Virtual JFK

I’ve never been seduced by the Kennedys, for I came to political awareness much too late for that. The best thing to be said about JFK and RFK was that they could bend with the tide of history, as when the civil rights movement forced them to respond. People are always looking for leaders, but it is only when they make their leaders act that we get anything real done.

The documentary Virtual JFK suggests that President Kennedy would not have escalated military involvement in Vietnam. There were only “advisors” in-country at the time of his assassination; LBJ sent in combat troops; then, Nixon, whose election-year claim of a peace plan was bullshit, presided over the final years of slaughter. The movie’s thesis is based on earlier incidents in which JFK did not follow the recommendations of his war-mongering advisors during these crises: Bay of Pigs, Laos, Cuban Missile, Berlin Wall. That took some balls for a young, seemingly lightweight guy who’d only been a Senator briefly. (Of course, judging from all that shtupping, he had moy mucho cojones.)

In Oliver Stone’s hyperactive JFK, it’s argued that the military and LBJ team up to whack the President so that the war would go on. This doc is certainly more interesting than that nonsense. You can second-guess anything, of course, but I think a couple of things are missing in Virtual JFK, as well as in the 1000 days mythology in general. Kennedy was a hardcore Cold Warrior. He played up a non-existent “missile gap” with the dreaded Reds to win the 1960 election (of course, it was the dead of Cook Co. who won it for him), showing he knew the value of politicizing national security, and how important it was to undercut the GOP on that front. (Recall that the GOP had savaged the Democrats for “losing,” as they so presumptively said, China. Could JFK stand up to the charge of “losing” Vietnam during the 1964 election? As McPalin knows, we Americans like to “win” wars even if we don’t know what they’re about.) He, like every American President since FDR, has been a complete creature of the national security state, it’s assumptions, aims, and methods. He might not have believed in the heavy hand of the Pentagon, but he was right in there with the social scientist/cowboys like W.W. Rostow who, neocon-like, thought they could change the world with their ideas. The best and the brightest in their narrow ties, plus fortified hamlets and targeted assassinations, that was the ticket. Cf. his romance with Special Forces and counter-insurgency tactics, flipside of the Peace Corps.

In short, I don’t buy the film. I’m not sure why it’s even being sold except as a vanity project of the academic who’s the narrator and co-producer. The most interesting thing about it is seeing the vintage footage, especially the press conferences.