Harvard’s Graham Allison is telling us what President Kennedy would say to “his successor” (I guess we don’t say Bush, because nobody takes Bush seriously any more, so he would really be talking to Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton) about how to handle Iran:Lesson One: . . .the use of military muscle should be a last resort. . .For JFK, force was the hand inside the glove of diplomacy. . . Kennedy . . . orchestrated . . . options short of war. . .
Lesson Two: President Kennedy famously said, "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."
Lesson Three: The perfect should not be the enemy of the good. . . small steps that avoided confrontations that could lead to a nuclear war neither country would survive. . .
Kennedy did a great job with the Cuban Missile Crisis. But we were fortunate to escape without a nuclear exchange that would have been civilization’s greatest disaster. Khrushchev lost his job within a year because of the humiliation the USSR suffered at Kennedy’s hands. For most Democrats, Kennedy’s muscular liberalism is best remembered for defending, then overturning the Roman Catholic Diem regime in non-Catholic South Vietnam. The experience taught liberals to avoid most foreign wars.
Allison’s analysis currently seems a bit outdated as a critique of Bush administration foreign policy. Bush may have achieved a major success in Korea through multilateral negotiations and an agreement based upon “small steps.” Iran may be next.
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At the risk of seeming mean spirited, curmudgeonly or absurd, itn't it time for those of us who were mesmerized by JFK (and the surrounding halo) to step back a bit and look harder at what he did, and what it meant. I admit that is difficult. I, like many of my generation was transfixed by his magnetism. I voted for him (or at least I think I did.) But in retrospect, which is supposed to entail less sentimentality than when we were young, JFKs failures go a long way to cancelling out his successes. In the latter category we must place the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights and maybe the tax cut. On the negative side there is the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy's "hands off acquiescence" in the overthrow of Diem in VN (the central causative factor in later US involvement, not LBJs dispatch of US troops), complicity in CIA assassination plots against Castro and sleeping with the enemy, as in Judith Exner/Sam Gianciana. (At least Clinton was only dallying with a WH intern and the nuclear codes were presumably safe.)I am afraid that too much has been made of an admittedly intelligent, charming and charismatic person with much promise but little performance, and much of that questionable. Ah well, Kazantzakis was right, Americans expect their saints to be heroes and vice versa. It is left to us to grow up and realize the difference.
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