Publications
The Kennedys: An American Drama
Peter Collier and David Horowitz
(Pan Books, London 1985)
JFK:The Presidency of John F. Kennedy
Herbert S. Parmet
(Penguin Books, London 1984)
Kennedy assassination buffs – and I confess to being one in a very small way – can’t resist books about the Kennedys even when they suspect there will be nothing, not a fragment, of interest about the assassination in them. The books by Parmet and Collier and Horowitz looked like being a couple of duds, but weren’t quite that.
What most books about the Kennedy administration – rather than the Kennedy person/myth -seem to fail to do is convey any real sense of what an interesting and adventurous foreign policy Kennedy and his little band of Atlanticist buddies tried to run. Of course, when I write that, I mean: by the standards of the time. Kennedy, it should not be entirely forgotten, followed Eisenhower/Dulles.
Think of all those brave ventures designed to show the world the liberal-progressive (if anti-communist) face of American imperialism: the Alliance for Progress; treaties with the Soviets; and ‘opening to the left in Italy’; the Peace Corps. Interesting moves. Futile in their apparent ambition to gild the lily, but, nonetheless, interesting. Kennedy was, indeed, a Cold War Warrior, but not just one.
Parmet’s chronicle of the Kennedy presidency is pretty accurate but he fails to convey any size of the change from the Eisenhower/Dulles era. We tend to think of the Reagan administration as representing a big shift to the right. This isn’t really accurate – not in the whole post-war period. All they’ve actually done is return to the rhetoric (mostly) and the behaviour (partly) of the pre-Kennedy era. Little of what has been said or done by the Reagan administration would have seemed that surprising coming from the mouth of John Foster Dulles.(Though Dulles might have said it more elegantly and looked less ridiculous doing it.)
Parmet, a historian, fails to convey that sense of history. His perspective is hampered somewhat by his role as one of the new defenders of the Warren Commission report on Kennedy’s assassination. It’s almost nostalgic to read Parmet seriously quoting Warren Commission lawyer Bellin’s view that Jack Ruby’s encounter with Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Station was just a “happenstance”…”that changed the face of history “(p349); or making this really convoluted defense of the Report: “There is still no tangible evidence that however flawed the Warren Commission report may have been, its conclusions were wrong.” (p348) “Tangible evidence?” I dunno, like a confession maybe? The Report is “flawed” but not “wrong”. So, half-wrong? If it is flawed, how can he know its conclusions are correct? Ah, yes; no “tangible evidence”. Intellectual inquiry ceases while we wait for this “tangible” stuff.
Writing like this is so silly. How can an obviously intelligent human being like Parmet engage in such silly nonsense? Well, for one thing, he refers to ‘Jack’ much of the time. Yep, he’s a fan. Welcome to hagiography country.
There is, however, one section (p334 onward) which seems to me to be both new and significant.
Parmet describes a hitherto unknown private visit to Vietnam’s Diem by a personal friend of Kennedy’s, Torbert MacDonald.
“MacDonald himself explained why Kennedy sent him. The President had begun to develop personal sources of information from FBI men who were bypassing J. Edgar Hoover and going directly to him. Some CIA people were following a similar route and avoiding the agency …. when he heard that Big Minh and his group were planning to assassinate Diem, he wanted to make a direct contact. He was hesitant about the embassy in Saigon because he could not trust his people there. So he called on Torby who … told Diem “They’re going to kill you. You’ve got to get out of there temporarily to seek sanctuary in the American Embassy”. Diem refused.
Parmet just drops this into his section on Vietnam without comment and without any indication that he has the slightest idea of the significance of what he is telling us. Back channels to the CIA and FBI? Advance knowledge (from whom?) of the Diem assassination? These should ramify for years. Parmet’s book will be remembered in years to come for this section, if for nothing else.
Collier and Horowitz (Cowitz for short) don’t even bother trying to give an account of the Kennedy administration . Theirs is American history as Dynasty out-takes.
As a portrait of a patriarchy running amok it is pretty interesting, some of it, especially the final section on the Kennedy children, the sons and nephews of John and Robert. Cowitz call this ‘The lost boys’. They aren’t lost (except to the keepers of the flame), they’re just buried by the accident of being ‘a Kennedy’. Never before can a life of multiple drug use and unlimited access to women have seemed such a drag!
The strange thing is that this group of young men, all imprisoned by these myths, is, apparently, not remotely interested in the questions: Who killed my dad? Who killed my uncle? They are children/nephews of the two most famous assassinations in recent history, and they aren’t even curious? On Cowitz’s account, this is the case. Or is it just that Cowitz didn’t ask them about the deaths?
This latter suggestion has a good chance of being true, in my opinion. Cowitz duck the entire assassination issue. Parmet might be said to display the courage of his own needs; Cowitz have no such excuse. Their evasion of the issue is calculated. Sirhan doesn’t get a namecheck; Oswald just one. No view of the events of 1963 or 1968 is offered, bar a very faint inference proffered: that it was Oswald in 1963.
But Cowitz know it wasn’t like that. They used to be among the senior staff at Ramparts magazine; and Ramparts has the distinction of being just about the only serious magazine on the American left which continued to take the assassination seriously all the way through to Watergate. Ramparts published Peter Dale Scott’s Dallas, Watergate and Beyond, one of the seminal essays on the subject. Cowitz know that it wasn’t Oswald and Sirhan. This knowledge shows itself in the way they can’t bring themselves to just hold their noses and state ‘Oswald and Sirhan did it’. A sentence or two – who would notice? Instead we get “a man was waiting with a gun”, or some such circumlocution.
Cowitz must find their knowledge of events such as this an embarrassment in their new roles as born-again rightwingers, revealed to the world in October’s Encounter . “Casting our ballots for Ronald Reagan was indeed a way of saying goodbye to all that – the self-aggrandizing romance with corrupt Third Worldism; to the casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism; to the hypocritical and self-dramatising Anti-Americanism which is the New Left’s bequest to mainstream politics.” .
As such confessions go, this one is quite interesting if unoriginal. Accusing the (old) New Left of naivety is easy enough. The world is complex; it takes a long time to read all the books. Almost by definition the young are going to appear naive.
The curious thing is that someone as sophisticated as Horowitz should produce a confession that is so over the top. Just because the New Left now appears naive seems a fairly thin reason to vote for Reagan, who was a dummy when Ramparts was on the go, and is now a dummy with pretty advanced senile dementia.
The new lesson according to Cowitz includes these:
“In Vietnam we waged a war against ourselves”;
“The Ethiopian regime is propped up by 200,000 Cuban legionnaires”;
“Thousands of Afghan children who have been taken to the Soviet Union to be “educated” will be returned to their native land as spies and quizlings.”
The first is virtually unintelligible – and probably racist; the second and third are factoids of enormous proportions. No longer “indulging Soviet totalitarianism” is a fine thing. Why does it so often seem to mean turning off the critical faculties?
Robin Ramsay