Quotulatiousness

July 24, 2024

Investigate one assassination attempt, reveal the truth about two earlier assassinations?

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I have to admit that I’m skeptical about this, as conspiracies tend to unravel the larger they get (hence the old joke about three being able to keep a secret, if two of them are dead), and the tradition of deathbed confessions has had six decades to reveal itself. However, Benjamin Dichter thinks that a full, honest investigation into the attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Butler, PA would also yield historical dividends on the assassinations of JFK and RFK in the 1960s:

On July 13, 2024, both tragedy and an iconic photograph in American political history emerged from the attempted assassination of the 45th president. Even the harshest critics of Donald J. Trump among the legacy media were forced to acknowledge the moment, which many believe has cemented President Trump as an American icon. This failed assassination has become one of the most pivotal moments in American history, akin to tragedies such as 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the attempted assassination of Reagan. It is rapidly emerging as a unifying moment for many Americans, signaling that the media’s rhetoric and repeated attempts to label Trump as a dictator, a neo-Nazi, and other unsubstantiated vitriolic claims have gone too far.

Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024. One spectator was killed and two others were reported to be in critical condition. The shooter was killed by Pennsylvania State Troopers, according to reports in the succeeding hours.

As a Canadian who has spent much of my life traveling to the US, I have always sensed an underlying, unresolved collective emotional trauma that lingers like morning fog. This trauma stems from the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy — both murders believed by the majority of Americans to remain unsolved. More on that in a bit.

A friend of mine, working with the Department of Defense in the domain of security readiness for the US government, has told me the level of incompetence and fumbling of security obligations during Trump’s speech in Butler, PA, was inconceivable. He is not one to be hyperbolic, and we are both believers in Hanlon’s Razor. However, after his long career in the military and then at the Department of Defense, where he learned there is no shortage of incompetence due to government bureaucracy, he insists that the most basic protocols were violated in this case.

How is it possible that anyone could get within 125 yards of a former President and current candidate with a rifle? Not just a small pistol hidden in a pocket, but a large AR-15 platform rifle. “The idea that this could happen uncoordinated is absurd” he said. Even the legacy media is unable to spin their usual ridiculous deflections, which often appear like a frenzy of spawning sharks whenever President Trump is in their midst.

The gravity of this situation has changed everything and heralds a dawn of opportunity for America. For Trump, it is a chance to show the world how the gears of the machine turn. How things really work behind the scene. He is presented with a massive opportunity to seek retribution on behalf of the American people, who are still grappling with unresolved issues from past traumas.

Unlike the tragic assassinations of JFK and Robert F. Kennedy, Trump survived and will likely return to office. Also caught in the chaos were innocent bystanders, notably Corey Comperatore, who sacrificed himself by shielding his family from gunfire, along with two other victims whose injuries were not life-threatening. The innocent victims and their families who will vote in November, make this a situation that hits home with many Americans regardless of party affiliation.

October 23, 2023

QotD: The real meaning of “Watergate”

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I was reflecting this week on my brief stint, many years ago, as a newspaperman. It was a job I loved. I signed on not too many years after the Watergate scandal, and journalists were still flush with heroic ideas about themselves. Woodward and Bernstein — and all reporters by extension — had toppled a corrupt presidency and saved the republic and the Constitution from the kind of behind-the-scenes government tyranny dramatized in such thriller films as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.

[…]

Recently, reading Mark Levin’s Unfreedom of the Press, I was reminded that, before reporters went on their great crusade against Richard Nixon, they had overlooked a whole lot of corruption in the Democrat presidents who preceded him.

Levin tells how John F. Kennedy, with the knowledge of his brother and Attorney General Robert, nudged the IRS into auditing conservative groups. With Kennedy’s approval, the FBI was also employed to investigate those the administration disliked, including Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Baines Johnson would later increase the politically motivated auditing and spying. None of this was uncovered until later on.

Ben Bradlee — the editor of the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story — was well aware of his pal Kennedy’s misuse of the tax and investigative agencies. Not only did he not report it, he allowed himself and his paper to be manipulated by information JFK had wrongly obtained.

This totally changes the Watergate narrative. Nixon’s dirty tricks and enemy lists may have been creepy and wrong, but the press exposure of these misdemeanors came after years of ignoring similar and worse malfeasance by Democrat administrations.

That changes what Watergate means. That transforms it from a heroic crusade into a political hit job, Democrat hackery masquerading as nobility. The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised — despised in part because he battled the Communism many of them had espoused.

Andrew Klavan, “‘Watergate’ Doesn’t Mean What the Press Thinks It Means: The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised”, The Daily Wire, 2019-08-31.

January 12, 2013

The Cuban Missile Crisis, 50 years on

Filed under: Americas, Books, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz looks at the myths and realities of the standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States over Cuba in 1962:

On October 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers — a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid resolve and prudent crisis management — thanks to what Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world” — the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted.

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory — as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.

Scholars, however, have long known a very different story: since 1997, they have had access to recordings that Kennedy secretly made of meetings with his top advisers, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (the “ExComm”). Sheldon M. Stern — who was the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library for 23 years and the first scholar to evaluate the ExComm tapes — is among the numerous historians who have tried to set the record straight. His new book marshals irrefutable evidence to succinctly demolish the mythic version of the crisis. Although there’s little reason to believe his effort will be to any avail, it should nevertheless be applauded.

[. . .]

The patient spadework of Stern and other scholars has since led to further revelations. Stern demonstrates that Robert Kennedy hardly inhabited the conciliatory and statesmanlike role during the crisis that his allies described in their hagiographic chronicles and memoirs and that he himself advanced in his posthumously published book, Thirteen Days. In fact, he was among the most consistently and recklessly hawkish of the president’s advisers, pushing not for a blockade or even air strikes against Cuba but for a full-scale invasion as “the last chance we will have to destroy Castro.” Stern authoritatively concludes that “if RFK had been president, and the views he expressed during the ExComm meetings had prevailed, nuclear war would have been the nearly certain outcome.” He justifiably excoriates the sycophantic courtier Schlesinger, whose histories “repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts” and whose accounts — “profoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive” — were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys.

August 28, 2009

Ted Kennedy

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Virginia Postrel looks at the differences between the glamour of the JFK and RFK images and the non-glamorous career of Ted Kennedy:

Ted was the Kennedy who lived. He was, as a result, the Kennedy who wasn’t glamorous.

Jack is forever young and forever whatever his adoring fans imagine him to be: the president who would have gotten us out of Vietnam (rather than the one who got us in) or the original supply-sider (rather than a textbook Keynesian), the ideal combination of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. We learned decades ago about Jack’s compulsive womanizing, but it is those selective images of the beautiful family that remain in collective memory. Life recorded no adulteries, no dirty tricks, no secret injections. The JFK of memory is a man of vigor, not an Addison’s patient dependent on steroids, painkillers, and anti-spasmodics. He is the personification of political glamour.

Bobby, too, is glamorous — the tough guy turned symbol of youth and idealism, more photogenic than Gene McCarthy and more mythic. No one wonders how he would have held together the fractious Democratic Party of 1968, because he never had to. Like his brother, RFK is a persona, not a person, all hope and promise and projection.

In an age of cynicism and full disclosure, political glamour is a rarity — not because politicians lack good looks or wealth or celebrity but because we know too much about them. We too easily see their flaws and imagine even more than the flaws we do see.

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