convention in Chicago by the old bull party bosses congregated around Hubert Humphrey. George McGovern became the placeholder for Kennedy delegates after Senator Teddy Kennedy declined to pick up the mantle of his assassinated brother.
McGovern would go on to lead the McGovern-Fraser Commission which would rewrite the rules on how Democrats nominate their presidential candidate. The work McGovern did on the commission would pave the way for his nomination in 1972. In the general election McGovern would lose every state to Nixon except for the Kennedys' Massachusetts and the Black-majority District of Columbia. Nixon's '72 landslide victory would come to naught as his administration imploded over Watergate.
What struck me about Hersh's account was that after the initial splash the Family Jewels created, along with related followups, there wasn't the interest or support from his editors at The New York Times to pursue more of these national security state bombshells. Hersh mentions that congressional committees, e.g., Church and Pike, would continue the work with subpoena power; so off he goes on vacation and then relocates to New York City where he starts reporting on corporate corruption for The Times.
That's 1975. You have to get all way to the mid-1990s in Hersh's memoir to understand what happened (really, what didn't happen) with the Church and Pike investigations of national security state crimes. Hersh explains that senate leaders were reticent to give Frank Church chairmanship of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities because they knew that he coveted a presidential run as leader of the Democratic Party and they didn't want to muddy the investigation with presidential politics. Church promised that he would not run for president in 1976. He lied.
The result of this lie, according to Hersh, is that the committee's work was compromised and the crimes of the Kennedy administration were obscured or soft-pedaled because Church believed to win the nomination of the Democratic Party in 1976 the victorious candidate had to be perceived by primary voters as the true representative of the Kennedy legacy; to tarnish that legacy was to guarantee defeat.
To correct the record and debunk the myth of Camelot Hersh writes The Dark Side of Camelot (1997).
I purchased a copy of the book as soon as it appeared. In the 1990s I worked nights and spent my free time studying Kennedy assassination literature. I was drawn to the topic because, from college days, I was a Derridean, someone who believed that perception is textual. When it comes to textuality you would be challenged to find a field larger than that provided by the Kennedy assassination. My thinking was -- at the time I was still south of 35 years of age -- that if one could master that mass of literature, one could claim to have mastered perception itself.
But I never finished The Dark Side of Camelot. I think I made it halfway through, and then, because none of the material was what I considered at the time to be of a bombshell nature, since I was so thoroughly immersed in the literature, I set it aside. Hersh was pilloried at the time in the mainstream press for material, forged documents, that never even made it into the book. He was also criticized for getting marginal stuff wrong.
After I finished Hersh's memoir, I picked up the copy of The Dark Side of Camelot I set aside more than 20 years ago.
It's a tremendous book. I truly savored it. Hersh systematically demolishes the Kennedy legacy:
- JFK worked with the mob to win the presidency
- Bay of Pigs is laid at JFK's feet
- JFK/RFK fulsomely supported "Executive Action," a.k.a., assassination
- Cuban Missile Crisis almost led to nuclear holocaust (then Kennedy lied about swapping the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba)
- Kennedy supported the assassination of Diem because Diem was negotiating with the North to end the war
There's much more. Overall the picture -- both of Jack and Bobby -- is of an unhinged presidency. Jack Kennedy was addicted to sex, in poor health, committed to ruthless skulduggery, seemingly always in crisis, and Bobby was his loyal little brother enabler.
If I would've finished the book back in 1990s I could've seen that Hersh basically affirms the hypothesis -- that Kennedy's assassination tracks back to LBJ -- that I was working on. Hersh doesn't make this argument explicitly because he, improbably, accepts the conclusion of the Warren Commission, that there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy, but Hersh does say that in final months of Kennedy's life the decision was finalized to boot Johnson off the ticket in 1964. The Bobby Baker Quorum Club scandal taken up by the Senate Rules Committee tainted both Jack (because of his affair with German party girl Ellen Rometsch) and Lyndon (because of petty kickbacks, the details of which RFK was surreptitiously feeding to Republicans on the committee). Then Kennedy's brains are blown out in Texas.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that RFK's rebirth as an anti-war politician post-Tet might have been sincere but it was most likely mere crass opportunism. Bobby was no peacenik.
Nonetheless, as decades plodded on after '68, there remained and remains a significant constituency within the Democratic Party which is opposed to the national security state and perpetual warfare. This constituency elected Obama and probably defeated Hillary.
Russiagate was designed and continues to be used to neuter and bleach this constituency, and in this regard it has been largely successful. The Democratic Party is now just as bellicose as the Republican Party, and for that reason it needs to be destroyed. Because even if the George Floyd Rebellion and the Black Lives Matter renaissance are fundamentally anti-imperialist and pro-peace, a lot of the white liberals who have supported the movement are card-carrying Russiagaters and defenders of the CIA , NSA and FBI.
Hersh, as far as you can throw him.
ReplyDeleteHersh is an interesting character. I think provides a modified limited hangout for the MIC. Jim DiEugenio demolishes many of the creators of JFK as womanizing criminal-conspiring bad man. There is an important essay, The Posthumous Assassination of President Kennedy.
Seymour Hersh in essence reported My Lai, but did not report the huge Phoenix Program which ran many slaughters of civilians in Vietnam. As Valentine has written in his latest book, the Phoenix Program was practice for COINTELPRO, CHAOS and other fascist tactics in the US and in other countries the US controls.
The full, original essay is in the collection of essays THE ASSASSINATIONS by DiEugenio and Pease. I put Hersh's JFK analysis on par with Chomsky's.
By the way, did you know that Ellsberg was CIA in Saigon? When Nixon was shown the door that glorious exposure of government criminality was not a resurgence of American journalism. Why would the NYT and WaPo suddenly decide to become agents of change? Why would a former naval intelligence officer end up being cast as the dogged investigator of Nixon's criminality?
https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-posthumous-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy
The Kennedys weren't saints, but they weren't what the post-assassination press of the Mighty Wurlitzer. After the deaths of the Kennedys and King you could walk into living rooms of Americans and see portraits of them hanging on the walls. That is what the corridors of power wanted to destroy, along with the ideals those men brought to the country. You might as well read the FBI-generated hit pieces about Martin Luther King that Hoover spread around.
When I was little my parents had framed the Time Magazine with Bobby Kennedy on the cover and hanged it in my bedroom. We made the pilgrimage to see him on his train when it passed through the San Joaquin Valley down to Los Angeles before he was assassinated. So I know of what you speak, Bob.
ReplyDeleteThe fact remains, undisputed as far as I know, that RFK led the Castro assassination program that terrorized Cuba.
I believe that Bobby's anti-war rhetoric was sincere; it help bake in a pro-peace orientation for a generation of liberals. But I also believe that Obama's anti-war rhetoric was sincere, initially. The Iraq pullout is proof.
Then you had Snowden and Ghouta and things changed.
Now, honestly, ask yourself, "Where's the spirit of '68?" Russiagate has exorcised it for a lot of liberals.
People who want to assign awards or blame to politics and politicians in the sixties are faced with a tremendous amount of propaganda generated by the same people who killed the Kennedys, King and Malcolm X, among others. People who hear the reports of sexual philandering published in Time, in books and the National Enquirer need to understand that all these outlets were writing for the protection of the national security state. Again, I'll recommend DiEugenio, but perhaps his latest book.
ReplyDeleteObama's mother appears to have been in the same CIA op that sent Steinem and Lillian Murrett abroad. When one realizes that Obama's mother was in the middle of the military coup in Indonesia, it strongly suggests that Obama is merely the next generation of CIA operatives. If there was a chance that Obama actually was a real progressive, it ended when as a senator he flipped on voting down FISA.
If you haven't already, I suggest you read Talbot's THE DEVIL'S CHESSBOARD. LBJ had to have known about the assassination, generally, but it very much appears that Dulles was the one who directed the operation.
If you read John Armstrong's HARVEY AND LEE it appears that there was a general operation, under what eventually was called "the Oswald Program", or project, to assassinate a President, going back to the early fifties when it wasn't known who would be the President.
Oswald, the one sent to Russia under the false defector program, was playing a central role in hunting for Soviet moles in the CIA, Angleton's project. There were two Oswalds, more at certain points, and reports on them were often identified as Lee Harvey, Harvey Lee, Lee Henry, etc. Reports generated by the CIA would identify "Oswald" by these different names, theoretically to find who reported what to the Soviets.
And again, Seymour Hersh is modified limited hangout. He reported on My Lai, he didn't report on the Phoenix Program. As far as his reportage on JFK, he was merely regurgitating stories generated by the Mighty Wurlitzer.