I am content to allow my little book to live or die on its own. It was published 52 years ago and for better or worse is now pretty much out of my hands. But before I move on, I would like to say one thing about the relevance of so apparently abstract and theoretical a work to the actual lived experiences of people in America at the time when it was published.
Let me remind everyone that back then there was a military
draft run by the Selective Service System. By the late 1960s, the United States
was deep into the Vietnam War and young men were being drafted to serve there
and, like as not, to die there. Hundreds of thousands were drafted and served,
many more avoided the draft by getting student deferments, some, like our
former president, got phony medical excuses, and a certain number of honorable
young men risked going to jail by standing up and refusing to serve on the
grounds that they believed the war to be unjust. Their conscientious stand was
rejected by many distinguished public figures who argued that because the
United States was a democracy whose laws express the will of the people, these
young men were morally obligated to serve even in a war to which they were on
principle opposed. It was said that
their obligation derived from the fact that the laws commanding them to serve
were in effect the expression of their own wills, manifested through the
actions of their elected representatives.
In 1970, The Bar Association of the City of New York held a
celebration to commemorate its Centennial. As part of the celebration they
arranged a debate about the question whether young men have a moral obligation
to serve in a war to which they are on principle opposed. There was no question
that they had a legal obligation; the question was whether the obligation was
morally binding as well. Defending the affirmative was Eugene V. Rostow, an
extremely distinguished lawyer who had for a time been the Dean of Yale Law School
(Rostow, brother of Walt Rostow, was actually named Eugene Victor Debs Rostow -
his parents were old Jewish socialists from New York - but this must have made
him uncomfortable because he never used the “Debs.”) Rostow
took the straight old social contract line and argued that the law commanding
these young men to serve was, indirectly, the expression of their own wills and
therefore was morally binding on them.
Defending the negative was a young philosopher from Columbia
University, newly promoted to the rank of full professor, who would later that
year publish a little book with the provocative title In Defense of
Anarchism.
With America’s wars now being fought by an all-volunteer
professional army, the question being debated that day may seem “academic,” but
it was not then
75 comments:
Although there is no active draft, I believe selective service registration is still mandatory for men (and a condition for various forms of federal support), and that there is an active case seeking to force inclusion of women in draft registration or end the registration requirement. But this is just a footnote your post, which I took to suggest that selective service is no longer in place.
You are quite correct. I just did not want to make the post too much longer By going into detail.
So, who won the debate? By “won” I mean who was then and there judged by the general will of those present to have come out on top? Was there a vote on this? Also, in 1970 18 year-olds did not yet have the right to vote—Nixon signed that into law in 1971. So where did Rostow think the moral obligation came from? Sure, there was a legal obligation, and it’s usually moral to follow the law, but I don’t see how the moral obligation per se flowed from the general will of adolescent males who legally couldn’t vote.
As a young man who had his draft physical in 1968 and avoided military service through a combination of medical certificates, lies and bullshitting, I want to thank you.
I had no idea then whether I had a moral obligation to serve in the army or not nor did I care much. I simply wasn't going to let myself be drafted into a pointless and genocidal war.
However, I appreciate the fact that you lent your debating skills to giving people like me
the support of a moral justification.
One additional point regarding the volunteer army. During the Vietnam war, college students who were eligible to be drafted either joined the National Guard or the Army Reserve, knowing that they would not be sent to Vietnam. I did the latter. We were referred to as “week-end warriors,” because, after having completed basic training and our Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) training (I was assigned to artillery, and am the only person among my friends and associates whoever humped ammo and fired a 105 mm. Howitzer), we only had to attend musters once a month, and attend summer camp for two weeks.
President George W. Bush (who also joined the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, but reportedly never showed up for duty after completing his training) did the unthinkable. He sent National Guardsmen and Army Reservists to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is common knowledge that the “weekend warriors” are not sufficiently trained to engage in actual combat. When I was in the Army Reserve, I knew that if I were sent to Vietnam, I would not survive. Even worse, Bush had these “weekend warriors’ serving multiple tours of duty. It was an insane and cruel policy, implemented so that Bush would not have to initiate a military draft to provide fodder for his war.
Not the first time I've plugged this here, but it's on topic:
For my Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary (="post-1950") Political Theory, I commissioned this essay from Anna Stilz (Princeton) on the enduring importance of the Defense of Anarchism book.
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198717133.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780198717133-e-7
There's another question, namely, was the student deferment policy fair? (N.b. I did not have a direct personal stake in any of this, bc when the Vietnam draft ended I hadn't yet graduated from high school.)
Mainly from reading Forester, _In the Shadow of Justice_, I know that Rawls introduced a resolution to the Harvard faculty that would have put it on record as opposed to student deferments (presumably the faculty cd not have actually ended deferments, bc I assume they were based in federal statute or regulation). Rawls's resolution garnered some support among the faculty, but not enough to pass.
P.s. posting on phone and not able rt now to check my facts or do any research, but I believe what I say above is basically correct. But if I have time I will check the details to make sure.
LFC,
Let me explain how the student deferment worked.
They gave you 4 years to finish college. I entered college in September 1964 and I graduated in May (or what it June?) 1968. In 1968, a month or so before I graduated, I was called for a draft physical examination. So if I hadn't managed to get myself declared "unfit" (1-Y), I would have been drafted immediately after graduating. No student deferment for graduate school, although there was one for medical school, but then you had to serve in the Army as a doctor after graduating. So the student deferment didn't get you out of Viet Nam.
There was a student deferment for graduate school.
I had one when I was a graduate student at the U of Michigan Philosophy Department from 1964 until 1967, when I returned my draft card to the Selective Service System at one of the Draft Resistance rallies, declared my intention not to cooperate with the draft and [in 1968] was reclassified as 1A-Delinquent, was drafted, refused induction, and was criminally indicted for violating the Selective Service Act.
So, there was a student deferment for graduate students.
David,
The student deferment for graduate students ended in 1970, when I was a philosophy graduate student at the University of Michigan and President Nixon instituted the draft lottery which removed student deferments. I drew number 45, and knew that my days were numbered unless I joined the National Guard or Army Reserve.
A giant in American Cinema, and in the civil rights movement, Sidney Poiter, has passed away at the age of 94. He was the first African-American to be awarded the Best Acting Oscar for his role in “Lillies Of The Field,” and turned outstanding performance in many other movies, “In The Heat Of The Night”; “To Sir With Love”; and “Someone’s Coming To Dinner,” a movie about acceptance of biracial marriage.
s.w.
The student deferment pretty much DID get you "out of Vietnam", or at least helped, IF you happened to enter college in, say, 1968, bc unless you got a bad lottery number when Nixon ended student deferments in 1970 (acc to AA) you were basically home free. Ditto if you entered college in, say, 1967. It was just yr bad luck, s.w., that you entered in 1964.
P.s. I've seen _In the Heat of the Night_ albeit on TV and many years ago. I know this is an overused phrase, but Sidney Poitier had an amazing, unforgettable screen presence. There was no other movie actor of his time quite like him.
Are you sure that the deferment for graduate students lasted until 1970? If that had been the case, I simply would have gone to graduate school when I graduated in 1968. I investigated those things fairly exhaustively back then and as I recall, by 1968 they were not granting deferments to graduate students in the humanities, even if they may have still existed in theory.
David Zimmerman,
Let me congratulate you on your courage!!
LFC - fascinating tip on Rawls's position on student deferments, with which Rogers Albritton agreed. From the Harvard Crimson:
"Military conscription is an interference with our basic liberties so extreme that only exceedingly strong reasons can justify discriminating between one eligible man and another in the distribution of this burden. No such justification can be found for the present deferment (and often, ultimate exemption) of college students and teachers. It requires no special expertise to see that speculative reasons of social benefit are not strong enough.
Though both Albritton and Rawls said they saw the issue in these ethical terms, they did have figures to substantiate their argument -- that 2-S discriminates against non-college students. Rawls conceded last night that he had made an error in not introducing the statistics into the debate. Culled from testimony before a Congressional subcommittee, the figures showed the following: In the summer of 1964, of men aged 26, only 40 per cent who had completed college had served in the military in contrast to 57 per cent for high school graduates and more than 60 per cent for those who had dropped out of college. (However, only 50 per cent of the men not reaching high school had served.)"
The Crimson article also references discussions around abolishing or eliminating class rankings at Harvard, which was eventually adopted at the law school and also appears to support Professor Wolff's view of the causes of grade inflation during the Vietnam War.
The above-referenced article is here: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/1/11/faculty-shelves-draft-resolution-after-debating/
s. wallerstein,
I am quite sure that the deferment lasted until 1970, because when I started graduate school at the University of Michigan in September 1969, I had no worries about being drafted. The lottery drawing was held on Dec. 1, 1969, and I was allowed to complete my first year of graduate school. That summer I had to find a Army Reserve unit that would allow me to enlist so that I would not be drafted.
Thank you, S. Wallerstein, for the kind words.
I was just one of many who gave up their student deferments between 1964 and 1968 or thereabouts.
I just wish that we had been more effective in hastening the end of the Vietnam war, which [as you know] lasted until 1974!
For years, I felt guilty about the role that the Resistance may have played in getting LBJ to withdraw from the presidential race in 1968, a race he probably would have won against Nixon. That feeling lasted until I read about the background to the '68 campaign.... specifically about Nixon's backroom appeal to the South Vietnamese government to refuse to enter into good faith negotiations with the North Vietnamese, a refusal that effectively undermined Humphrey's campaign. Nixon told the SV that they would get a better deal if he became president. [Of course, LBJ's tepid support of Humphrey did not help much either.]
In any event, I felt a bit less guilty after learning that.
David Zimmerman,
I owe you an explanation because I've often found your comments to be "moralistic", but now that I see that you were willing to put your principles into practice when a real risk was involved, I'll consider your comments in another light.
I myself thought about burning my draft card, but my French instructor, with whom I ate lunch with from time to time, just because we often coincided in the same lunch-room, convinced me not to. In any case, your courage and those of many others moves me.
@ Ridiculousicculus
Thks for the reference.
I haven't had a chance to read the article. Re class rankings: there were no individual class rankings at Harvard when I was an undergraduate there in the late 1970s or if there were, no one told you what your exact rank was (e.g. #703 out of a class of 1600 or whatever). While, to the best of my recollection, there was not a lot of overt discussion of grades among students, at least not among those whom I knew, I'm sure a lot of people, looking ahead to the competition for places in professional and graduate schools, cared about their grades and their GPAs. (And [cough] I shd have been more concerned about my own than I was at the time.)
@ D Zimmerman
Very small correction: the war lasted until 1975.
Re: "Nixon's [and Kissinger's] backroom appeal to the South Vietnamese government to refuse to enter into good faith negotiations with the North Vietnamese [in Paris]..."
This of course was a secret and quasi-treasonous interference in U.S. diplomacy to boost Nixon's chances of election. And when LBJ found out about it, he could have called out Nixon on it forcefully and publicly, but instead, on the advice of Walt Rostow, he sent Nixon a private letter and the whole thing remained unknown to the public at the time. (See the account in David Milne, America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (2008).]
"That summer I had to find a Army Reserve unit that would allow me to enlist so that I would not be drafted."
My highschool history teacher once said to his class that men would join the National Guard to avoid the Vietnam War only to realize too late that their Guard Unit was going to be activated & deployed to S.E. Asia. Your the first person I've heard of that actually got away with it. But, yes, I know there is a slight difference between the National Guard and the Reserves.
Michael,
Two years ago wile I was shopping at a department store, I saw an older man wearing Army fatigues and I asked him if he served in Vietnam. He answered "affirmative," and then told me that he had joined the National Guard, expecting not to be activated, but was activated anyway. When I was in basic training at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, there were several graduate students from other states who had enlisted, like me, to avoid the draft. None of them, to my knowledge, were activated. I became friends with a graduate student from Louisiana, and his unit was never activated. Why the government would treat National Guardsmen differently than Army Reservists, I have no idea.
Post-script:
While I was undergoing my Army medical examination prior to enlisting, I experienced a comical episode straight out of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.” The final step in the examination was giving our medical histories to a bank of physicians sitting at a lengthy table. The fellow in front of me told the physician that there was a history of Huntington’s Chorea in his family. (He may very well have been bluffing, since it was widely known that Arlo’s father, Woody Guthrie, had died from Huntington’s Chorea.) The physician squinted and said, “That sounds familiar. Give me a minute. I have to consult a medical book.” Oh, Lord, I thought, here’s a doctor who does not know what Huntington’s Chorea is. He came back and said that that could be pretty serious, and had him step aside to meet with another physician. I realized that the likelihood of two examinees in a row having a family history of Huntington’s Chorea was pretty slim.
Before I go far off-topic (like others, I have a questionable habit of treating this blog like an all-purpose conversation forum), I should thank Prof. Wolff for what he does. As Charles and Jerry Fresia said in response to the previous entry, Prof. Wolff's honesty and authenticity are refreshing. I'll add that I often get a good feeling watching his YouTube videos in particular; the feeling is that the intellectual and academic showboating that seem typical of philosophical discussion have completely receded from view, and have given way to something more pure, pleasant, intriguing, and even childlike (in the best possible way) - I can't quite pin it down, but it reminds me of the "wonder" of the Ancient Greeks, or, less pretentiously, of very young children learning to explore their minds (or some more grown-up friends enjoying a psychoactive trip of some sort). It's a good thing - one of the best things - and it makes me want to try to share it in some way. Thanks, Prof. Wolff.
On that note, I've found myself thinking a lot about nostalgia lately. What is nostalgia, what's it "about" - what can we make of it? Whatever it is, it's been a constant theme of my entertainment choices since the pandemic hit - revisiting one show/album/game after another from years/decades past. Judging from talks with friends, this seems very common these days - does anyone else find it a likely side-effect of COVID?
And though the feeling is enjoyable, I think it's something I've been enjoying excessively, to the point that my inner existentialist has been muttering to me some vague and ominous suggestions that I'm "fleeing the present" (and future) to live in an idealized past...but I'm not much of an existentialist, so I want to turn to other/older/wiser people to help flesh out these suggestions. (E.g., Google directs me to this Psychology Today piece, "The Meaning of Nostalgia.")
Michael,
First of all, Youtube makes it very easy to revisit the past. All the old music is there, all the old TV shows are there, etc. That wasn't true in the pre-Youtube days.
In my experience, as one gets older, there is a tendency to idealize the past. Not that the past was objectively "better" than the present or that pop music was superior, but that one was younger, had more energy, was more physically attractive, probably brighter (in the sense of being able to get a higher score on standardized SAT-type tests), cooler, more "with it", sexier, with more illusory hopes that the world would recognize one for one's great qualities and applaud one for that.
Given the way our minds work, we then associate, say, listening to Bob Dylan with being physically attractive and cool (because we were more physical attractive and cooler back in the days when Bob Dylan was also more physically attractive, cool and creative)
and thus idealize the whole era. Ditto for being involved in radical politics. It wasn't that the politics were somehow more "correct" back then (they could get pretty dumb and purist in the 60's), but that back when we were involved in radical politics in the 60's, people saw us in a favorable light as people tend to see young and attractive people and we felt full of energy and sex appeal, that the world was our oyster, as they say.
To cure oneself of excessive nostalgic, one has to "deconstruct" the associations of being young from the reality of the past.
Michael,
Throughline (NPR), which is both a radio show and a podcast, had a program on nostalgia several months ago. I think I only listened to a bit of it, but here's the link in case you're interested:
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/13/1045812865/the-nostalgia-bone
AA,
When I was in Basic Training, I heard several soldiers say that one of the things that made them glad was the fact that they couldn't be drafted anymore because they were now in Boot Camp. I wonder if it was the same during the Vietnam War? If you didn't want to be drafted into a combat role, I guess the best thing to do back then was to enlist into some sort of combat support role?
Michael,
No, that would have been a terrible idea. If you enlisted, even if you were promised a particular MOS, the army did not always live up to its promises. You could still wind up in combat, and suing the military for breach of contract was futile.
That NPR link was well worth the time, LFC, thanks.
Thanks for your thoughts, too, s. wallerstein. Your comment seems to emphasize a sort of nostalgia that's perhaps reserved for later years, to which once-ambitious people, once considered cool and sexy, are especially prone. That probably covers a lot! Now, we might be inclined to scoff a little if we heard, say, a 10-year-old child "wax nostalgic" on some friendships from "long ago," but maybe the cases still overlap.
I wonder if I'd be missing or underemphasizing something if I described the nostalgic experience as a "self-indulgent" (but hardly resistible) fantasizing about a no-longer-accessible past situation that one regards (accurately or otherwise) as preferable to the present. E.g., I wonder if there's a connection to the "omnipotence fantasies" Prof. Wolff mentioned in a Freud lecture (IIRC) - as in the fantasy of being able to stand outside of time, immune in a way to its passage, having no obstacles between oneself and the objects of one's will. I find myself especially nostalgia-prone as I'm preoccupied - maybe coincidentally, but I doubt it - with the imminent declines/deaths of my loved ones or self etc., or otherwise with some possible/actual impending loss.
Thanks again for the interesting contributions.
AA,
Man was that messed up. Thankfully times have changed. The U.S. Army was very, very good to me on a personal level--although I don't want to go into detail about it. I don't know how many people can say that they were a true blessing. I'm hoping many more.
2 points:
1) Fritz Poebel wrote, "Also, in 1970 18 year-olds did not yet have the right to vote—Nixon signed that into law in 1971."
I don't think this is correct. The 26th amendment, passed by Congress in March 1971 and approved by 75% of the states by the beginning of July 1971, is what bestowed suffrage on those aged 18-21.
2) If you wanted to avoid combat during the VN war, enlisting in the army might have been a mistake, but if you knew your way around the other services, enlisting in one of them could work. In my first post-college job, my boss had served on a submarine during the war, precisely for that reason. On the map, the combat zone extended out to sea, defined by lines on the map. He said his skipper regularly had the sub go through a corner of the zone from the last hour of one month until the first hour of the next month; in this way, everyone aboard earned 2 months of combat pay. It was apparently very good for morale.
PS: the one drawback to me boss's strategy was the his period of enlistment was 3 years rather than 2. But he stayed out of combat, which was a high priority for him.
Pace Marcel Proust: Nixon made a big deal out of his role in the implementation of the 26th amendment. He signed some document on 5 July 1971 that “certified” the amendment, in a grand ceremony at the White House. I don’t know what the legal status of his certification actually was—maybe it was necessary to implement the just-ratified Amendment, maybe not. But I remember well enough (I was 22 at the time) that he soon made his role in all this a conspicuous campaign talking-point in the 1972 election. He figured, I suppose, that he could garner the votes of thankful adolescents for making all this happen, war or no war. Loathe though I am to cite this source, the online Nixon library has a good write-up (with pictures) on Nixon’s certification of the Amendment. The site of course says nothing about his cynical use of this in his campaign. (While certification may not be synonymous with signing something into law, it isn’t all that far removed from it, at least sometimes. Certification was big deal on 6 January 2021, since that was Pence’s job.)
I recommend those of this blog’s readers who are concerned about the future of democracy in our country to watch the interview, aired today on PBS, with Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans who agreed to sit on the Congressional Jan. 6 Committee, on the link below. It is refreshing, and rare, to hear a Republican speak out in an objective and truthful manner about the Jan. 6 insurrection. As Rep. Kinzinger reports it, the future of this country’s democracy is in serious trouble.
https://www.pbs.org/video/adam-kinzinger-kigaed/
The Constitution's Art. V is quite clear. The president has no role in the amending process. The Archivist of the the United States under 1 USC 106b has a ministerial role. Of course presidents can make ceremonies up for political reasons.
AA's observation on the misuse of the Reserves and NG in the recent past is interesting in that we now have two to three generations of folks from now electorally dispositive regions whose disproportionate participation in the military has led to disillusionment and radicalization. Multiple factors over several decades led to a perfect storm.
The maturing of the Taft-Hartley poison pill that happened as privatization and globalization hit these same regions. Passing NAFTA in 1994 followed by the Gingrich Revolution in November of that year sealed the deal.
Then there were the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s and the decision of the Republican Party to go for the white vote.
An aside about Sen. Robert Taft, the son of President Taft and the co-author of the Taft-Hartley Act, an anti-union piece of legislation, and how politics can make strange bedfellows. In “Profiles In Courage,” allegedly ghost written by Ted Sorensen, John Kenney, who needed the support of labor to get elected, included a chapter on Sen. Taft. For what act of courage was Kennedy honoring Taft? For Taft’s stance after WWII in opposing the Nuremberg trials on the basis that the trials violated the principle against ex post facto laws, laws which make conduct unlawful after the fact, and therefore do not afford the defendant prior notice that what s/he is about to do violates the law. According to Taft, since there had not been an established law making genocide and crimes against humanity unlawful, the Nuremberg trials were unfair. He stated:
“I question whether the hanging of those, who, however despicable, were the leaders of the German people, will ever discourage the making of aggressive war, for no one makes aggressive war unless he expects to win. About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record, which we shall long regret.”
Query: Did the fact that Kennedy included a chapter in his book, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, in praise of Sen. Taft mean that he, too, thought the Nuremberg trials were unfair?
The book, mostly written by Ted Sorensen, hasn't aged well. Another profile in "courage" - the Senator whose vote was dispositive in not convicting Andrew Johnson was likely bribed. Johnson was a racist drunk whose policies plague us still.
Given his father's performance as Ambassador and He and his brother's dalliance with Joe McCarthy, it wouldn't surprise me if he at least somewhat agreed with the reactionary Taft.
The 1946 midterm election was a disaster - twelve years after Hoover and Mellon voters put the Reps back in the majority - go figure!. It gave us Nixon and McCarthy. Joe McCarthy defeated Bob La Follette jr. in the primary. Of course, Ron Johnson defeated Russ Feingold twice so there must be something in the Wisconsin water.
For a more favorable view of Kennedy, see Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956. (Have heard the author discuss the book, but haven't read it. Logevall is best known for his work on the diplomatic etc. history of the Vietnam War.)
I have immensely mixed feelings about John F. Kennedy. I came of age during his administration. Everybody in my family loved and admired him. He had wit; he was handsome; he was cultured; Robert Frost had read a poem at his inauguration; he had given a memorable inaugural speech; he was articulate and held numerous press conferences. My mother and sister talked about how radiant and beautiful Jacqueline was. We watched her interview with Walter Cronkite and the tour of the refurbished White Hose.
And then November 22, 1963 happened. I was a junior in high school, and the public address system told us to report to our homerooms. We were told that President Kennedy had been shot, and was dead. We were sent home. I walked home with my history teacher, tears streaming down her face, sobbing uncontrollably. That weekend I was scheduled to visit my older brother in New Brunswick. I took the train that Friday night from Newark, A pall of silence engulfed the train. I returned home to watch the funeral with my family; watched the riderless horse, with the boots in the stirrups facing backwards; the repeated drumbeats; and Jacqueline leaning down to tell John John to salute his father, as the caisson passed by. Camelot was over, if it ever existed.
And then, with the passage of years, unflattering things about him began to be revealed, a constant drip of anecdotes and rumors. And disappointments – the fact that he had turned his back on his Hollywood friend, Frank Sinatra, because Sinatra wanted to invite Sammy Davis, Jr., married to a white woman, to the Inauguration, but Kennedy told him to withdraw the invitation, concerned about the political blowback; the way he and Robert had treated Marilyn Monroe, both reportedly having an affair with her, and then discarding her when they were done, giving rise to rumors that her suicide may not have been a suicide; scatological stories about his extra-marital affairs and his treatment of women, which Jacqueline was painfully aware of, and accepted; criticisms of how he handled the Cuban missile crisis, some arguing that his machismo had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
I have read numerous books about his administration and his assassination. The passage of years and the maturity age is supposed to bring have forced me to think of him with a more sober eye. As Churchill is reported to have said, “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart; if you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain.”
And yet, and yet, with all that, I still tear up every November 22, remembering those years when I, and many others, were proud of our President and his beautiful wife, cut short by the appalling, tragic assassination. I still cannot bring myself to condemn him, to participate in criticizing him. For one brief, shining moment, I believed I was living in Camelot.
I would have no problem with thinking that the assassination of President Kennedy was an average assassination by a lone gunman, like the failed attempt at Reagan or Teddy Roosevelt, if it were not for the fact that Oswald was killed on television by some dude who (just by looking at him for a few seconds!) I know couldn't care less than half a penny about Oswald shooting & killing President Kennedy. To me I think of it now as the most covered up assassination in American history. And because of Oswald's very suspicious death people have summed up every conspiracy theory that could be conjured up for that time period and generation. There is a psychological trick to it too. When you don't know the facts to the mystery you want to know the facts. But when you eventually do find out the truth behind it all, you end up not really caring at all about the mystery behind it all in the first place.
Back in 1962 I was a fly on the wall at a small briefing given by Ed Hiestand who was a local Congressman (and one of two Birch Society members in the House). It was what one would have expected from a very conservative Republican but one thing stayed with me. He hemmed and hawed at one point, like he wanted to say something but couldn't (it was 1962 and he was quite old school proper). The press was different back then and that was before Kennedy's serious health problems and womanizing were widely known. I had always heard that the Sinatra problem was due to Sinatra being mobbed up (as was one of Jack's girlfriends) and Bobby having a fit. I believe the SD jr. thing was separate but really bad.
ML, the cigarette butts around the grassy knoll were covered up.
I
"the cigarette butts around the grassy knoll were covered up."
I've heard some really weird stuff about the cover up. Like after the shooting, the people who witnessed Kennedy being shot started to disappear one by one over the years, no matter what age, over the several decades that followed the assassination.
aaall,
From what I've observed, you're generally well informed about what really happened behind the scene in politics.
What's your take on the JFK assassination? I don't have any particular theory myself, although I've heard many and don't believe the Warren Commission.
aaall,
You are correct, the Sammy Davis, Jr., issue was not the reason Kennedy’s friendship with Sinatra withered. The real reason (see link below) was that Hoover came to Bobby Kennedy and played a surveillance tape of a telephone call with Sam Giancana, the Chicago mob boss. Giancana had been putting pressure on Sinatra to use his friendship with Kennedy to get Bobby and the FBI off his back. Sinatra told Giancana that he was having an affair with Pat Kennedy, Peter Lawford’s wife and John and Bobby’s sister, and that he would use his influence over her to influence Bobby. Bobby, understandably, went berserk and told John, who then broke off the friendship. Sinatra, peeved, supported Nixon in 1968.
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a24443048/frank-sinatra-pat-kennedy-affair-jfk-handsome-johnny-book-excerpt/
Regarding the assassination, of the several books I have read I thought the book by Gerald Posner, “Case Closed,” was the most thorough and best researched. He has a detailed explanation of the single bullet theory and goes through each of the conspiracy theories and explains why they are erroneous. His conclusion: Oswald acted alone. Of course, we are unlikely ever to know the truth, unless there is something in the unreleased archives that has the answer.
Post-script:
One of President Kennedy’s extra-marital affairs was with Mary Pinchot Meyer, a Washington socialite, who was married to a CIA operative, Cord Meyer. She kept a diary of her affair with Kennedy, which had lasted several years. The Kennedys and Meyers were friends with Ben Bradlee, the publisher of the Washington Post, and his wife, Mary Meyer’s sister. Mary Pinchot was killed in October, 1964, while walking on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown. She was shot in the head and back, at close range. Ray Crump, an African American, was charged with the crime, but was later acquitted.
Ben Bradlee reported in his memoir, A Good Life, that on the night of the murder, they were partying at their home with James Angleton, chief of counter-intelligence at the CIA (he was portrayed by Matt Damon in the movie “The Good Shepherd”). A friend of Mary Pinchot, Anne Truitt, who knew of the diary’s existence, called the Bradlee home looking for Angleton and informed them of the diary’s existence. Bradlee and Angleton decided that they had to find the diary and destroy it. Ben Bradlee and his wife broke into Pinchot’s art studio, searched for the diary, found it and destroyed it.
I have nothing substantial to add to the conspiracy theories about Kennedy. But I do have one amusing quasi-first-hand anecdote about the Kennedy clan and the force-of-nature character James Michael Curley, mayor of Boston, congressman, and Massachusetts governor back in the early decades of the 20th century. Apparently, Curley hated the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds, though I don’t know the reasons for this. I have to suppose that there was plenty of infighting among the Boston Irish socio-political elite that Curley and the others dominated. I went to a Jesuit high school in New England in the early-to mid 1960s. (I was a sophomore there when Kennedy was murdered, and I remember the intercom announcement that afternoon and the unusual silence in the classroom that followed the terrible news, which was the first that any of us had heard about the assassination.) A year after Kennedy’s murder, a new Jesuit arrived at the school; his name was Francis X. Curley, and he was the son of Mayor Curley. FXC was a flamboyant character—he wore a black cape and seemed to think that life was a penance, and of course that all of us students were barbarians and idiots. He was, though, prodigiously knowledgeable about Latin. In the spring of my senior year a few of the kids decided to drive down to Washington DC, just to see the place (I don’t think that there were any protests going on, but maybe I’m wrong about that). Anyway, Curley somehow got wind of this and approached one of the students and said something like this: “I hear you’re driving down to Washington. While you’re there, do me a favor. Go over to Arlington cemetery and blow out the eternal flame.”
Fritz,
Not very Christian of him.
AA,
Those were the days when a tight group of powerful people in government and media lived in Georgetown, often within several blocks of each other. (There's a fairly recent book about Georgetown in that era, just looked it up: Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington.) Things are no longer that way: Georgetown, or at least certain parts of it, is still a fashionable and expensive neighborhood, but powerful and/or wealthy people no longer cluster there the way they used to, but instead live all over the place as there are a quite a lot of upscale parts of the city (and suburbs). And if you want a *really* big house, e.g. what Bezos lives in, you can't have that in Georgetown, or at least there are not many of them. (Btw, Bradlee was editor of the Post; Katherine Graham was the owner/publisher.)
LFC,
Yes, thank you for the Bradlee/Graham correction.
Just to clarify my previous comment, not "everyone who was everyone" lived in Georgetown, even back then. Wdn't want to leave that misimpression.
AA, Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot with a .38 on the side of her head which would argue against a pro hit.
s.w. likewise with the Warren Report but beyond that ??? I have a rather dark sense of the world in general, hence my grassy knoll reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XDa3kyncE8
The truth is out there.
aaall,
I happen to know that Louie Lepke used a .38 for all of his hits.
I know that the government of JFK was not the most corrupt or even the most Machiavellian government in U.S. history, but seldom has there been so much distance between the public image (Camelot) and the reality of what went on in the White House and of the personal and political life of the president.
I never wholly bought into the general idealized picture of JFK, even at age 14 I was too perverse and contrarian for that, but as I learn more about him, I confess that even I am a bit shocked at times. I sometimes sense that when I hear about the reality of JFK and those around him, I'm reading Suetonius, the Lives of the Twelve Caesars.
s.w.
I believe only a few U.S. presidents have so far governed by the Chinese political art of benevolence & the virtue of the Pole Star.
What I find most shocking about JFK was his health. The guy had no business running for president. At least he wasn't deranged like TFG. We never learn.
ML, are you aware of how the sausage was made in the various courts? When navies were becoming important, Ming emperors trashed what was then the world's largest navy. Writing a killer eight-legged essay didn't lead to good governance. We have enough problems; no need to add more.
AA, given the circumstances, I was thinking of a whole different level of professionalism.
aaall,
You can't sleep either?
Point taken, but couldn’t the professionals you are contemplating have used a .38 as a diversionary device, to pin the blame on the mob? But what motive could those professionals have conjured up that would have been attributed to the mob, since killing Pinchot would have prevented the disclosure of information which would have damaged John Kennedy’s reputation. Perhaps post mortem revenge against John Kennedy by killing one of his mistresses? Or a warning to Bobby Kennedy, who was still alive?
Didn't the police use 38 caliber revolvers in the 60's? I have no idea what arms they currently use. What kind of sidearm did the FBI carry in the 60's?
The problem with figuring out who killed Pinochot is like figuring out who killed JFK. She knew too much, I suppose, but lots of people might have wanted to silence what she knew for different reasons.
If Biden were to be assassinated today, I suppose we'd all immediately assume that it was the far right, but in the case of JFK and those around him, it might have been the far right or it might have been the gusanos (the Cuban anti-communists) or the Mafia or Jimmy Hoffa or Fidel's boys or the CIA, etc. The list is very long.
aaall
The eight-legged essay was the first Civil Service Exam. Old school conservatives like Plunkitt of Tammany Hall would most likely not approve. I believe you shouldn't be just a bookworm to be in the Civil Service, but I apprehend that you should be educated to a certain degree too. Through the cracks might come some inept workers. But without an education this factor is magnified ten fold.
Michael Llenos: "I believe only a few U.S. presidents have so far governed by the Chinese political art of benevolence & the virtue of the Pole Star."
Name ONE.
AA, I live on PST. The newspaper account I read depicted the event as rather sloppy - Mossad wouldn't approve. There would be no usefulness to manufacturing some distraction as her situation would inevitably lead to the suspicions we all have. A .22 is the weapon of choice as it is clean, easily suppressed, and more then enough.
sw, back in the day most (if not all) urban departments and (I believe) most agencies used .38 special revolvers.
Oliver Stone makes a good case that Kennedy was assassinated by a group of conspirators, not Oswald acting alone with a magic bullet. Stone seems to think the US intelligence agencies (esp CIA) were responsible. Regardless, there is reason to believe there was a massive cover-up afterward. We still don't know why Trump went back on his word and blocked the release of some of the remaining classified documents at the last minute, or why Biden has continued to block their release.
Eric
You said: "Name ONE."
Well, how about Herman Melville's favorite: President James Polk. Also, Jimmy Carter & Barrack Obama.
Maybe I could list other liberal and conservative presidents, but I'll stick to the more virtuous ones so I don't get bombarded with too much negativity. And just remember that no matter how blameless a leader is there is always something off putting someone else will believe is part of that leader's character.
Polk was a proponent of Manifest Destiny and launched the U.S./Mexican war. Not sure what "the virtue of the Pole Star" means precisely, but I don't think of Polk as esp. virtuous in the ordinary sense of that word. If you're talking virtù in the Machiavellian sense that might be a different matter, but I'm not sure Polk qualifies on that score either.
A virtuous person is someone who is a good person, talented, and a role model. This is how the Confucius model of virtue worked. President Grant loved his cigars. Let's say he gave up smoking because he just wanted to break the habit because he thought the habit was addicting & bad. After several years of going cold turkey, there would be many Americans who might also give up smoking cigars because they looked up to the President's good sense and self discipline. Rulers are like the breeze. And civilians are like the grass. When the breeze blows, the grass all bends. When stars circle the Pole Star, it's the metaphor for willingly following a leader because of his good sense and self restraint and respect of the culture.
Polk stole half of Mexico and helped set the stage for the Civil War. He was a consequential president but virtue - not so much. Grant had his issues but crushed the first Klan and enforced Civil Rights laws. Would that his example had been followed. Defeating treason in defense of slavery was also good.
And if the grass doesn't bend it gets cut? I'm not sure we want to model that. Worthwhile culture is mostly food and music; the rest is mostly manipulation. When the eighth century c.e. was the high point ...
ML, all those fancy words are merely a just so story rationalizing an authoritarian state. I would prefer civil servants to have actual expertise in a variety of fields instead of being hired because they excelled in scholasticism.
P.S. Carter was a micro-manager who governed to the right of his congressional majority and facilitated the trend to neo-liberalism. He has been the best ex-president. By the time Obama figured out Republicans are basically rat bastards, incapable of good will and lacking any concept of the common good, it was too late. A very good man but could have been a better president.
aaall
But when it comes to public administration, then scholasticism is of the highest importance. The administration of a town, city, state, or country needs people well versed in the humanities because they have the best knowledge when it comes to dealing with people and also what is truly practical in all types of politics & the overall realpolitik of any given situation. And how would one know the culture of any neighboring political entity if one doesn't know the history of scholasticism within it?
BTW, I know nothing of 'fancy words' from Confucianism or anywhere else. My grammar is atrocious, and I can't write worth a damn.
ML,
I'm not sure I would be quite so hard on yourself. As long as you're managing to communicate your thoughts, you're writing well enough for a blog comment thread.
(As for writing more generally and in other contexts, I think few people find it especially easy, including those who make their living by doing it. But I don't mean to open up another subject.)
Michael Parenti on the hilarity of the notion that Oswald was the lone assassin of Kennedy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHYs-8yM70U
This is from years ago. Long before Oliver Stone's recent documentary release.
I would far rather have less-skillful, less-educated bureaucrats who are completely dedicated to fairness and equality than highly-skilled, highly-educated bureaucrats who are completely dedicated to serving themselves and the propertied classes at the expense of everyone else. But that's just me.
I don't have a strong interest in the JFK assassination, but I tend to think Oliver Stone is not an esp reliable source on this (I didn't see the movie, but it's based on Jim Garrison's theories, if I'm remembering that name correctly). That said, I don't have a strong view on whether Oswald acted alone or not. If he did, we already know the answer to the supposed puzzle, and if he didn't, I doubt the answer will ever be known, even after all the files are released.
ML, I meant "Scholastic" in a Thomistic sense, not as general education and scholarship. An endless series of riffs on Confucianism while ignoring what was happening in the rest of the world didn't end well for China (part of Herbert Hoover's fortune rested on China having little to no native mining at scale expertise). Overvaluing harmony is like painting over dry rot. The folks who wrote killer essays saw little or no value in exploration and a world class fleet.
Eric, you have set up false dichotomy, e.g. the state agency that regulates logging has to be staffed by folks who are both honest and knowledgeable in things like forestry, geology, and engineering (personal example). BTW, idealistic but ignorant (and stupid) folks are also corruptible (personal knowledge).
aaall
You have to realize that sometimes Confucianism was the dominant teaching in China and sometimes it was not. Before communist China embraced capitalism on a grand scale, like it did in the preceding three decades, Confucianism was greatly suppressed in that said country. Confucianism has its enemy orthodoxy too, which is called Legalism. Legalism and a lack of Capitalism have messed up China more than Confucianism ever did since Confucianism was founded in the 6th century BC by M. Kong. [E.g a lot of hell broke out for Chinese peasants in building the Great Wall because of Legalistic rulers who did not look to Confucianism for guidance.]
ML,
I don't want to put words in aaall's mouth, but I think his point is that the examination system was not a great way to staff a civil service because a thorough knowledge of the Confucian classics, the key qualification, ensured that aspiring bureaucrats would receive the sort of education that, however valuable in certain respects, did not equip them with the skills that any sort of modernizing (for lack of a better word) dynasty or administration would have needed. It worked ok for a while I suppose, until it didn't.
If you look at just the barebones of China's modern history (the 1911 revolution, I guess it's fair to call it, followed by Japanese invasion in the '30s, civil war, and Communist victory in 1949), you have to conclude that, while the Qing dynasty lasted a long time, it was unable to bring the country successfully into the modern world.
My Chinese history is rusty, to put it mildly (I took a course on it in my first semester of college, haven't formally studied it since then, and that was a long time ago). But I suspect any basic textbook (such as the one used in that course -- Fairbank, Reischauer & Craig, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation) would confirm the point.
aaall,
No. It would have been a false dichotomy if I had said we can only ever see those two possibilities. I was explaining my priorities in response to Michael Llenos' "when it comes to public administration, then scholasticism is of the highest importance." Honesty & fairness are of the highest importance. Scholasticism (as opposed to basic competence, which is what you describe) is not of the highest importance.
And btw, the skills that lead to competence can often be learned on the job. That's not the case with honesty and fairness.
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