Thank you all for your thoughtful and well-argued responses to my question. After reflecting on what you have said, let me try to explain why I am inclined to come down on the side of not launching federal prosecutions of Trump. I say “inclined” in order to convey that I am still quite torn on this matter.
Looking back on my long life, I find that during those years
there are a number of presidents for the post – presidential prosecution of whom
I could make a good argument. I have been alive during the presidencies of 14
men starting with Roosevelt and ending with Trump. Far and away the most
reckless, dangerous, and hence perhaps most worthy of prosecution was Kennedy
(although, of course, his assassination made the question moot.) Alone among
the 14, Kennedy brought us to the brink of a civilization annihilating nuclear
war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It was also Kennedy and his vice
president LBJ who took us into the Vietnam war. George W. Bush lied us into the
Iraq war, a succession of presidents carried out or did not put an end to the
practice of “rendition,” which is to say the outsourcing of torture. And so on
and on.
None of these actions was illegal, at least as defined by
the Constitution. All of them were arguably within the purview of the powers of
the presidency. By comparison, the illegal actions of Nixon and Trump and the
sexual dalliances of Clinton are really quite minor. Trump is a grifter, a
crook, and a cheap one at that. His crimes have all been out in the open and
cheered on by perhaps 40% or more of the American electorate. I sing myself to
sleep at night imagining the entire Trump family reduced to pauperism and
forced to spend their lives searching for the parents of the children they
turned into orphans. But that is neither here nor there.
To some extent, my response to the question I posed depends
on the outcome of the Georgia senatorial runoff elections. If the Democrats win
both, there is the possibility of some rapid, major, and extremely beneficial
domestic legislation which would help the desperate circumstances of scores of
millions of Americans. A prosecution of Trump would steal all of the time and
attention from that legislation and I do not think would be worth the
satisfaction of seeing Trump brought low. But if we lose one or both of those
runoff elections, then regardless of good old Joe, virtually nothing will get
done for at least the first two years of his presidency and in that case
perhaps it would be just as well to spend some time and political capital going
after the Trumps and their henchmen (or perhaps I should say henchpeople, since
when it comes to corrupting and debasing the already corrupt and debased, Trump
is an equal opportunity villain.)
Those are my thoughts at the moment. But if the comments
section to this blog continues at its current level of intelligence and
thoughtfulness I may find myself changing my mind. Thank you all again.
44 comments:
I wondered from where “henchman” was derived. From etymology online:
Henchman
mid-14c., hengestman, later henshman (mid-15c.) "high-ranking servant (usually of gentle birth), attendant upon a king, nobleman, etc.," originally "groom," probably from man (n.) + Old English hengest "horse, stallion, gelding," from Proto-Germanic *hangistas (source also of Old Frisian hengst, Dutch hengest, German Hengst "stallion"), perhaps literally "best at springing," from PIE *kenku- (source also of Greek kekiein "to gush forth;" Lithuanian šokti "to jump, dance;" Breton kazek "a mare," literally "that which belongs to a stallion").
Perhaps modeled on Old Norse compound hesta-maðr "horse-boy, groom." The word became obsolete in England 17c., but it was retained in Scottish as "personal attendant of a Highland chief," in which sense Scott revived it in literary English from Germany 1810. Sense of "obedient or unscrupulous follower" is first recorded 1839, probably somehow a misunderstanding of the word as used by Scott.
“This officer is a sort of secretary, and is to be ready, upon all occasions, to venture his life in defence of his master; and at drinking-bouts he stands behind his seat, at Himself haunch, from whence his title is derived, and watches the conversation, to see if any one offends his patron.” [Scott, notes to "Lady of the Lake," 1820; his proposed etymology is not now considered correct]
Some of these associations are so revealing. “Gelding,” or, a mare that belongs to a stallion, would certainly be applicable to many Trump officials, but most appropriate to Pence, Conway, and the endless stream of intellectually castrated press secretaries who ‘spring’ forth in front of the cameras to defend their patron’s indefensible actions with ‘gushing’ nonsense.
Climate change is a threat to, in Chomsky’s happy phrase, “organized human life.” Trump’s deliberate undermining of efforts to deal with climate change puts him nearly in the same class as JFK. Unfortunately, even if the Democrats win the run-off elections in Georgia, Congress is unlikely to pass meaningful climate legislation because a 50-50 Senate is unlikely to do away with the filibuster. I don’t expect Congress to act on climate change unless and until the spell of unreality that grips a sizable portion of the electorate is broken. Keep in mind that there are still people in this country who can’t accept that the coronavirus isn’t a hoax, as illustrated by this interview with a South Dakota nurse. People who can’t accept a pandemic, with its obvious causes and consequences, are not going to come to terms with climate change unless a dramatic change comes over this country.
If I thought that aggressive federal prosecutions of Trump & Co would break the spell, I would support them. If I thought that no prosecutions would break the spell, I would support that. If I thought that a few carefully chosen prosecutions—DeJoy is high on my list—would do the trick, I would support them. But prosecutions are probably never going to be sufficient to effect the change this country needs to begin to deal with reality.
I am reminded of the anti-Semitism of medieval Christians. So ignorant and so divorced from reality they were that they would blame the Black Death on Jews, and no amount of death and ruin could shake them from, in Daniel Goldhagen’s words, their “fantastical beliefs.” A key element of the Republican base hold fantastical beliefs in relation to the coronavirus and hold fantastical beliefs in relation to climate change. It seems to me that if the spell is to be broken, it must be the work of a mass movement, especially among the young people of this country who fear a future of climate degradation—young people who, in all too many cases, make up a sizable portion of the 1/3 of the population who didn’t vote in the last election. That’s not much to hang our hopes on, but I don’t see an alternative right now.
" It was also Kennedy and his vice president LBJ who took us into the Vietnam war." ?
As my aging memory serves, the US was already engaged in Vietnam during the Eisenhower administration--siding with the French, refusal to adhere to the Geneva Accords, etc.
David, I watched that interview with the nurse. The Republican Party has become a death cult. Very few things lately have appalled me quite so much. Chris, thank you for that wonderful bit of etymology. Very soothing to the spirit. Anonymous, I am sure you are right. I had in mind the actual sending of troops.
I don't believe much in imprisioning people, not even Trump, but I could see sentencing
him and his family to a life sentence of community service at the minimum wage, for example, working with immigrants or preparing food in a soup kitchen.
Dr. Wolff,
Death cult is exactly right. I have been describing the Republican Party as the party of morbidity and mortality since their refusal to vote for the ACA. In using that phrase i’m riffing on the CDC’s publication titled “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” which I used to follow when I was working in health and human services. I consult the etymology online source frequently, and had looked up henchman a few weeks ago when the work appeared in a NYTs Spelling Bee game which I do every morning during breakfast.
A bit off topic, but since coups have been mentioned here and since at a stretch the topic is how to deal with political crimes the following collection may be of interest:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/collections/see-you-in-hell-punk
I was pretty firmly on the don't prosecute side yesterday. But if Trump is caught blatantly trying to illegally influence the people who certify the election, like bribing them to change votes, well that would really need to be prosecuted even at the risk of further dividing this country. I see he personally called one of the election officials in Detroit that initially refused to certify the county's election results- supposedly to check on her 'safety'.
I am not sure why I consider this more disturbing than all the other things he has done as President- but I do.
Haven't read the comments (yet), but it was Truman and esp Eisenhower who, by supporting the French in Indochina, laid the groundwork for US involvement there, and it was LBJ who made the crucial escalation decisions in 1965. So plenty of blame to go around in addition to JFK.
I know that Prof Wolff lived through the Cuban missile crisis whereas I was too young to be aware of it at the time, but I don't understand where this idea that JFK brought us to the brink of nuclear war comes from and that, by implication, another President might not have. No conceivable US President in 1962 would have seen the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba as anything except a natl security crisis, so the question is how JFK handled the crisis, and while I'm not an expert on the matter, what I've read suggests he handled it pretty well and that he and Khrushchev both get some credit for the fact that a nuclear war did not occur. So the idea that JFK was the most worthy of prosecution of the Presidents in RPW's lifetime strikes me as bizzare.
Even if no conceivable US president in 1962 would have seen the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba as anything but a national security crisis, that does not exculpate JFK. Rather that indicates that all conceivable US presidents in 1962 were worthy of prosecution for international crimes of aggression.
Cuba in 1962 was a sovereign state, with the right to invite their Soviet ally to place missiles there. The U.S. does not own the Caribbean, in spite of the Monroe Doctrine.
And by the way, there were U.S. missiles in Turkey which is roughly about the same distance from the Soviet Union as Cuba is from the U.S., but that is neither here nor there.
Again relying on my aging memory: Didn't Kennedy lie his way to the presidency by claiming that there was a missile gap? (And rumor has that he also stole it.) If that's so, then he played a major part in boosting the number of nuclear weapons in the US and elsewhere and drove the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. That might be interpreted as bringing us all closer to the brink. Beyond that, LFC, it is, I think, at least arguable that the USSR was trying to get the US to take seriously the presence of its nuclear missiles on the Soviet border area, in Turkey. But Kennedy did choose to treat Cuba as if the Soviet move there lacked any other context. At least in public. In private, as I recall, the removal of the American missiles from Turkey was eventually part of the deal.
s.w. I see we remember the same sorts of things.
s.w.
If all conceivable US Presidents in 1962 deserved prosecution, then you're prosecuting JFK mostly because, from this angle, he had the bad luck to be president in 1962, not because of personal failings primarily but because of a somewhat arbitrary matter of timing.
Anonymous
Point taken on the "missile gap." That was bad. On the other hand Kennedy shd get some credit for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, banning atmospheric testing.
I'm actually not a big fan of JFK or his foreign policy. But to say he's more worthy of prosecution than Nixon for Watergate, Cambodia, and Chile and Bangladesh -- I don't get that.
I'm not claiming that JFK is more worthy of prosecution than Nixon, merely that he's worthy of prosecution.
By the way, it's important to point out that Fidel Castro authorized the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba only after the Bay of Pigs invasion, that is, only after the U.S., using Cuban exiles, backed by U.S. planes, tried to invade his country. There were also numerous assassination attempts by JFK against Fidel Castro and a general JFK administration plan called Operation Mongoose to sabotage and subvert the revolutionary process in Cuba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose
I know that you, LFC, are aware that the U.S. at the time backed dictatorships all over Latin America, so that the JFK administration concern about dictatorship in Cuba was completely hypocritical, but for those who may not want to acknowledge that fact, let me note that at the same time as they waxed indignant about Fidel Castro being a dictator, the U.S. was supporting Papa Doc in Haiti, Somoza in Nicaragua and Trujillo in the Dominican Republic among others.
In regards to Cuba, former president McKinley tried to get Spain to release Cuba and let them become independent. It failed, there was conflict and we got some carribbean islands out of the deal but let Cuba to its own devices. But McKinley also was a champion of manufacturing and put in lots of tariffs to make America great. Unfortunatately he was shot by an anarchist. So all presidents try, some are good ones, some not so much. But if Spain had given Cuba its independence, things may have been different.
s.w.
I was addressing Professor Wolff's contention, in the original post here, that Kennedy was the most "reckless, dangerous, and hence perhaps most worthy of prosecution" of the 14 presidents during RPW's lifetime.
I agree with LFC’s assessment of Kennedy and his role in the Cuban missile crisis. He did not, alone, bring the world to the edge of nuclear Armageddon. In point of fact, Kennedy had -anticipated that the Soviet Union would use the presence of the Jupiter IBM’s in Turkey as an excuse to place missiles in Cuba. Three months before the missile crisis, he had instructed Undersecretary of State George Ball to begin a process of removing the missiles from Turkey. See “To the Brink: Turkish and Cuban Missiles during the Height of the Cold War,” https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1218&context=issr. Once the Soviet Union had begun building the missile launching site in Cuba, and lied about it to the UN, Kennedy had no choice but take an aggressive stance demanding that the missile site be dismantled. He could not risk allowing the missiles to be delivered and made operational. The U.S. could not afford to have a nuclear threat 90 miles off its shores which could be used to extort concessions from the U.S. And to suggest that, well if it was OK for the U.S. to have missiles in Turkey, it should have been OK for the Soviet Union to return favor in Cuba, ignores the dynamics of geopolitics. In point of fact, Kennedy implemented the least aggressive response that his diplomatic and military aids recommended. They recommended a full-scale invasion of Cuba, or preemptive nuclear strike. He opted for the less aggressive response of a naval blockade. Then he, on the advice of his brother, decided to defuse the situation by allowing Kruschev to save face by agreeing, secretly, to remove the missiles from Turkey. As the author of the above analysis states, “The situation took relations between the Soviet and American heads of state to a high and fostered mutual understanding between the two leaders; both states had been willing to grant concessions in favor of the other, perhaps opening a new doorway to the mollification of American-Soviet relations.” That all ended on Nov. 22,1963.
Regarding Kennedy’s role in the Vietnam debacle, Barbara Tuchman reports in her analysis of missteps made by governments through history, “The March of Folly,” on p. 304, that shortly before his assassination, he “instructed Michael Forrestal to think about preparing a plan for post-election withdrawal, saying it would take a year to prepare acceptance by Congress and by the allies in Asia and Europe. Nothing came of this, but when asked privately how he would manage withdrawal without damage to American prestige, he replied, “Easy, put a government in there that would ask us to leave.” This too ended on Nov. 22. Kennedy had a grasp of international relations which Trump could never have equaled. Can you imagine how Trump would have handled the Cuban missile crisis, with his machismo and bravura? We would not be alive today to write about it. To say that Kennedy was the worst President of the last 60 years, and worthy of prosecution (by whom?) is, I submit, not accurate.
You could say we are in the predicament we are in because of LBJ and hanging chads.
wasn't 22 November when the chickens came home to roost (to quote someone who was not MLK)? Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated 20 days earlier, which was one way of putting in a government which ould ask the US to leave?
But more largely, I didn't realise I was rank ordering Presidents in terms of the harm they caused domestically or internationally. I thought I was just raisng minor historical points relevant to their evaluation. i didn't think anyone else was suggesting that kennedy was the worst or that he was worse than X.
On JFK in the Cuban missile crisis, I agree in general w MS and thank him for the reference (for perhaps some future perusal). The Cold War context shaped the overall reaction of alarm, and one can criticize the U.S. (as s.w. does) for the compromises, inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and efforts to destabilize or overthrow sovereign govts that came w the Cold War mindset. Within that context, however, JFK's behavior in the missile crisis was as MS has described, and I don't want to even think about what might have happened if he had taken one of the more aggressive options on the table. As it is, it was a pretty close-run thing, a near-miss at some moments, is my impression, partly because a lot of the on-the-ground moves were in the hands of military subordinates who cd not always be communicated w instantly. I have Michael Dobbs's virtually hour-by-hour account on my shelf, but have only dipped into bits of it.
I have my own views on Kennedy and Vietnam, which are somewhat ambivalent (and agnostic on what might have happened had he lived), but I'm not going into it bc (1) I don't have time and even more importantly (2) it would derail the thread in a major way.
Kennedy was a Cold Warrior for sure, to some extent even a crusading one, and claimed in his inaugural address that the US would "bear any burden, face any foe" (or however the phrase went) to support the cause of "liberty," i.e. anti-Communism. In Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere, the result was a foreign policy that I, and I think many other people, would not give high ratings to today for balance or consistency, among other things, or in some cases even success on its own terms. "Revolution" was viewed as ipso facto bad, local conditions were not always carefully judged, anti-Communism (broadly construed) was an overriding preoccupation. So a v. mixed record, but his decisionmaking during the missile crisis is not on the bad side of the ledger.
While the Kennedys were no saints, can anyone argue with a straight face that they were worse than the pack that brought us Iran-Contra and then pardoned themselves for it when they got caught?
Well, we could get into pages and pages of discussion about which presidents were the worst, but that would lead very far off the path of discussing the merits of past presidents being investigated and potentially prosecuted by successor administrations, and specifically of whether Trump & Co should be prosecuted.
Actually, we all owe our lives, and those of our parents and present and future grandchildren, and the lives of everyone on the planet, to a Russian submarine commander named Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. Had he not succeeded in talking down his superior commander when their submarine had lost communication with Moscow, his commander would have launched the submarine’s missiles, setting off WWIII. You can read about it here:
ou-know-owe-your-life-to-thttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almost-everyone-yhis-man/#:~:text=The%20Russian%20in%20question%2C%20an,the%20nuclear-tipped%20missile%20readied.
RPW argues that the presidents in recent decades who may have acted in ways that many of us find highly objectionable were acting within the constitutionally authorized powers of their office.
Setting the validity of that dubious argument aside for the moment, let me suggest that whether a president's acts were constitutional is far too narrow a criterion for judging the acts of a president and his administration.
The US is not one of the 123 countries that are parties to the treaty governing the functions of the International Criminal Court—the international body empowered 20 years ago to investigate and prosecute some of the worst possible crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes) when national courts are unable or unwilling to do so. We can thank both of the major US political parties for this state of affairs. It would be necessary for the US Executive to sign the treaty and for Congress to ratify it for the US to become subject to the Court's jurisdiction. Seeking to have it both ways, in typical Clintonian fashion, Bill Clinton authorized the government to sign the treaty but argued that the US should not ratify it unless it were amended to prevent the Court from ever attempting to prosecute personnel of countries that had not recognized its jurisdiction; Bush subsequently "unsigned" the treaty.
The US then, in 2002, passed legislation (the "American Service-Members' Protection Act", tucked into a post-9/11 anti-terrorism funding bill) making it illegal for any court or agent of the United States federal, state, or local governments to cooperate with the International Criminal Court should the ICC seek to investigate or prosecute any US elected official, US military personnel, or US ally acting in an official capacity. The legislation had been introduced by Republicans Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Tom DeLay, but it passed with bipartisan support, including support from Sen. Joe Biden, Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi. (Notably, some of the more progressive Democrats did vote against it, including Rep. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Barbara Lee, and Sen. Russ Feingold.)
This leaves us in a situation in which the only international body that would be able to investigate & prosecute American presidents or members of Congress for crimes against humanity is the United Nations via an ad-hoc committee established for such a purpose. The problem with that being, of course, that the current US president would have to agree to it, since the US holds a permanent UN Security Council seat, controlled by the president, and can veto any such proposals.
Do you see where this line of argumentation that successor administrations should not prosecute past administrations leads us?
So long as no president agrees to investigate and prosecute his predecessors, no US president can ever be prosecuted for crimes against humanity (with the sole exception, perhaps, of prosecution by an independent counsel appointed by Congress). Nor can can the leadership of the House or the Senate–or any chairs of intelligence, foreign affairs, or judiciary committees in Congress—who are supposed to be overseeing the Executive Branch, ever be prosecuted for crimes against humanity—not an insignificant consideration, insofar as the House & Senate leadership also decide whether to impeach and try a president, and in some cases share responsibility for enabling (or turning a blind eye) to actions taken by the president (as with Pelosi and the Bush torture program).
If they are above every law, what incentive is there for US officials to not employ torture? To not commit or act as an accessory to genocide? As Nixon and Trump have said, if the president does it (in the interest of national security), it is by definition legal.
Following on from Eric's depressing account of just how little we can expect justice will be done, I suppose we can look forward to the day when China becomes the global overlord so that it can begin dragging others, including Americans, to Beijing to stand trial for breaking Chinese law. (Cf. Assange, for one.)
If the question is, "Should there be federal prosecutions of Donald Trump?" I submit that the issue is not yet ripe. If the question is, "Should the appropriate federal law enforcement agencies investigate Trump and those in his administration to determine if federal crimes have been committed and who is potentially liable to prosecution?" My answer to that question would be a resounding yes.
Once Trump is out of office, investigations can proceed apace. And as the scope of his actions become clear, the real question will be how much can or should be disclosed. Some of it will leak, some of it will be ferreted out by diligent reporters, some will come out in congressional investigations. This then brings us to a critical juncture: It has been the policy of the justice department to not comment if prosecutions are not sought. But it is also true that the American people deserve an accounting of any criminal or bad faith acts of the Trump administration.
I think that prosecuting a former president is genuinely undesirable. And I also think that Trump is so far from the norm that there may be no good response to him. I think the only hope may be exposing how fundamentally corrupt he is so that a sufficiently large majority rejects him and the party that supported him.
Prosecuting Trump is akin to chemotherapy: it will be painful and sickening and provides at best only the hope of a temporary remission, not a cure. But the alternative, it seems, is simply allow the cancer to grow, and I cannot imagine how that could possibly lead to a any kind of a positive outcome.
I think we need to tease apart the issue of federal criminal investigations (which are done in secrecy by law enforcement), investigations done by intelligence agencies to determine possible security breaches (which obviously are done in secrecy), investigations done by congress (which are mostly done in public) , and investigations done by independent news organizations.
Trump's corruption is such a big a juicy story that that tremendous amounts of time will be absorbed in investigating him. There simply is no way around this. How much time should congress spend in investigating Trump? Most of it should be directed to what is needed for good governance, to be guided by the need to expose and repair the damage wrought by this malignant administration.
Criminal investigations and investigations into possible security breaches will occur as a matter of course, and these shouldn't necessarily require much congressional oversight. But they are essential and must be supported as needed.
Congress's most important role may be in support of the various agencies damaged during the past four years along with making government records available through freedom of information acts and public disclosure. Congress need not do all or even most of this itself, since the appetite to find out what happened will be so large that whole new organizations may be spawned to do just that.
But ultimately, again, I come back to my same conviction: criminal investigations must be done, and any crimes that are found must be prosecuted.
One final note: if Trump were any normal individual, some kind of accommodation could be made, some kind of lukewarm plea deal could be reached. But since Trump will never accept any limits on his actions, the only courses left to us are tolerating his behavior, or prosecuting it. No middle path is possible.
I have taken a number of controversial positions on this blog, and have engaged on several occasions in satire and caustic comments in responding to opinions which I have regarded as poorly reasoned and indefensible – responses for which I have been taken to task – but for a commenter to say that the assassination of President Kennedy was “chickens coming home to roost” for the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem is despicable, and one of the most reprehensible and irresponsible statements I have seen on this or on any other blog, and the fact that no one has taken the individual who wrote this to task is very disappointing, and says, I believe, something about the thought processes of the readers of this blog. And Martin Luther King did not say that his assassination was “chickens coming home to roost.” He said just the opposite. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/statement-john-f-kennedy-assassination
In point of fact, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, were murderous tyrants who persecuted, imprisoned and tortured thousands of Buddhists in South Vietnam, and ordered their military to shoot protesters who bore the Buddhist flag, to the point that Buddhist monks were engaging in self-immolation in protest. The Diems were hated by the majority of the South Vietnamese people. Ngo Dinh and Dinh Nhu were assassinated in a military coup that was led by a cadre of officers in the South Vietnamese army, led by General Van Minh. Neither President Kennedy, nor Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, nor the CIA had anything to do with the coup or the assassination. When Nixon was President – who had no love foe Kennedy – he ordered that a governmental investigation be conducted to determine whether Kennedy or the Cia had directed or authorized the coup and/or the assassinations of the Diems, ant the investigation concluded thar there was no evidence that there had been any involvement, direct or indirect, by the U.S, in the coup or the assassination, a conclusion that I suspect many of the readers of this blog will view with a jaundiced eye. However, General Maxwell Taylor, who was present in the room when President Kennedy learned of the assassinations reported, “Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before.” Arthur Schlesinger reported that Kennedy was “somber and shaken.”
For anyone to celebrate Kennedy’s assassination – or. for that matter, the assassination of any American President - as deserved payback for the deaths of the Diem brothers is beyond the pale, and the fact that no one had, prior to my comment, condemned its author is very sad indeed.
Anonymous above says that "to quote someone who was not MLK", not to quote MLK, the chicken came home to roost. The person who was not MLK was Malcolm X and the remark was given much unfavorable media coverage at the time.
the fact that no one has taken the individual who wrote this to task is very disappointing, and says, I believe, something about the thought processes of the readers of this blog.
Indeed--they could be too busy to wade through walls of text of indifferent craftmanship. Life intercedes. This casting of aspersions can fairly be called fatuous.
I am aware that the comment was made by Malcolm X, and it was erroneous when Macolm X said it (in response to a reporter’s question) and it is erroneous to repeat it today, as I point out in my comment above. Neither President Kennedy nor the CIA had anything to do with the coup which overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem, or with his assassination, and to endorse and give credence to the unattributed remark by Malcolm X, that Kennedy deserved what he got because of his role in Diem’s assassination is historically inaccurate and, more importantly, despicable. And then to go on and suggest that this was Kennedy’s way of installing a government that would ask us to leave South Vietnam compounds the distortion, since Diem’s successors, Minh and Thieu, did not ask us to leave, but insisted that we stay.
Milk aneggs,
In a prior comment in a different thread, s. wallerstein challenged another commenter’s opinion that it is unsatisfactory to have a liberal echo chamber, to which s. wallerstein responded, what’s wrong with a liberal echo chamber, when there are so many conservative and right wing echo chambers out there that liberals are entitled to have one of their own (I am paraphrasing). What’s wrong with an echo chamber, whether on the right or on the left, is that, like an echo, you lose sight of where the truth lies, and it is the truth, is it not, that sophisticated literati are supposed to be pursuing? An echo chamber just reinforces the confirmation bias of those contributing to the echo. As is evident here. You say that life’s demands intervene to make it difficult to spend the time to get at the truth of what role, if any, President Kennedy and the U.S. had in the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. But I don’t see the demands of life preventing the commenters on this blog, including in this thread, from submitting multiple comments about how most, if not all, U.S. Presidents are unsavory people who have committed crimes deserving of prosecution. Yet, when they see a comment by Anonymous repeating the canard that President Kennedy got what he deserved because of his role in the assassination of Diem, they don’t recognize it for the abhorrent statement that it is; are unwilling to do the research to find out if it is true. They just shrug their shoulders and move on to the next comment that reinforces their confirmation bias. That’s what’s wrong with an echo chamber, whether right wing or left wing.
"You say that life’s demands intervene to make it difficult to spend the time to get at the truth of what role, if..."
That's an obvious mischaracterization of "...they could be too busy to wade through walls of text of indifferent craftmanship."
I'm out of time. You may presume otherwise.
I don't have time right now to read the recent comments in detail, but I don't see where anyone made these remarks linking the two assassinations in that way. It must be buried pretty deep in a comment bc it doesn't jump out.
LFC,
Anonymous at 5:26 PM (in response to my comment that prior to his assassination, Kennedy had instructed Forrestal to begin to draw up plans for a withdrawal from Vietnam, and that when asked how we could withdraw without losing face, Kennedy responded, “Easy, we will just put a government in there that would ask us to leave.”), wrote, “[W]asn’t November 22 when the chickens came home to roost (to quote someone who was not MLK)? Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated 20 days earlier, which was one way of putting in a government which [w]ould ask the US to leave?” This was repeating a comment that Malcolm X made after the assassination indicating that Kennedy had it coming. Anonymous’ reference to the assassination of Diem was stating that Kennedy’s assassination was for his alleged role in the Diem assassination, reiterating Malcolm X’s assertion that he had it coming, i.e., his chickens had come home to roost.
On a separate note relating to Cuba, this morning I received an email from the federal courts indicating that the courts have instituted a new fee schedule. In the federal courts, there is an initial filing fee for civil lawsuits, now raised from $400 to $402. This is better than the fees which state courts file, because in federal courts, once you pay the filing fee, there is no fee for filing any motions thereafter, which can total up to 5-10 motions per lawsuit and in state courts amounts to a pretty penny. However, there was one new filing fee of $6,800!! The fee is for filing a lawsuit under a statute I had never heard of – the Action Under Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996 (get this, LIBERTAD for short – some might say it is missing an R between the A and the D). The statute authorizes Cuban Americans who claim that their assets were illegally confiscated by the Cuban government (among other things). I am quite confident that I will not be filing such a lawsuit in the near future, since I do not have any clients who could afford the filing fee.
MS - cool story, bro. lol
Trust MS to grab the dirty end of the stick and proceed to flail around in a zealous frenzy. Next thing we’ll be told that Nixon & Kissinger & the Univ. of Chicago economics dept. didn’t bear major responsibility for that earlier 9/11 horror in Chile.
As to the horror which was the USA’s war on the Vietnamese, I’ll go along with Seymour Hersh’s judgement that “Minh joined with two other senior South Vietnamese officers in the coup, WHICH WAS CARRIED OUT WITH THE PRIOR KNOWLEDGE AND ACQUIESCENCE OF THE AMERICAN EMBASSY AND THE WHITE HOUSE” [my emphasis] (“The price of Power, p. 425)
Gabriel Kolko says the same sort of thing in more detail—too much to quote here—in his “Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience.” (pp. 117-8)
I expect to be told at exhaustive and exhausting length that these aren’t reliable sources.
Also, by the way, in quoting Malcolm X I wasn’t trying to say that Kennedy had it coming, I was (pardon my irony) just trying to poke a little indirect suspicion at the claim, the still much debated claim, that Kennedy and the rest of the best and the brightest would have exited Vietnam.
I have a high regard for Seymour Hersh and his journalistic credentials. That does not mean that he may not have gotten somethings wrong. My sources for the accounts of how President Kennedy reacted with shock and dismay upon learning of the assassination of the Diem brothers are: Howard Jones, Death Of A Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK prolonged the Vietnam War; Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. My source for the Nixon investigation of the Diem assassinations is Ellen Hammer, A Death In November: America In Vietnam. The fact that different journalist/historians may differ about the facts is hardly surprising, given the fog of war, and Aeschylus’ observation, “In war, truth is the first casualty.”
Regarding your pejorative comments about me, I have in prior comments disclosed my identity behind my pseudonym. Why do you feel a need to continually hide your identity behind “Anonymous”?
MS< Here’s how the review of one of your references at
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/ellen-j-hammer/a-death-in-november-america-in-vietnam-1963/
begins in a way that seems to support my view of the coup against Diem:
“Hammer (Struggle for Indochina) here focuses on Vietnam in the year that culminated in the assassination of South Vietnam's President, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his powerful brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. She claims that this US-ABETTED COUP (my emphasis) turned the Vietnam War into an ""American operation"" that ultimately led to the end of South Vietnam as a sovereign nation.”
and here’s how it concludes:
“The story is a complicated one, and Hammer does little to help the reader sort out or interpret the mass of details. She has an annoying tendency to drop a mention of an event or individual, then jerk the reader back in time to supply pages of background data without a transitional clue as to its purpose. Although she is obviously sympathetic to Diem, he remains inscrutable. As a result, this valuable document will probably appeal only to historians and the most ardent Vietnam War buffs.”
Elsewhere, https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/21/1/vietnam_historians_at_war —this tendentious essay, but when was anything written about Vietnam not tendentious (as we have proved here yet again) the author at least a couple of times mentions Hammer and William Colby in the same breath, implying that they were rather alike in their (mis?)understanding of Vietnam. He says this specifically:
“The works of Ellen Hammer and William Colby, an American scholar living in France and a former CIA director, respectively, charged that South Vietnam was viable under Ngo Dinh Diem and that the United States erred catastrophically in encouraging his overthrow.”
On to another matter: I’ve gone this way and that on anonymity, but I’ve come to favor it for at least a couple of reasons. (1) From looking at quite a number of blogs, I’ve become aware that there are some people who repeatedly post, sometimes even in a long stream. My reaction to these is usually, ’not him/her again’ and pass on without looking at anything they might say; and (2) as is particularly noticeable on this blog, we, several of us, tend to respond to the remarks attached to a particular id. as if a red sheet had been waved in our face—you do that, I do that, so do several others whether anonymous or not. So anonymity would seem to have the virtue of short-circuiting both of those types of response.
I marvel at the rehashing of the 1960s. The relevant lesson is to sweat the smaller stuff. There will likely be pardons but it is in the nature of things that not everyone will be pardoned. Once pardoned a person can't self-incriminate and may be liable to contempt for refusing to testify. House sub-committees and grand juries can grind away in the background. The states will have their own agendas. All this can easily run in the background.
There are numerous bad actors in the various agencies who need to be destroyed before they go on to be part of a future successful coup. After all, we are still dealing with folks from the Nixon Administration. Besides exposing and possibly indicting these actors we might bear in mind that getting a subpoena means hiring an attorney who is competent in dealing with Congressional committees and federal grand juries. This will be ruinous for most of them even if they escape the fines and prison terms they so deserve. It is important that their fate serves as un exemple pour les autres.
Johnson could have stopped Nixon dead in 1968 by revealing his conspiring to hamper the peace talks. He chose not to for the same reasons being advanced to not go after the malefactors in the Trump Administration. A president Humphrey would have meant a different time line for us.
Trump is actually relatively unimportant here. NY can deal with him and I would expect a competency hearing anyway. The slope most likely crosses the x-axis before 2024.
Anonymous,
I believe it is fitting that I submit this comment the day before the 57th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. While there may be a lack of consensus on whether President Kennedy and/or the CIA supported and/or facilitated the military coup which overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem, even if President Kennedy did support the removal of a dictator who was killing and imprisoning the Buddhist members of his country’s populace, it would still be consistent with that proposition that he did not expect, recommend or endorse his assassination, or that of his brother. And on that score, I would be inclined to give more credence to first hand observers like Maxwell Taylor and Arthur Schlesinger, who were there to see President Kennedy’s reaction to the news of the assassinations, and reported that he was shocked and distressed, than to Seymour Hersh, who was not there.
This link on the BBC about the trial of former French president Sarkozy may be of interest in the context of this thread
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-55015479
Best regards
Whatever happens, the broad outcome is virtually indisputable:
Democrats will continue to care about precedent, decorum, tradition, fairness ... and Republicans will continue to ruthlessly pursue whatever gets them what they want. The country will continue its shift to the right, and it will be an increasingly extreme and authoritarian right at that.
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