JFK . . . 60 Years of Myths and Disinformation

Posted on November 22, 2023 by buzzanco

It’s the 60th Anniversary of the Assassination of JFK and a major industry has developed over the years with various scholars, politicians, and especially cultural celebrities creating a heroic image of JFK–a man whom they claimed had seen the error of the Cold War and Militarism and was going to withdraw from Vietnam, make peace with Cuba, and end the cold war against the USSR but who was cut down because of his transformation to peacemaker by the “deep state” which had a greater interest in maintaining the military-industrial complex and inciting global tensions.

That version of JFK is without any evidence. The partisans of this JFK-as-Hero view rely on anecdotes and stories told long after the fact to portray JFK as a man of peace. But the real records–the various archives, documents, reports, military appraisals, and positions of government agencies all belie this view and show Kennedy as what he was–a militarist, hard-charging, interventionist Cold Warrior.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on this topic for some time now, inspired and in collaboration with Noam Chomsky at first, and it’s particularly important to have it out there now as this JFK Lovefest takes hold of the media. Both the establishment corporate press and many elements of Left media are giving this story significant time and blocking out views that undermine it. Apparently, many of these JFK partisans think we need a hero and are willing to make up stories about him to fill that role and they ignore the reality of how American power operates.

Here are some of the contributions that we’ve made on “Green and Red Podcast” and in writing about this topic. There’s also a recent Green and Red Podcast episode about this at https://youtu.be/RyUsHmPoCj0?si=-YhWGJ2IQUoPzX5c

Enjoy, think about it, and share . . . .

John F. Kennedy Goes Hollywood: Oliver Stone’s Fantastic History

John F. Kennedy Goes Hollywood: Oliver Stone’s Fantastic History

Inside Oliver Stone’s Kennedy-Conspiracy Complex

Inside Oliver Stone’s Kennedy-Conspiracy-Complex

JFK’s Recklessness in October 1962

JFK’s Recklessness in October 1962

Noam Chomsky on Oliver Stone’s “JFK Revisited”

Why Oliver Stone’s “JFK Revisited” is Full of S**t

Debate vs. James DiEugenio, Oliver Stone’s screenwriter

Did the CIA Kill JFK?  A Conversation with Jefferson Morley    

The Missile Crisis at 60 . . . Was JFK Really a Hero?

Pulitzer-Prize Winner James Risen on Frank Church, the CIA, the JFK Assassination, and Conspiracies 

Noam Chomsky on JFK and Latin America

Noam Chomsky on the Legacy of JFK

Interview on “Pod Damn America” about JFK

Interview on “Unlicensed Philosophy” about JFK

Posted in Cuba, Foreign Policy, History, John F. Kennedy, Liberals, Media, Military, Oliver Stone, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

JFK’s Recklessness in October 1962

Posted on October 28, 2023 by buzzanco

When Kennedy Brought the World to the Brink during the Missile Crisis

61 years ago this month John Kennedy confronted the placement of missiles in Cuba with bluster and provocation in the gravest crisis of the Cold War era. He’s been heroicized for his role in October 1962 but his “brinksmanship” was in fact recklessness. The reality of JFK’s conduct of the missile crisis has to be reckoned with in order to understand the way Americans exercised their global hegemony.

(This was also an episode of Green & Red Podcast, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlAE3Sk8rhU)

During a private fund-raiser in 2022, President Joe Biden was speaking about the threats posed by Vladimir Putin, to Ukraine and all of Europe, and said “for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat to the use of nuclear weapons, if in fact things continue down the path they’d been going” . . . we have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis.”

That’s a great starting point to use to evaluate the Missile Crisis and Kennedy’s role in it, for which he has been acclaimed as a hero, which took place in the latter half of October 1962. This was arguably the most grave crisis in the nuclear era, when the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba and President John Kennedy’s response to it, which has been highly praised for six decades now, actually brought the two countries close to a nuclear exchange.

This incident is already well known and has been written about extensively—what I want to do here is give you a brief description of the crisis, and then, more importantly, discuss President Kennedy’s role in exacerbating and intensifying the global danger and also discuss the aftermath of the U.S.-Soviet encounter. 

John Kennedy has been universally praised for his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Perhaps the person most responsible for his public acclaim, the filmmaker Oliver Stone, said it was “the greatest single act of human courage this world has ever witnessed with that much at stake.”  That’s not just Hollywood rhetoric—if you do a basic study of the event, most commentators offer high praise to JFK because, in their versions, he firmly stood up to the Soviets and so prevented a nuclear war.

But there’s so much more to the missile crisis than that and it needs a different narrative.  I’ll talk about the actual crisis of course, the so-called 13 Days—but even more discuss the background to the showdown of October 1962, and just as importantly, the aftermath.  Much of Kennedy’s public legacy, polished by people like Stone and a cadre of JFK admirers who write books, give talks, and produce movies about him, is based on the idea that he was a man of peace, someone who was moving toward some kind of a détente with the Soviet Union and a thaw with Cuba, and that the missile crisis was almost a Road-to-Damascus experience for him, not provocative nuclear saber-rattling against  a much smaller and weaker country which he’d been trying to overthrow since he became president (see my critique of the Kennedy Cult at https://afflictthecomfortable.org/2022/04/30/john-f-kennedy-goes-hollywood-oliver-stones-fantastic-history/).

So, first, some background. . .  As Kennedy was inaugurated, he faced a dilemma in Cuba, where a 1959 Revolution had put Fidel Castro into power. In fact, in his debates with Richard Nixon, JFK attacked the Republicans for allowing the establishment of a communist country so close to the U.S.   Since 1898 Cuba had been a virtual American economic colony with significant U.S. investment–Americans owned 80 percent of Cuba’s utilities, 90 percent of its mining, 40 percent of its sugar, and had a base at Guantanamo and  casinos where tourists could go for entertainment and gambling [an environment accurately depicted in The Godfather, Part II].  The U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith, observed in 1960 that “the United States, until the advent of Castro, was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that . . . the American ambassador was the second most important man in Cuba, sometimes even more important than the President. . .”  (in Louis Perez,  The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013), 134).

Castro instantly  took measures to distance himself from that U.S. control–he instituted land reform measures that took property away from U.S. corporations to give to Cuban peasants, condemned the Platt Amendment, insisted on the return of Gitmo, took on the gangsters and the casinos, and sought actual Cuban independence from the Americans. In 1960, in fact, Castro infuriated the U.S. by agreeing to a deal to trade sugar to the Soviet Union in exchange for oil, machinery, and technicians. Trade between Castro and the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe rose from 2 percent to 80 percent that year. Castro’s relationship with the Soviets would cause concern and alarm within the U.S. and later be seen as a cause for military action.  But even Ambassador Philip Bonsal later admitted, “Russia came to Castro’s rescue only after the United States had taken steps to overthrow him”  (In Thomas Paterson, Contesting Castro. The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York, 1994, 258).

In April 1961, not even 100 days into his presidency, JFK of course authorized an invasion of Cuba at the Bahía de Cochinos, or Bay of Pigs, an inlet on the southern coast of the island, across from Havana. Castro had vowed “what happened in Guatemala [the 1954 coup against Jacobo Arbenz] will not happen here.” So, when about 1500 CIA-trained Miami Cubans arrived at the Bay of Pigs on April 17th, 1961, Castro himself led the battle on the beaches, which crushed the American-backed invasion in two days with 114 dead and 1100 captured. It was an utter disaster.

In turn, JFK tightened the noose on Cuba even more, with an economic blockade that still exists today, removal of the country from the Organization of American States, and sponsorship of countless assassination attempts on Castro for many years, all of which, of course, failed. The U.S. also began Operation Mongoose, which hoped to ignite a revolt against Castro inside Cuba—and in fact the U.S. had been organizing Cubans in Miami to go back and conduct subversion to overthrow Castro and they had been conducting military maneuvers against the island constantly.   The Cuban government believed that the U.S. was all-in on doing whatever it would take to overthrow them.  Even the U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara later admitted, “if I had been in Moscow or Havana at that time, I would have believed that Americans were preparing for an invasion” (In Pierre Salinger, “Gaps in the Cuban Missile Crisis Story,” New York Times, 5 February 1989, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/05/opinion/gaps-in-the-cuban-missile-crisis-story.html).

Logically then,  the Cubans saw Soviet support and eventually missiles as an important way to stop the U.S. from attacking.  But in reality any aid from Moscow could not change the balance-of-power in North America at all—the U.S. had a 20,000 to 1600 advantage in nuclear weapons!—yet Kennedy always responded aggressively to any sign of Russian support to Havana, and never more so than when he brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962.

*****

Against that backdrop, with the U.S. committed to getting rid of Castro and the Soviet Union on board as a Cuban ally after early 1961, the events of October 1962 unfolded……

Most discussions of the Missile Crisis begin with the mid-October discovery of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba, but the entire episode began earlier.  In the spring of 1962, Soviet officials worked out details of an operation with Castro to deploy R-12 missiles (named differently by the U.S.) with a range of about 1200 miles, which meant they could hit as far north as New York City, to Cuba.  From July into October the Soviets began to secretly send troops and weapons to Castro, eventually deploying 36 R-12 rockets and 24 launchers along with tactical cruise missiles. 

In August the U.S. began to notice something happening in Cuba as U-2 spy planes took photographs of Soviet anti-aircraft sites in Cuba, and CIA director John McCone speculated that Russian military officials were trying to hide a ballistic missile deployment to Havana.  At that same time Republican Senator Kenneth Keating of N.Y. publicly accused JFK of allowing a Soviet buildup in Cuba that included nuclear weapons—he didn’t know it at the time, but he was guessing right.  The first Soviet missiles weren’t in Cuba yet but Keating’s public words forced JFK to warn the Kremlin that the Soviet missiles in Cuba would raise “the gravest issues”  (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/CMC-60/red-lines-and-regrets).

At the same time, JFK and the National Security Council were finalizing NSA Memorandum (NSAM) 181, which laid out planning for an American response to Soviet missiles in Cuba, even though the U.S. did not know that nuclear weapons were going to be deployed there.  Policymakers concluded,  “In sum, the expectation is that any missiles will have a substantial political and psychological impact, while surface-to-surface missiles would create a condition of great alarm, even in the absence of proof that nuclear warheads were arriving with them.”  It also directed military officials to plan to provoke more internal subversion in Cuba which could be followed by U.S. military intervention   (https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v10/d386   and   https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v10/d401).

About a month later, during an October 1 meeting b/w McNamara and the Joint Chiefs, the defense secretary discussed possible military action and a  against Cuba and told the chiefs, especially the Navy, to be prepared to establish a blockade of Cuba  (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/msc_cuba004.asp).

Then, on October 4th, 1962, the first Soviet missiles arrived in Cuba, at the port of Mariel, under the command of Soviet Colonel Nikolai Beloborodov.  The Soviets saw the missiles as a way to preserve Cuban sovereignty amid the constant American assaults of Cuba since Castro took over.  Beloborodov later wrote, “It was clear that in the conditions of the existing balance of forces in conventional arms, which was ten to one against us, there was only one way we could repel a massive assault—by using tactical nuclear weapons against the invaders. In principle, this action would be consistent with international law on the protection of sovereignty and freedom. But that would be the beginning of the end. Only madmen could unleash a nuclear war”  (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/CMC-60/soviet-nuclear-warhead-commander-Beloborodov-memoir).

These initial actions by the U.S. and USSR were part of the much longer period of tensions b/w the two sides, as noted, and just as JFK had been laying the groundwork to eliminate Castro’s regime, the Soviets had been preparing to defend it.  In fact, the Cubans and Russians later called the events of late 1962 “The October Crisis” because the US covert war, which had ramped up with Mongoose, produced monthly crises for the Cubans.  And throughout the build-up to October the purposes of both sides was clear.  For the U.S. it was getting rid of Castro and for the USSR it was defending Cuba. 

By mid-October the  Americans began receiving reports from its operatives that  the Soviets were bringing weapons into Cuba, but they were not specific regarding nuclear missiles.  So, on October 9th,  Kennedy approved U-2 reconnaissance flights over Cuba to verify reports that the Soviets were deploying missiles in an “area of concern” in the western part of the island.  Because of sketchy weather, the first U-2 flights weren’t deployed until October 14th (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/CMC-60/Gilpatric-notes-meeting-with-JFK-on-U-2-flights-Oct-9-1962 ).

October 14th is the date usually associated with the unofficial beginning of the crisis.  On that date U-2 pilots took the first intelligence photographs of Soviet medium-range ballistic  missiles in Cuba.  The U-2 photos revealed medium-range missiles, code-named SS-4 and SS-5 by NATO (the Soviet R-12s), and also ballistic missile facilities.   Years later Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei said that his father had sent missiles as diplomatic signal—”don’t invade Cuba.  We’re serious.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phpe0DsisbY

Two days later, on the 16th, JFK had his first meeting to discuss the missiles in Cuba, with an advisory group that would be known at the Ex-Comm, or executive committee.  The options laid out that day were to negotiate with Khrushchev and Castro, to quarantine Cuba with a naval blockade, or to conduct air strikes to destroy missile sites, which might provoke a Soviet response elsewhere, perhaps Berlin. Kennedy’s first instincts were to go with the quarantine (and to call it a quarantine since a blockade can be considered an act of war) and he officially decided on that a few days later.

At that October 16th meeting, Kennedy also apparently had some regrets about his August statement that the Soviet missiles would raise the gravest issues because of the intensity of the new danger and according to others at the meeting the president kind of joked “I said we weren’t going to [accept offensive missiles in Cuba] and last month I should have said we’re… well, we don’t care” (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/CMC-60/red-lines-and-regrets).

During that meeting there was also a fascinating exchange between JFK, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and Deputy Undersecretary for Political Affairs U. Alexis Johnson that precisely showed that the Soviet missiles in Cuba were not the threat that the U.S. would claim they were.

JFK: Why does he put these in there though?

Bundy: Soviet-controlled nuclear warheads [of the kind?] . . .

JFK: That’s right, but what is the advantage of that? It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs in Turkey. Now that’d be goddam dangerous, I would think.

Bundy?: Well, we did, Mr. President.

U.A. Johnson?: We did it. We . . . 

JFK: Yeah, but that was five years ago.

U.A. Johnson?: . . . did it in England; that’s why we were short.

JFK: What?

U.A. Johnson?: We gave England two when we were short of ICBMs.

JFK: Yeah, but that’s, uh . . .

U.A. Johnson?: [Testing?]

JFK: . . . that was during a different period then.      

(“Off the Record Meeting About Cuba,” 16 October 1962, https://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct16/doc3.html)

So at the very moment that JFK and the Ex-Comm were planning to ramp up the tension and potentially provoke a military exchange, perhaps nuclear, between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the president knew that America’s own military posture was stronger, that the Soviets were living with medium-range ballistic missiles in Turkey right across the Black Sea from the USSR.  That mention of the weapons in Turkey would later become critical . . .

JFK also introduced what would be one of the key factors going forward—and this was true in Vietnam too—American credibility.  He said, “But when we said we’re not going to, and then they go ahead and do it, and then we do nothing . . . then… I would think that our… risks increase.” Passively accepting the missiles at any point would likely have been untenable politically to JFK.   “They’ve got enough to blow us up now anyway. After all, this is a political struggle as much as military” (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/CMC-60/red-lines-and-regrets).

So, to be clear, from the very outset, JFK had a clear understanding that the missiles in Cuba had not changed the balance of power and did not provide a justifiable reason to risk nuclear war.  In 1962, the US had about 160 ICBM and 2500 strategic bombers while the Soviets had 24 ICBM, along with the aforementioned 20,000 to 1600 nuclear weapon dominance.  Moscow knew that it was far behind the U.S. and in no position to confront Washington militarily, and JFK knew that as well.  But he also knew that the issue was political . . . that in his mind the imperatives of the Cold War demanded a strong American response and flexing of U.S. military might, even if it was provocative and could lead to the gravest consequences.

Decades later, Sergei Khrushchev half-seriously said that the U.S. should just have let the rockets sit there in the heat in Cuba; the steel would have rusted, the propellant dissipated; the warheads would have used up all the food service ice Cuba could produce to keep from overheating; and within months, certainly a year, the rockets wouldn’t fire. The Soviets didn’t understand why Kennedy had created such a crisis  (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/29114-day-8-october-11-red-lines-and-regrets).

That meeting of October 16th began the famed “13 Days” of the Missile Crisis, the subject of a huge number of articles, books, documentaries and movies. 

The 13 days of the crisis (which isn’t really accurate because the crisis, as we’ve seen, preceded the discovery of Soviet missiles and continued into November) were filled with some of the more anxious moments in postwar U.S. history.  Rather than offer a detailed daily account of what happened, I’m going to focus on a few really key elements to the crisis—first, JFK’s announcement to the public about the discovery of missiles in Cuba; second, Kennedy’s aggressive military deployments and the U.S. quarantine and confrontations at sea against Soviet vessels; and third, efforts at negotiations and Nikita Khrushchev’s letters to Kennedy eventually leading to a deal involving missiles in Cuba and Turkey.  After all that I’ll talk about the aftermath, consequences, and historical memory of the events of October.

First, Kennedy told the Americans about the missiles in Cuba on October 22 and it terrified the country.  It was the first nuclear crisis and after 17 years of constant panic and fear-mongering about atomic war, the creation of the national security state, civilian preparedness, and “Duck and Cover” propaganda for every kid in America, and it shook the country unlike anything had in the modern era.  Kennedy revealed the presence of the weapons in Cuba, announced a quarantine, and during the speech, sent orders to all US forces worldwide, placing them on Defense Readiness Condition, or DEFCON, 3, which meant the Air Force had to be ready to mobilize within 15 minutes. 

Kennedy began his speech by laying out the crisis and pushing responsibility for it onto the USSR and Cuba, and charging that Moscow had interfered in Cuba’s “special and historical relationship to the United States”–meaning the Monroe Doctrine.

This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet Military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere. 

Upon receiving the first preliminary hard information of this nature last Tuesday morning at 9 a.m., I directed that our surveillance be stepped up. And having now confirmed and completed our evaluation of the evidence and our decision on a course of action, this Government feels obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest detail. 

The characteristics of these new missile sites indicate two distinct types of installations. Several of them include medium range ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead for a distance of more than 1,000 nautical miles. Each of these missiles, in short, is capable of striking Washington, D.C., the Panama Canal, Cape Canaveral, Mexico City, or any other city in the southeastern part of the United States, in Central America, or in the Caribbean area. 

Additional sites not yet completed appear to be designed for intermediate range ballistic missiles–capable of traveling more than twice as far–and thus capable of striking most of the major cities in the Western Hemisphere, ranging as far north as Hudson Bay, Canada, and as far south as Lima, Peru. In addition, jet bombers, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, are now being uncrated and assembled in Cuba, while the necessary air bases are being prepared. 

This urgent transformation of Cuba into an important strategic base–by the presence of these large, long range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction–constitutes an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas, in flagrant and deliberate defiance of the Rio Pact of 1947, the traditions of this Nation and hemisphere, the joint resolution of the 87th Congress, the Charter of the United Nations, and my own public warnings to the Soviets on September 4 and 13. This action also contradicts the repeated assurances of Soviet spokesmen, both publicly and privately delivered, that the arms buildup in Cuba would retain its original defensive character, and that the Soviet Union had no need or desire to station strategic missiles on the territory of any other nation. 

The size of this undertaking makes clear that it has been planned for some months. Yet only last month, after I had made clear the distinction between any introduction of ground-to-ground missiles and the existence of defensive antiaircraft missiles, the Soviet Government publicly stated on September 11, and I quote, “the armaments and military equipment sent to Cuba are designed exclusively for defensive purposes,” that, and I quote the Soviet Government, “there is no need for the Soviet Government to shift its weapons . . . for a retaliatory blow to any other country, for instance Cuba,” and that, and I quote their government, “the Soviet Union has so powerful rockets to carry these nuclear warheads that there is no need to search for sites for them beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union. 

Kennedy then described in more detail the U.S. version of the crisis, its origins and its gravity.  And then he laid out a list of his responses to the placement of missiles in Cuba . . .

Acting, therefore, in the defense of our own security and of the entire Western Hemisphere, and under the authority entrusted to me by the Constitution as endorsed by the resolution of the Congress, I have directed that the following initial steps be taken immediately: 

First: To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. This quarantine will be extended, if needed, to other types of cargo and carriers. We are not at this time, however, denying the necessities of life as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade of 1948. 

Second: I have directed the continued and increased close surveillance of Cuba and its military buildup. The foreign ministers of the OAS, in their communique of October 6, rejected secrecy in such matters in this hemisphere. Should these offensive military preparations continue, thus increasing the threat to the hemisphere, further action will be justified. I have directed the Armed Forces to prepare for any eventualities; and I trust that in the interest of both the Cuban people and the Soviet technicians at the sites, the hazards to all concerned in continuing this threat will be recognized. 

Third: It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union. 

Fourth: As a necessary military precaution, I have reinforced our base at Guantanamo, evacuated today the dependents of our personnel there, and ordered additional military units to be on a standby alert basis. 

Fifth: We are calling tonight for an immediate meeting of the Organ of Consultation under the Organization of American States, to consider this threat to hemispheric security and to invoke articles 6 and 8 of the Rio Treaty in support of all necessary action. The United Nations Charter allows for regional security arrangements–and the nations of this hemisphere decided long ago against the military presence of outside powers. Our other allies around the world have also been alerted. 

Sixth: Under the Charter of the United Nations, we are asking tonight that an emergency meeting of the Security Council be convoked without delay to take action against this latest Soviet threat to world peace. Our resolution will call for the prompt dismantling and withdrawal of all offensive weapons in Cuba, under the supervision of U.N. observers, before the quarantine can be lifted. 

Seventh and finally: I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination, and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and to transform the history of man. He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of destruction–by returning to his government’s own words that it had no need to station missiles outside its own territory, and withdrawing these weapons from Cuba–by refraining from any action which will widen or deepen the present crisis–and then by participating in a search for peaceful and permanent solutions. 

This Nation is prepared to present its case against the Soviet threat to peace, and our own proposals for a peaceful world, at any time and in any forum–in the OAS, in the United Nations, or in any other meeting that could be useful–without limiting our freedom of action. We have in the past made strenuous efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. We have proposed the elimination of all arms and military bases in a fair and effective disarmament treaty. We are prepared to discuss new proposals for the removal of tensions on both sides–including the possibility of a genuinely independent Cuba, free to determine its own destiny. We have no wish to war with the Soviet Union–for we are a peaceful people who desire to live in peace with all other peoples.    (https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/address-during-the-cuban-missile-crisis)

*****

The most aggressive part of the response was obviously the quarantine, and that led to near-disaster in the coming days.

As Americans were processing the shocking news that JFK had delivered, the crisis continued with the American quarantine in place and Soviet ships heading toward Cuba.  On the 25th, two U.S. ships, the USS Essex and the Gearing, attempted to intercept a Soviet tanker, the Bucharest, 500 miles at sea from the Cuban coast but failed to do so . . . and ultimately decided to let it through the blockade after determining it did not contain military material.  Intercepted military cables indicated that several Russian ships bound for Cuba were altering their course away from the quarantine line, wary of confronting U.S. forces in the waters.  While Kennedy was aggressive, the Soviets remained ever cautious, aware of their significant weakness compared to the Americans  (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/620928_621025%20Chronology%201.pdf)

Kennedy, however, raised the stakes on the 25th, requesting an emergency meeting of the U.N. to challenge the Soviet ambassador about the missiles and then the next day he raised the readiness level to DEFCON 2, the last step before nuclear weapons would be used, in which all armed forces were required to be ready to deploy and fight within 6 hours . . . and the only confirmed use of that level in U.S. history. B-52 bombers were on continuous airborne alert and other medium bombers were sent to various airfields and prepared to take off on 15 minutes notice. About 180 of the Strategic Air Command’s (SAC) bombers were put on alert and almost 150 ICBMs were on ready alert. 

Most ominously, 23 nuclear-armed B-52s were sent to points within striking distance of the USSR.  The Soviets, however, were standing down, and the U.S. knew it, as Air Force General and Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations David Burchinal later recalled.  While JFK had put in a sea blockade and had 80 percent of SAC’s fleet prepared to strike Cuba or the Soviet Union, “the Russians were so thoroughly stood down, and we knew it. They didn’t make any move,” Burchinal said.  “They did not increase their alert; they did not increase any flights, or their air defense posture. They didn’t do a thing, they froze in place. We were never further from nuclear war than at the time of Cuba, never further”  (In Kohn, R. H.; Harahan, J. P. (1988). “U.S. Strategic Air Power, 1948-1962: Excerpts from an Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. Catton”. International Security 12 (4): 78–95).

Despite the one-sided war mobilization, and just two days after the Essex and Gearing challenged the Bucharest, the most dire confrontation of the entire crisis occurred.  October 27th was the most dangerous day in the postwar era prior to September 11th, 2001.  An American U-2 accidentally flew into Soviet Air Space, and even more dangerously, another U-2 was shot down over Cuba killing the American pilot and bringing Kennedy to the brink of a military retaliation.

The death of the pilot, Rudolf Anderson, led the military chiefs to call for a massive retaliation, even an invasion of Cuba, and the Army Chief of Staff Earle Wheeler worried that “Khrushchev may [let] loose one of his missiles on us.”  Later the JCS Chair Maxwell Taylor briefed the other officers on the White House meetings that day and told them that JFK was considering a swap of removing missiles in Turkey if Khruschev did so in Cuba because “The President has a feeling that time is running out”   (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book-special-exhibit/russia-programs-cuba-cuban-missile-crisis/2022-10-04/cuban-missile)

As the White House and Chiefs were debating the response to the U-2 shootdown,  the American destroyer, Beale, in international waters, unknown to the JCS, confronted a Soviet B-59 submarine and dropped depth charges to force it to surface. The Soviet crew believed that a war had broken out, and a Soviet intelligence officer on the sub, Vadim Orlov, later described how the U.S. ships “surrounded us and started to tighten the circle, practicing attacks and dropping depth charges. They exploded right next to the hull. It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer” (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/020000%20Recollections%20of%20Vadim%20Orlov.pdf)

The B-59 was carrying a nuclear-tipped torpedo, which American naval forces did not know, that had about 2/3 of the blast capacity of the bomb used at Hiroshima. Its nearest target would have been an anti-submarine aircraft carrier, the Randolph which had a crew of 3400 sailors and marines, more than the number of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor or on 9/11.

The Soviet sub was prepared to fire back, but the three senior officers on board had to agree unanimously.  Two agreed to launch immediately.  Vasili Arkhipov did not, and may very well have prevented a nuclear war.  Arkhipov wasn’t sure they were under attack and wanted the sub to surface and await orders from Moscow. In addition, the B-59’s batteries were low and its air conditioning was failing—it had been built for the Arctic, not the warm waters of the Sargasso Sea—so the sub surfaced and began its return trip to the USSR without incident.  At the very moment JFK had filled the skies with nuclear-armed planes and had gone to DEFCON 2, the Soviet sub officer had the composure to deflate the crisis at sea, perhaps saved the world from nuclear war  (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2022-10-03/soviet-submarines-nuclear-torpedoes-cuban-missile-crisis),

That did not, however, mean the danger had passed.  SAC officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana had rigged the launch system on a Minuteman ICBM to give themselves independent launch authority and bypass normal procedures.  A tactical missile squadron on Okinawa also received erroneous launch orders for the nuclear cruise missiles but an Air Force captain questioned the order since DEFCON 1 was not in effect.  In fact, 3 of the targets in the top secret envelope (like the one opened by Major “King” Kong in Dr. Strangelove) were in China, which had nothing to do with the crisis. Inside Cuba, the Soviet missiles were put on launchers that day and were operational (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book-special-exhibit/russia-programs-cuba-cuban-missile-crisis/2022-10-04/cuban-missile).

*****

While the Soviet-American confrontation at sea was developing, the crisis was moving toward its conclusion as the representatives of the USSR and U.S. began to talk to each other and carve out a settlement, which is the 3rd key element to talk about……

Kennedy had made contact immediately with the Soviets as soon as the missiles were photographed, instructing his brother and Attorney General Robert Kennedy to contact the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, to express American concern, and he was told by Dobrynin that there would be no ground-to-ground missiles or offensive weapons put into Cuba and that the USSR wouldn’t disrupt Soviet-American relationships.  A couple days later, on the 18th,  JFK met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who reiterated that the weapons were for defensive purposes, to prevent an American attack to oust Castro.  Kennedy did not tell Gromyko that the U.S. had the U-2 photos of the sites and was aware of the specifics of the missile buildup, and since them supporters of JFK have cited this to show that Gromyko and the Russians were being duplicitous (https://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct16/doc3.html; https://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct18/doc1.html).

But the Russian insistence that the missiles were defensive and that they were giving an ally reassurance amid constant American threats to overthrow has generally been discounted, though the Soviets were consistent on that point and didn’t intend to use the missiles to attack the U.S. unless some kind of move was made against the government in Havana.  While missiles can surely have offensive or defensive purposes, or both, the Soviets had been steadfast in their intention to protect Cuba, not provoke a war with America.

After Kennedy’s public speech, the sense of alarm had grown dramatically.  On October 24th, Khruschev sent a telegram to JFK calling the blockade “an act of aggression” and “outright piracy” that would lead to war and said the USSR had to decline “the despotic demands of the USA.”    Kennedy responded the next day by telling the Soviet leader that the U.S. had been forced to respond that way because he had denied that there were offensive weapons in Cuba and that he hoped that “your government will take necessary action to permit a restoration of the earlier situation” (https://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct24/doc2.html; https://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct25/doc1.html). 

The president also decided to confront the Soviets publicly with U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson challenging the Russian representative over the missiles on October 25th. Stevenson demanded a Soviet response to the American allegations that it had placed offensive missiles in Cuba and told the assembly that he was prepared to wait “until hell freezes over” for the Russians to admit to putting the weapon in a country so close to the U.S.

And of course this was all happening at the same time as American and Soviet ships were contesting each other at sea.   The situation was close to warfare.

As conditions in Washington, Moscow and Havana seemed to be spinning out of control, Khrushchev saved the situation and maybe the world, and sent another letter to Kennedy the next day, the 26th, telling the president that he would remove the missiles from Cuba if the U.S. guaranteed it would not invade Cuba (https://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct26/doc4.html).   At the same time Bobby Kennedy met with Dobrynin and told him that the U.S. would be willing to discuss removing American Jupiter missiles from Turkey as part of a negotiated deal.  Even as both sides seemed to be looking for a way out of the crisis, the B-59 incident occurred and the U.S. staged a hydrogen bomb test with a B-52 dropping an 800 kiloton bomb over the Pacific.

The pace of events was speeding up and Khruschev at that time also proposed that he would remove the missiles if JFK promised not to invade Cuba AND remove its missiles from Turkey.  On the 27th he wrote “You are disturbed over Cuba. You say that this disturbs you because it is ninety-nine miles by sea from the coast of the United States of America. But… you have placed destructive missile weapons, which you call offensive, in Italy and Turkey, literally next to us…. I therefore make this proposal: We are willing to remove from Cuba the means which you regard as offensive…. Your representatives will make a declaration to the effect that the United States… will remove its analogous means from Turkey… and after that, persons entrusted by the United Nations Security Council could inspect on the spot the fulfillment of the pledges made”   (https://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct27/doc4.html).

The Jupiter missiles in Turkey had added another layer to the crisis.   The Jupiters were outdated and being phased out anyway, to be replaced by Polaris missiles, so Khruschev’s proposal was reasonable and offered a clear way out of the crisis. Kennedy himself realized  the U.S. would be in an “insupportable position” if Khrushchev’s proposal became public because the Jupiters were obsolete and, the president said, “To any man at the United Nations or any other rational man, it will look like a very fair trade” (Recording of Kennedy meeting, Cuban Missile Crisis: October 26, 1962 & October 27, 1962, 41:42, https://soundcloud.com/hpol/cuban-missile-crisis-2?utm_source=www.wyzant.com&utm_campaign=wtshare&utm_medium=widget&utm_content=https%253A%252F%252Fsoundcloud.com%252Fhpol%252Fcuban-missile-crisis-2).

It was a fair trade.  The Soviet leader had created a simple plan with just two options—the U.S. would promise to not invade Cuba and it would remove Jupiter missiles from Turkey. 

Kennedy did not want to make that deal, didn’t like either option,  even though the U.S. would be giving up nothing substantial in that process—just agreeing not to do something and giving up something it was going to scrap anyway.

But as the National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy told JFK, the U.S. could not acquiesce to Khruschev’s plan—“the current threat to peace is not in Turkey, it is in Cuba” he said. Obviously, the U.S. had a vastly superior nuclear arsenal trained on Moscow itself, not to even mention the overwhelming dominance the U.S had over Cuba—it could have obliterated the island in an instant–but that wasn’t the point.  Demonstrating power and will, even at the risk of nuclear war, was the point  (In Sheldon Stern, The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis., 149).

But the events we mentioned earlier on the 27th, the U-2 shootdown, the confrontation between the Beale and the B-59 sub, the itching for war, had forced the White House to take negotiations more seriously.  Bobby Kennedy was meeting with Dobrynin at the Department of Justice that evening and warned him that the U.S. was prepared to bomb the Soviet sites in Cuba but offered the potential carrot of a trade of the Jupiters for the SS-4 missiles in Cuba. “Time is of the essence and we shouldn’t miss the chance,” RFK told the Soviet Ambassador (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/621027%20Dobrynin%20Cable%20to%20USSR.pdf).   

Even then, JFK moved slowly.

Faced with a chance to pull back from the brink on October 27th, Kennedy did not want the world to think he made concessions on the Jupiters, which to him would be a sign of weakness.  But Khrushchev took action that next day to end the crisis.  In a speech on Radio Moscow the Soviet leader announced that the missiles in Cuba were being dismantled and didn’t demand the Jupiters be removed.  Silently, the U.S. had agreed to take the Jupiters out, but they didn’t want the world to know they’d made that deal.  Kennedy was aggressive to the bitter end.  As McNamara later said, “we were eyeball-to-eyeball, and the other guy blinked.”

Kennedy was in fact so concerned with his credibility and creating the public image that he’d stared down Khrushchev that he and his aides created a cover-up of sorts and refused to admit that there had been a quid pro quo—the SS-4s for the Jupiters—to end the crisis.  They made sure that the media and others writing official stories of the incident credited JFK’s strength and resolve as the key factor in forcing the Soviets to blink. 

They even went so far as to smear Adlai Stevenson, who had confronted the Russians at the U.N. but also urged Kennedy to accept Khrushchev’s deal, by planting stories in the press about him with a source described as an  “unadmiring official” quoted as saying “Adlai wanted a Munich.  He wanted to trade U.S. bases for Cuban bases.  The “unadmiring official?” . . . John F. Kennedy.  As it turned out, the president himself had added those lines to a draft of that article, in his own handwriting (https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cuba-cuban-missile-crisis/2022-10-28/cuban-missile-crisis-coverup-kennedy-adlai-stevenson?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=afd3ff3a-918e-4bf5-8edc-aa32a1b8fcad). 

Though the immediate crisis of October 1962 had subsided, the residue of a near-confrontation between nuclear-armed forces and the legacy of JFK’s conduct during the crisis continue to have important meaning.   The “Cuban Missile Crisis” has become a short-hand phrase for global conflicts of severe gravity and is invoked to stress how important the stakes are—like the 6-Day War, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Reagan’s wars in Central America, the Gulf War, various middle eastern crises, and of course 9/11, and as Biden just did.  

At the same time, the general view of JFK has been overwhelmingly positive and he’s held up as an example of strength and resolve in the face of great danger.  In fact, in a special CBS news report on the night of October 28th, 1962 the well-regarded journalist Charles Collingwood set the tone for the way JFK would be viewed, saying that the world had come out “from under the most terrible threat of nuclear holocaust since World War II” with a “humiliating defeat for Soviet policy” (In Noam Chomsky, “The Week the World Stood Still: The Cuban Missile Crisis and Ownership of the World,” https://chomsky.info/20121015/).

But as we’ve seen, many of Kennedy’s decisions were reckless.  The U.S. had an overwhelming advantage in the balance of power against Cuba and Moscow.  Of course the presence of nuclear weapons in a country so close to the U.S. would raise concern and demand action, but the possibility of those weapons being used offensively against America prior to Kennedy’s blustering was minimal if not zero.  Any nuclear attack would have led to the immediate annihilation of Cuba and immense attacks against the USSR.  Kennedy knew that but his credibility and need to assert global power was more important.  He was willing to risk nuclear war in order to maintain U.S. hegemony and empire.

But, thanks to Oliver Stone and a cadre of scholars, journalists, and politicians, Kennedy’s actions are seen as heroic and the Missile Crisis is cited as his shining moment, when he not only stood up to the gravest challenge but learned from it and became a global force for peace afterwards.  But that, too, isn’t the case . . . .

*****

Finally, a little about “Post-Missile Crisis Kennedy,” the president who is still praised for his handling of the crisis. . . .  The reality, however, is that JFK after October 1962 wasn’t much different than JFK before October 1962.   When you peel away the layers of rhetoric and the spectacle of the global crisis, JFK, and American actions globally, were the same.  After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy believed that success in Vietnam could mitigate the public fallout from the disaster in Cuba, and from that point on the fortunes of those 3d World Revolutions were always linked.  Kennedy never received any lessons from the crisis in Cuba that led him to take anything other than a militarist and interventionist approach in Vietnam.  And after the Missile Crisis, the U.S. ramped up its commitment in Vietnam.  There was no transition to peacemaker.

Yet, one of the key claims by establishment fans of JFK, like Oliver Stone, is that the Cuban Missile Crisis shook Kennedy so much that he was on the path to normalizing relations with Cuba itself.  Once again, the record, the archives, the documents tell a very different story. The  American-sponsored subversion inside Cuba continued during the Missile Crisis.  The subversion had not ended.  In fact, on November 8th, as the Pentagon acknowledged that the Soviet missiles in Cuba had been dismantled, a CIA unit dispatched from Miami blew up a Cuban industrial facility and killed 400 workers, not even two weeks after pledging to Khruschev that the U.S. wouldn’t try to overthrow Castro’s government (Raymond Garthoff, “The Cuban ‘Contras’ Caper,” 25 October, 1987, Washington Post,      https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/10/25/the-cuban-contras-caper/f100977d-34a4-41fa-82d3-98989e914c72/).

On November 16th the U.S. began an exercise to simulate a full-scale invasion of Cuba at Onslow Beach, North Carolina which included 6 marine battalion landing teams, and overall had over 100,000 army troops, 40,000 marines, and about 15,000 paratroopers ready to fight in Cuba, as well as 550 combat aircraft and over 180 ships available to support an invasion.

A few days after that U.S. representatives met with their Soviet counterparts to finally resolve the issue of 42 Russian aircraft that remained in Cuba with the U.S. aggressively demanding their immediate removal.  JFK also renewed high-altitude incursions of Cuban airspace to gather intelligence though low-altitude flights were suspended.  At that meeting Bobby Kennedy wrote on an envelope “President reluctant to send in low-level flights…How far can we push K[hrushchev?]” and he threatened Soviet diplomats that the low-level warplanes would begin flying over Cuba again unless all the Russian planes were removed, all while the entire U.S. North American arsenal could be deployed against Havana with 550 combat aircraft on alert to attack Cuba on short notice.  Kennedy the so-called peacemaker had not taken his foot off the gas and still posed an existential threat to Castro’s government (https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/subject/missile-crisis/ch04.htm).

In December JFK ended the year in Miami paying public tribute to the Cuban Invasion Brigade and pledging that Cuba would be made “free” with Alliance for Progress and American help.  In an April 1963 meeting, JFK made clear he had not given up on removing Castro but insisted it had to be a Miami-Cuban effort and wondered “whether active sabotage was good unless it was of a type that could only come from within Cuba”  (See Kennedy remarks in Miami at the Presentation of the Flag of the Cuban Invasion Brigade, 29 December 1962, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-miami-the-presentation-the-flag-the-cuban-invasion-brigade; Memorandum for the File, “Meeting with the President — 5:30–15 Apr 1963 In Palm Beach, Florida,” with attached memorandum for the President on “Donovan Negotiations with Castro,” April 16, 1963 (Document 29). National Security Archive, Kennedy and Cuba: Operation Mongoose, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cuba/2019-10-03/kennedy-cuba-operation-mongoose).

At the same time Bromley Smith, the executive secretary of the NSC, presented an analysis that made it clear that Kennedy had decided to end the “restraint” he had shown on Cuba and was recommitting American assets to the campaign against Castro. “This paper,” Smith began, “presents a covert Harassment/sabotage program targeted against Cuba; included are those sabotage plans which have previously been approved as well as new proposals.” The NSC acknowledged that “while this program will cause a certain amount of economic damage, it will in no sense critically injure the economy or cause the overthrow of Castro.” It could however “create a situation which will delay the consolidation and stabilization of Castro’s revolution” and that was worth the U.S. effort (Bromley Smith, National Security Council, Draft, “A Covert Harrassment/Sabotage Program against Cuba,” April 16, 1963 (Document 30), Ibid.

And on Castro’s end, despite claims by Stone and others, like journalist Peter Kornbluh, that the Cuban leader was warming up to JFK, he continued to be as wary as possible about the U.S. president.  At a reception at the Brazilian embassy in Havana on September 7th, Castro held a spontaneous interview with an AP reporter where he called JFK a “cretin . . . the Batista of his times . . . [and] the most opportunistic president of all time.” He also denounced the continuing American-sponsored raids on Cuban territory and said “we are prepared to fight them and answer in kind.  U.S. leaders should think if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe”     (https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-10088-10035.pdf).

Early in November, not two weeks before his death, Kennedy ramped up terrorist operations in Cuba and approved a CIA plan for “destruction operations” against an oil refinery and storage facilities, an electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges and harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships (Memorandum for the Record, “Cuban Operations,” 12 November 1963, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume XI, Cuban ,Missile Crisis and Aftermath, https://1997-2001.state.gov/about_state/history/frusXI/376_390.html).

In fact, in Kennedy’s last public words about Latin America, in Miami on November 18th Kennedy emphasized the need to aid the region against Castro and said that “my own country is prepared to do this.” He urged states throughout the hemisphere to “use every resource at our command to prevent the establishment of another Cuba in this hemisphere. . . .”  (Remarks by President John F. Kennedy before the Inter-American Press Association at Miami Beach, FL, “The Battle for Progress With Freedom in the Western Hemisphere,” 18 November 1963, The Department of State bulletin., v.49 1963 Oct-Dec. HathiTrust Digital Library, Department of State Bulletin, December 9, 1963, 900–904, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ssd?id=mdp.39015077199217;page=ssd;view=plaintext;seq=372;num=900).

The idea that JFK was so alarmed by the missiles of October 1962 that he became a man of peace is preposterous, and America’s war on Cuba that it had been waging violently beginning in 1898 had not slowed down at all. 

The U.S. attempt to oust Castro had not ended and both the U.S. and Cuba were aware that the acrimony, interference, and subversion was continuing.  Indeed, on the day Kennedy was shot in Dallas, a Cuban asset close to Castro, code-named AM/LASH, was in Paris receiving a poison pen from a CIA officer in a ham-handed effort to have Castro killed.

Kennedy has come into political life as a cold warrior, interventionist, and imperialist, and nothing had changed after the near-cataclysm of October.

Thirty years after the missile crisis, McNamara traveled to Cuba to discuss the events of October 1962 with Castro and others.   The defense secretary, hawkish during his time at the Pentagon, seemed chastened by the enormity of the missile crisis all those years later, yet still believed “In a sense, we’d won. We got the missiles out without war. My deputy and I brought the five Chiefs over and we sat down with Kennedy. And he said, ‘Gentlemen, we won. I don’t want you ever to say it, but you know we won, I know we won’”  (Errol Morris, director, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.)

And remember that Kennedy, at the initial meeting where the U-2 photos were shown to him on October 16th, wished he’d said “well, we don’t care.”  From the very outset, JFK knew that those missiles in Cuba, though symbolically powerful, did not threaten the U.S. and did nothing to shift any balance of power between the U.S. and Russia even minimally. 

Surely there were officials in Ex-Comm meetings and in the Pentagon who wanted an immediate military retaliation to the discover of the missiles in Cuba.  The fact that JFK did not go that far is not a fair basis for praise, as the President himself seemed to later realize that the SS-4s were not the danger he had made them out to be.  But during the so-called 13 Days, Kennedy took a hard line, confronted and challenged Khrushchev, established a huge quarantine/blockade, provoked confrontations at sea and struck a Soviet sub, and was reluctant to accept Russia’s deal of removing missiles in Cuba and Turkey and only did so secretly.

In the historical legacy of the Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s fans, and there are so many, do not include in the context of their analysis the long U.S. record of aggression against Cuba, especially from the Bay of Pigs onward and the constant Soviet insistence that the missiles were sent to defend Castro’s government from a U.S. invasion, which even McNamara himself conceded after the fact. 

They don’t account for the undeniable fact that the U.S. had immense and overwhelming military strength compared to Cuba obviously but the USSR too—any first-strike from either would have been met with annihilation and all parties involved knew that.  Only the U.S., remember, had conducted aggressive actions—most notable in April 1961 but persistently thereafter with its subversive operations not to mention the most intense embargo in world history.  And perhaps most importantly, almost no one discussed the continued aggression after the missile crisis. 

While his supporters and apologists argue that JFK had seen  and been terrified because a nuclear exchange had been so perilously close, the fact is that the president didn’t change his stripes.  The subversion continued and the U.S. never accepted the reality of Castro’s government and spend decades trying to overthrow it and continues to this day to oust its successors.

If JFK’s conduct during the missile crisis—giving priority to credibility over peace, aggressive provocations, using military power, and insisting on winning the political battle at the risk of a war that would kill countless millions—is seen as the blueprint for how to handle crises, then surely it’s inevitable that another such encounter, possibly in the near future, will not end without mushroom clouds…….

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Shell Game

Posted on March 21, 2023 by buzzanco

Government and Media Manipulation of Ukraine and China News

Governments lie and issue propaganda which are generally repeated by friendly media all over the world, at all times. That’s no secret. For the past year there’s been an uptick in what one might even call “fake news” (the real fake news, not Trump’s contortions) especially regarding the war in Ukraine and escalating U.S. tensions with China. So yesterday, March 20th, a couple of stories almost on top of each other on the Washington Post (WaPo henceforth) website offered a great, small example of the way the Biden Administration and influential media are shaping the national discourse driving the war in Europe and growing conflict over a host of issues in Asia, Taiwan in particular.

With Xi Jinping visiting Vladimir Putin in Moscow, the mainstream media has gone into full-on 24 hour coverage mode, and WaPo in particular has had round-the-clock coverage, including a page with articles filed minutes apart stacked on top of one another so the reader can learn all the essentials without leaving that particular page.

So at 3:50 p.m. EDT on Monday, 3/20, the headline read “China has considered sending Russia artillery shells, U.S. officials say,” with a stark black-and-white photo of missiles strewn about on cold, snowy terrain. The lede is jolting: “China is considering sending Russia lethal military aid in the form of artillery shells as President Vladimir Putin’s army rapidly depletes its supply of ammunition a year into his invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials said, a prospect that has alarmed those in the Biden administration who believe Beijing has the ability to transform the war’s trajectory.”

However, the very next paragraph begins “There is no evidence that any weapons transfers have occurred, these officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the U.S. government’s assessment.” Then there are the obligatory U.S. warnings that China should avoid aiding Russia and that such help would violate the spirit of a peace plan that Chinese leaders had crafted.

Finally, after instilling concern, fear, anger or whatever emotion the reader might feel, the article pointed out that President Biden did not expect China to send weapons to Russia–“I don’t anticipate — we haven’t seen it yet — but I don’t anticipate a major initiative on the part of China providing weaponry to Russia,” he said in an interview with ABC News. When asked if any future support would cross a red line, Biden said that the United States “would respond.”

If one were to only read the headline and opening lines, then a very important point would go unknown–the March 20th article warning that China might send weapons to Russia was in fact a verbatim excerpt from a February 24th WaPo article with essentially the same title, “China considers sending Russia artillery shells, U.S. officials say.”

But wait! There’s more! Just two days after that article, on February 26, WaPo posted a story titled “After warnings, no evidence China is supplying arms to Russia, U.S. officials say, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/26/russia-ukraine-china-arms/ in which “top adminstration officials” admitted they had no evidence of China sending lethal military aid to Russia, a position echoed by Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, and William Burns, the CIA Director, on the Sunday talk show circuit.

So on March 20th, nearly a month after its initial story about China potentially arming Russia which WaPo itself rebutted two days later, it reprised the “Chinese shells to Russia” story with a dark and foreboding photo along with it, and the message about Chinese-Russian complicity and pefidy was clear.

But WaPo wasn’t done playing its shell game on March 20th. At 5:00 p.m. EDT it posted a story titled “E.U. to Send Ukraine 1 Million Artillery Shells” with a much different presentation than the Chinese shells story barely an hour earlier. It’s a colored photo, with a small pile of shells being handled by a ruddy Ukrainian soldier with a cigarette dangling from his mouth–it could be described as a photo of a brave GI in World War II and it would be believable.

And the message of the article is quite different too. Seventeen E.U. states, and Norway, had agreed to send Ukraine a million shells over the next two years, with other states interested in joining an expanded program in the future. WaPo writers featured the words of Estonia’s Defense Mininster, Hanno Pevkur, who showed off his can-do spirit by explaining, “There are many, many details still to [be] solved but for me, it is most important that we conclude these negotiations and it shows me one thing: If there is a will, there is a way.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky got the last word, and praised the agreement in his nightly address.

In a separate article published the same day titled “EU’s top diplomat hails deal on artillery shells for Ukraine” WaPo writers continued to tout the shell transfers to Ukraine, with EU foreign policy head Josep Borrell adding that the organization had begun fast-tracking the delivery of the shells to Kyiv and that the EU was also providing 1 billion euros to member states to provide existing artillery or to manufacture new ammunition. The EU was also ramping up production so new orders for weapons to be sent to Ukraine could be places by this spring if the plan is approved quickly.

The third track of the program involves support to Europe’s defense industry. so that it can ramp up production in the longer term. EU officials have said that new joint orders could be placed by May if the plan is endorsed in its entirety. “We are taking a key step towards delivering on our promises to provide Ukraine with more artillery ammunition,” Borrell explained.

At the same time, the U.S., which has already send billions in aid and weapons to Ukraine, announced another transfer of $350 million in weapons and equipment, including various types of ammunition, such as rockets, and an undisclosed number of fuel tanker trucks and riverine boats.

These stories are not shocking or earth-shattering. In the old days we’d say they were just part of “Journalism 101,” but today it’s just a basic lesson in “Communications.” But the stories, the photos, and the messages side-by-side do provide an important lesson in the way information is delivered to the American people. Chinese shells going to Russia are dirty and part of a dark and evil plan, while EU shells, and U.S. aid, to Ukraine is done to benefit the people there.

The media is always playing shell games with us, and some, like these, are just a little more obvious than others.

Posted in Foreign Policy, History, Imperialism, Media, Military, Politics, Russia, Uncategorized, War | Leave a comment

The Old Man and the S-3

Posted on March 11, 2023 by buzzanco

Death, and the Restorative Power of Tom Ka Gai in a Houston Dive

Kelsey Buzzanco, 26 December 1988-11 March 2010

Death recurs.  Not for the deceased of course, but for the people who’d been in that life. Not in the Shakespearian  sense of cowards dying often and the valiant but once. The death of someone who meant something recurs.  It often doesn’t take much—a sound, an aroma, silly memory dancing through your head . . . and you’re remembering someone who’s gone, and you relive the day he died.  Kelsey died again for me several months ago last year when I found out that our favorite restaurant had closed, and I winced at another link to him disappearing. 

I was going to Bohemeo’s to meet someone.  I’d been in that strip so many times because I’d eaten at the best Thai restaurant ever, Kanomwan, so many times.  Kanomwan is closed, shuttered, with liquor license application for the new owners in the window.  It was a gut punch, the closing of a dive restaurant.  Something that happens all the time, especially since 2020, when COVID and the shutdown drove so many people out of business.

But Kanoman was different.  I went there more than any place in Houston since I moved here.  Right after I arrived at UH I went to lunch with a few of my new colleagues at this Thai place on Telephone Road (across the street from its current, or last at least, location).  The food was amazing and it was full of UH people, professors and staff.  It was like a hidden gem but it wasn’t very hidden.  It was always full.  The place itself was a dive, with tchotchkes and a wall full of baseball hats people had brought there.  But it was clean and had its own ambience.

But the main attraction was Yuthana Charoenrat, a name which I’d never heard until just some months ago, though it was someone I’d met hundreds of times.  I knew him as “the grumpy Thai guy,” while others called him “the Thai Nazi,” in homage to Seinfeld’s soup nazi.  I know there are all kinds of inferences about western imperialism that can be drawn from not knowing his name, but everyone who had been to Kanomwan called him “the grumpy Thai guy” or just “Grumpy,” and it was easy to remember.  He was the owner but more than that.  He dominated this small restaurant more than anyone I’ve ever seen own a room–like a Sinatra, Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe, or Muhammad Ali.  Larger than larger-than-life. 

Grumpy took orders (a really bad word for requesting food, and in fact in this case Grumpy gave orders).  Only he took orders.  No one else ever did.  No matter how busy the place was, no matter how many people were already seated, no matter the length of the line, only he took orders.  And you ordered off the menu, strictly.  He had no tolerance for someone who wanted a slight modification in the food.  There was one “vegetarian” option on the menu, and I went there with a lot of different vegetarians.

When they asked for some modification, like taking meat out of something, he just glared and said he couldn’t.  I once had a friend complain about not getting enough shrimp and I was terrified that he’d kick us out and I wouldn’t be allowed back in. It was his room and he set the rules, and no matter what, you obeyed, because the consequences—not being able to eat there again—were too great.  If you were sitting too long at your table when you finished, or if he was ready to close after 1:30, he wasn’t shy about coming to the table and saying “you go now!”  And I always did.  There are certain gods with which I will not trifle . . .

Now, the food was amazing too, and I’ll get to Kelsey’s role in all this in a minute.  I started going there with UH people and the place became addictive.  I’d look for people who wanted to go to lunch to eat there, and it wasn’t hard to find people.  I’d go with colleagues often  before I became the department pariah, and I’d take my Teaching Assistants there at the end of the semester to thank them, and I introduced the place to just about everyone I knew. When I had a cold I’d get takeout, some kind of hot shrimp soup that would make me sweat like a business major trying to write an essay.   

The food was always great and the Thai guy was always grumpy . . . except when he wasn’t.  He had a couple weaknesses.  He could sometimes crack a smile and show some attention to an attractive woman. I once was going out with a very good-looking Mexican-American woman (punching way above my weight class) and we went there often.  But we skipped a few months and when we went back he asked where we’d been—well, he asked her where she’d been. She played along and looked at me and said “he won’t take me here.”  Grumpy told her “you call me and I’ll come pick you up,” and he laughed. 

But now we’re getting to the Kelsey part.  Because while he might break character once in a while for a woman, he was genuinely and downright pleasant when Kelsey came in, and Kelsey came in there a lot. With me.  With his mom.  With his friends after he got his driver’s license.  Kelsey was a Thai food junkie, and his main fix was the S-3, the Tom Ka Gai.  Every Thai place in the world has it on the menu, and I always get it, because it’s a test for me.  It’s tasted the same everywhere . . . except for Kanomwan. It was the best Tom Ka Gai in the world, obviously some kind of secret recipe from some secret deity handed down to the Thai guy’s wife, who did all the cooking and who never came out from the kitchen.  The first few times we went to Kanomwan Kelsey tried some other stuff on the menu, the H-5 and H-6 for instance, but once he tasted Tom Ka Gai I don’t think I ever saw him order anything else. 

But it was a lot more than a restaurant for Kelsey and me, or for me at least.  And probably for Kelsey too.  I think he saw it as his secret, his claim to knowing a little bit about the “other” Houston, outside the Galleria and River Oaks and all the rich places. He knew Kanomwan and that gave him social currency and cred as a kid.  And like I said, after he got a drivers license he was there all the time and took his friends. 

But for me it was our place to have sit-downs, to have meets, to discuss the family business and negotiate.  It was our version of the Ravenite Social Club.  We’d sit down to eat but also to figure out the world.  It was a refuge for us, where we could just chat about nothing, or about everything.  I might tell him stories about the Buzzanco family, or talk to him about politics and history, or discuss something going on in his life. 

And Kelsey often had things going on in his life.  He wasn’t the most mild or obedient kid, which was fine.  But he drifted over the line more often than he safely should have, and I tried to rein him in.  And when it was time for that conversation, I took him to Kanomwan.

I never told him that I wanted to talk to him, or he’d tell me he couldn’t go.  So I’d just say I felt like eating Thai food and we’d head over.  Grumpy would come to the table and ask me what I wanted because I ate various dishes on the menu and mixed it up. He’d just look at Kelsey and say “S-3.” 

And we were off. I’d bring up whatever topic it was I wanted to talk about and Kelsey didn’t want to talk about it.  But since it was a public place and the S-3 held him hostage, he had to engage me a little bit at least.  And that’s the place where we had the most meaningful communications.  He had to sit there but he also knew he’d be rewarded with Tom Ka Gai if he listened to me, and I suspect he was a little more at ease in that environment than he’d be elsewhere, surely than at home where he hated every “serious” discussion I brought up . . .

Now that might not sound like much but for me it was really a refuge and it gave the Grumpy Thai Guy’s place a special importance—the closest thing to a safe house I’d have.  Outside of the personal space we shared, Kanomwan was probably the location of most of our interactions.  We loved the food and reveled just being in the presence of the Thai Guy, which always made us smile.  And it always made me happy to see the old man come over to Kelsey and smile at him and make some kind of small talk.  He didn’t do that for many people other than pretty young women, so I figure he was able to see something about Kelsey that wasn’t apparent to everyone else—the same stuff I saw in the kid. That spark, that magic, those eyes that reeked of mischief and the spirit of a wild colt.

And we know how this story ends, alas . . . Kelsey died by suicide in March 2010.  He’d often been uneven emotionally and I’d often try to get him to talk about it, which he hated.  Hence our frequent visits to the Thai dive on Telephone Road.  But I knew things were getting worse when I’d asked him a couple times in the weeks before his death to go to Kanomwan and he passed.  That was unlike him and it made me think . . .

After Kelsey’s death, I knew I couldn’t go back to Kanomwan. The old man would ask me about Kelsey and it was a conversation I didn’t want to have.  I had no problem talking about Kelsey, and still don’t—I want people to remember him.  But talking to the Thai Guy was a tough nut for me to crack. I don’t know why.  There was something special there, though they really barely knew each other.  Kelsey made the old man smile and the old man had a soft spot for the kid.  In my own fevered imagination, there was something magical going on and I wanted to keep it pure.  So when friends asked me to go to Kanomwan I’d pass.

But weirdly, tragically, coincidentally, the old man himself died a few months later.  He wasn’t that old and didn’t seem to be in bad shape.  But we’re all day-to-day and his time was up.  And I was freed.  I was shocked and saddened by his death, though in reality I didn’t know him either.  But I could go back to Kanomwan, knowing that I wouldn’t have a painful conversation about Kelsey.

After Kelsey’s death I never went there as frequently as I had. Maybe a dozen times a year?  But whenever I did, I felt like Kelsey was walking in besides me.  I felt a sense of heartache when I sat down, because I expected the kid to be sitting down next to me.  The first time I went there after they both were gone, Jackson Browne’s “For A Dancer” jumped into my mind, and it made sense—”I don’t remember losing track of you/You were always dancing in and out of view/I must’ve thought you’d always be around/Always keeping things real by playing the clown/Now you’re nowhere to be found/I don’t know what happens when people die/Can’t seem to grasp it as hard as I try/It’s like a song I can hear playing right in my ear.”  Yeah, it’s cheesy but I’ve listened to that song a million times and I think of Kelsey each time.

So when I saw the signs in the windows this summer telling me Kanomwan was closed, metaphorically passed on like Kelsey and Grumpy, it stung badly.  Another epoch in the life of Kelsey Niccolo Sandino Buzzanco was gone.  There are plenty left in my mind of course, but that was a big one.  I remember going there with him like I remember his first steps, his first time riding a two-wheel bike, his fist day of school, and so on.  It was a big deal.

And now I’m commemorating another March 11th with him gone.  I had 21 with him, and now 13 without him.  It’s unimaginable that he’d be an adult now.  But one of the images I’ll always have will be him sitting at a table at Kanomwan with me either laughing or uncomfortably trying to change the conversation or just excitedly putting a little rice in the little cup and pouring S-3 over it.  Nostalgia burns like a fever and it makes me happy to be able to think about him and cry.  Weep, talk, eat—not a bad epitaph for Kelsey.

Kanomwan was “cosa nostra” for us, our thing.  And now it’s gone.  And the world is less meaningful than it was before . . . .

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“Jimmy Carter . . . Liberal Saint Now, Neo-Liberal War Criminal Then” (Transcript)

Posted on February 19, 2023 by buzzanco

[Unedited transcript of podcast on Jimmy Carter’s legacy as president, November 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krp2XygLxgo&t=14s. Opened w/ discussion of Carter’s well-deserved reputation as a humanitarian and peace advocate after he left the White House, then segued to discussion below].

Bob Buzzanco (BB): And it’s something we have talked about a long time and on my blog https://afflictthecomfortable.org, which is part of the green and red media empire. I wrote a piece in November just, I don’t know, on the spur of the moment about Jimmy Carter, and I think it was called . . . “Jimmy Carter is a liberal saint now, was a war criminal then,” and I do not get the traffic of Jacobin or any of those big New York publications, obviously.  But for some reason, this thing has really taken off. And I’m still getting every week, I’m still getting like hundreds of reads. I have no idea why. And we’ve talked about doing a show about this for some time, about Jimmy Carter. And so the recent death of his vice president, Walter Mondale, kind of became the impetus to actually do it. And and the reason I think Carter is important, one, because I think it’s just historically, it’s always important to understand what people really were like and what they really did. But we’re going to say a lot of negative stuff about Jimmy Carter, right? Jimmy Carter is lionized and he should be. I don’t want you to think, you know, I mean, his his work with Habitat for Humanity, the Carter Center, working on elections all over the world, his views on race, his outspoken views on race. He won a Nobel Prize for working on the North Korea nuclear agreement in the in the Nineties.   On Israel he’s remarkable. He has used the word apartheid in a book title to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. So he’s a great guy. And I think that’s the point because people like that don’t become president if they’re people like that, right. Most of the time, all the time to get to that level of power in the government, whether it be president, Senate courts, whatever, you fit into this super framework of what the oligarchy wants.

BB: [00:12:25] And only rarely does somebody move beyond that. And we’re seeing that now. Right? All these people like Boehner, John Boehner, I hate Trump and I voted for him. Right. And you’re seeing people who are criticizing Trump and not really distancing himself. That’s why, like Liz Cheney has become Trump’s biggest critic in this upside down world. We have. But but rarely does a member who was really at that level. And I can think of a few one and we’ll talk about him in a future show is Ramsey Clark, who was the attorney general. Ramsey Clark father was Tom Clark, who was a Supreme Court justice, who, if he didn’t write the decision, certainly voted for the the putting Japanese in concentration camps in World War Two. Ramsey Clark was attorney general and later became a huge advocate for non-intervention, anti imperialism and civil rights.  Before Carter the best known I would say would probably be George Kennan, who was one of the architects of the Cold War, famous diplomat who later in life became like this ardent critic of nuclear weapons, nuclear proliferation, and in the 1980s wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs, which is the official publication of the ruling class, in which he said his concern for the future wasn’t nuclear war.

BB: [00:13:41] It was some kind of catastrophic environmental event. This is in the early 1980s. So and he really became it almost sounded like the new left people we’ve read. And then there’s Jimmy Carter. And so that’s what we want to talk about. He’s done great stuff. But what we’re going to do is tell you . . . how he became president and what he did as president and how American politics is structured in a way that a good guy is never going to become president and never get any close. You said Bernie Sanders, right? Who what we’re seeing now from Biden is that that, you know, Sanders and Warren aren’t really all that different from a lot of the stuff we’re seeing other than Medicare for All, which would be pretty radical. What Biden is doing isn’t all that dissimilar to what Warren and Sanders were talking about. So Jimmy Carter as president really fit well into that framework and laid the groundwork for Reagan, for Clinton, for this really pretty significant rightward drift that we’ve been seeing since the sixties and seventies. So I think Scott wants to lead off to talk a little bit about well, we’re going to start by talking about how who Jimmy Carter was and how he became president. And that involves the story of a group called the Trilateral Commission. So. . .

Scott Parkin (SP): [00:15:00] Yeah, and the Trilateral Commission is a term that you hear often in these conspiracy circles. It’s you hear about the Rockefellers and you hear about the Freemasons and you hear about the Illuminati . . . . And so the Trilateral Commission is actually now equated to some grand globalist conspiracy, etc.. But the important thing about the Trilateral Commission is it was it actually was a very influential body. It was a non-partisan, non-governmental discussion group founded by a Rockefeller, by David Rockefeller in 1973, and it was created to foster closer cooperation between Japan and Western Europe and North America. And and I’m going to actually read a quote. I’m going to start with a quote by one of our favorite people, which is Noam Chomsky. And Noam says, Talking about the Trilateral Commission and the philosophy of the Trilateral Commission is “essentially liberal internationalists from Europe, Japan and the United States, the liberal wing of the intellectual elite.” That’s where Jimmy Carter’s whole government came from, The Trilateral Commission. The Trilateral Commission was concerned with trying to induce what they call called more moderation in democracy. Little democracy turn people back to passive. . . . Yeah, to being passive and obedience so they don’t put so many constraints on state power and so on. In particular, they were worried about young people. They were concerned about the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young.

SP: [00:16:48] That’s their phrase, meaning schools, universities, church and so on. They’re not doing their job. The young are not being sufficiently indoctrinated. They’re too free to pursue their own initiatives and concerns, and you’ve got to control them better. And so, like I said, the Trilateral Commission comes together in 1973. It is a group of private citizens from the elite circles includes David Rockefeller, Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance. If you look at it in the spectrum of American politics, it’s people from both parties. Including William Scranton, who was a liberal Republican from Pennsylvania. He was the governor. And so essentially, when we talk about, you know, and Bob and I actually met in the midst of an anti corporate globalization movement about 20 years ago, we there’s a lot of critique of this phrase which we actually need to do a show on called neoliberalism. And so what the Trilateral Commission did was it was it was it’s one of those bodies which essentially. Manage the framework that led to this neoliberalism, that that rose up through the through the. What we tend to think has happened during the Reagan years, but it actually happened here in the Carter years. And that’s that’s a little bit about what we’re going to talk about. But it was a very influential body on governments and it was a very influential body on the US government. And it started with the administration of Jimmy Carter.

BB: [00:18:15] And Jimmy Carter, who was a peanut farmer, ran for governor of Georgia in 1974. He’d been in the state legislature, was elected governor, was a member of the Trilateral Commission, and some of those names there you mentioned Zbigniew Brzezinski was the kind of director of the trilateral, became Carter as his version of Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, I believe Griffin Bell may have been.

SP: [00:18:35] Brzezinski worked for Kissinger, correct?

BB: [00:18:37] Yeah. Do you think he did? Yeah. But he always thought he was smart, you know, not saying much. But Brzezinski later in life actually became kind of a critical of wars in the Middle East and things like that. But any at any rate, and Carter was a member of this. And like you said, it’s not a conspiracy. This is done in the open. I mean, they’re having open meetings. Everybody knows about it. It’s being covered in the media. Around that same time, there was another group called the Committee on the Present Danger, which was established to push for higher defense spending. So we should do a show about all this because the left loves these conspiracies that they’re not. They’re just a bunch of people. And Jimmy Carter, . . .  impressed these people at the Trilateral Commission. You know, at the time. He’s really young. He’s fresh. This is Watergate. It just happened two years earlier. He was kind of unknown. And then he’s the first person who really understood that the Iowa caucuses could be important, You know, So he spent a lot of time in Iowa and won the caucuses. And all of a sudden, you know, the Democrats were in disarray after 1972 and after Watergate. So kind of the usual suspects were running. You had Ed Muskie was allegedly the front runner and he kind of fell apart. And I think did McGovern run again? I can’t remember now.

SP: [00:19:45] And McGovern seemed to be perpetually running.

BB: [00:19:47] There were ten or 12 people, Fred Harris from Oklahoma, who was actually a good old populist.

SP: [00:19:51] Jerry Brown, Scoop Jackson.

BB: [00:19:53] Fred Harris had the best line. He said, The little people are going to elect me president. And after two primaries, he dropped out. He said the little people were too small to reach the voting levers. So . . .  Jimmy Carter emerged from that and the ruling class loved him. Right. Because, you know, in the aftermath of Watergate, there was this intense anger and there was a real fear, like you said, like Chomsky, quote, says, like the sixties scared the hell out of these people. Right. The students are on campus and SDS and, you know, Black Panthers. And so they want to bring back this level of normalcy. And Carter is their guy. Right. And, you know, as you said, you know, he kind of lays the groundwork like his views on race, which are ironic, right, Because he’s great [now]. I mean, he’s working with Stacey Abrams. He’s been very outspoken on all racial issues, on police and everything. But that wasn’t that wasn’t Jimmy Carter in 1976, was it?

SP: [00:20:45] No. And it’s interesting. One thing I’m going to say to kind of prelude all of this is that a lot of what we attribute to Reagan-like policies and bringing in certain political views and things like that, a lot of it started with Carter. And so, for example, in 1976, when he was running for president, he’s really known actually for what he I believe he said when he launched his campaign, which was to be contrary to Nixon, which is like, “I will never lie to you.” But there’s a lot of other interesting things that he says in that campaign. And so, you know, Carter actually race-baited during the 1976 election. So by the mid-seventies, there had actually been a big push on busing, particularly in northern cities, but also in places like Charlotte. And so Carter came out and spoke out against that and he was doing that during the 1976 primary and election to appeal to northern white ethnics and white southerners. And he carried a majority of white Southern men in 1976, in the election, in the general election. But a quote that he said was, “I see nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained. I would not force a racial integration of a neighborhood by government action.” And then a couple of days later, when he was criticized for it by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, he doubled down and he said, “What I say is that the government ought not to take as a major purpose the intrusion of alien groups into a neighborhood simply to establish their intrusion.”

BB: [00:22:14] And so that’s not really even coded language now. And Jesse Jackson got into a very public pissing match about that when it happened.

SP: [00:22:24] And, you know, a lot of when Reagan announced his presidential run and I believe 1979, he did it at the Mississippi State Fairgrounds in Blanket on the town in Mississippi. But it’s near where the three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. A lot of coded language in there about states rights, blah, blah, blah. Et cetera. Carter. Carter predates that.

BB: [00:22:51] Carter also reached out to the evangelical community.

SP: [00:22:54] Philadelphia, Mississippi.

BB: [00:22:55] That’s where Carter also reached out to the evangelical religious community. And I believe met with Jerry Falwell and I think kind of got his blessing. Carter won a majority of evangelical votes. So today, when we talk about the horrors of these evangelicals and Trump, Carter started that.

SP: [00:23:11] Yeah, exactly. And the rise of the religious right didn’t start . . .  they joined the Republican, the Reagan coalition, the Reagan cold, the Reagan coalition, the Republican coalition in 1980. But they were actually part of the Carter Coalition in 1976 to get him elected and to beat Ford, who who was actually a bit of a liberal Republican. Just to be clear.

BB: [00:23:30] Yeah. You know, in retrospect, as you look back on these things, like I was saying the other day, like, you know, it might have been better for everybody if Mitt Romney had won in 2012 and a Ford. Yeah. I mean, you know, Jerry Ford, me kind of I, I roam around. But I remember and I’ve said this, I told you this story probably more times. You care to remember Jerry Ford? I believe it was his first press conference, either as president or right after the pardon. And they talked about the pardon. And then somebody said there was a bill, a public spending bill, small amount, $15 Billion or something like that. And there’s Jerry Ford about it. And he said, look, you know, we’re in an economic you know, we’re in a stagnant economy. The federal government has a responsibility and obligation to take care of people in times like this. I mean, can you imagine anybody, any Democrat from that point on Clinton or Gore or, you know, Biden’s actually saying that now, which is kind of why we’ve some of these shows we’ve talked about. We’re starting to see kind of some slight reversion back to these kind of corporate liberal ideas because the situation is so bad. But no, absolutely. Ford in retrospect, when you look back, yeah, we might have been better off if he’d beaten Jimmy Carter, given the nature of what’s happened since then.

SP: [00:24:40] Yeah, exactly. The other on the other domestic front that we wanted to touch on is around economic policy. And so Carter was very much a fiscal conservative, fiscal not physical, but fiscal conservative, probably a fiscal conservative as well. But we won’t go.

BB: [00:24:59] Oh, he did. He was he did give an interview to Playboy where he admitted to having lust in his heart for other women. So, yes, I guess he was I would make that make him a fiscal conservative, too. I remember Shirley MacLaine.

SP: [00:25:12] Maybe maybe in the Matt Gates context of the word.

BB: [00:25:15] I remember Shirley MacLaine saying it should really be a little lower than that.

SP: [00:25:18] So but Carter was a hardcore supply sider. And so when we’re talking about supply side economics, we’re talking about neoliberalism, we’re talking about a macro economic theory that effectively wants to foster lower taxes, decreasing regulation and free trade. Right? And so everything that we have organized against just since Seattle, the WTO protest in Seattle is essentially like supply side economics. And it’s the governing philosophy of Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama and Trump.

BB: [00:25:55] And Carter had a kind of sketchy relationship, sometimes antagonistic, with the union, with labor because of that supply side means you take care of supply and demand supply or the producers demand or the consumers. Right, Right. And basic Keynesian economics is basically demand side, which means the basis of Keynes idea is that you provide employment because employment gives people money and then they can become consumers. Supply side means you take care of the people at the top generally means you cut taxes. And then by doing that, you open that money for investment and you know, and that’ll trickle down, right? So the unions still wanted good union contracts and they wanted good wages and they still were kind of living in that Keynesian. Economy. And Carter is really the first person. He had really antagonistic relationships with a lot of a lot of especially left labor like the the mechanics, the machinist union at the time and a couple of others wanted Teddy Kennedy to run. Chappaquiddick had made that impossible. But the liberal wing of the Democratic Party wanted Teddy Kennedy to run, and so they never really warmed to Carter. And Carter didn’t warm to them.

SP: [00:27:04] No. And we talk about the dismantling of the New Deal, Even though all of these politicians run on an embrace of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt like Carter and Reagan, and say that Reagan’s noted for saying that FDR was one of his heroes when he was a young man. But they’re actually the ones who began the dismantling of the regulatory systems that the New Deal policies had implemented. Reagan actually praised Carter in a column when one of the ways that Reagan, after he was governor of California, he had a radio show, which would probably be a podcast in 2021, and then and then a column. And he actually had a column called Give Carter a Chance, praising his fiscal conservatism.

BB: [00:27:45] But but Carter And worth noting, in the 1976 election, Carter had been way ahead like by 20 points and barely won, eked it out. But the Democrats that year had a veto proof Congress because of Watergate. They had two thirds of the Senate and the House. And I don’t know. That was I think FDR is the only other time that had happened. Right. So he had incredible political juice, much like Obama did in 2009. And he essentially went to war against the liberal wing of his own party.

SP: [00:28:22] Yeah. And. There were a number of things that he did that that pissed off the liberal wing of his party. Deregulation was actually a big one. There, there, there was moves around with the Interstate Commerce Commission. To deregulate trucking and railroads. There was deregulation move against the against Ma Bell the the phone companies. And then there was also a deregulation. There was deregulation moves around the oil sector as well.

BB: [00:29:00] And airlines.

SP: [00:29:02] And airlines as well in which.

BB: [00:29:04] 80 there were, I think, something like 29 domestic carriers and within like what, a decade and a half it was down to. When you were working in your old corporate life, what was there like five or six major carriers.

SP: [00:29:20] Something like.

BB: [00:29:20] That? Yeah.

SP: [00:29:22] But then we also had the rise of the low cost carriers. This is like, yeah, that meant mid to late nineties, which were.

BB: [00:29:27] Really challenging deregulated trucking, which meant which really hurt wages among truckers.

SP: [00:29:34] And put him at odds with the Teamsters.

BB: [00:29:36] With the Teamsters Union. Right. And the Teamsters, I think didn’t the Teamsters endorsed Reagan in 1980. Yes. They might have.

SP: [00:29:41] Yeah. Yeah, they did. One thing I won’t say about about the oil sector is. Is there were a couple of different schools of thought. Here is like Ted Kennedy, who was becoming the leader of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, was essentially advocating nationalization of the oil industry, where Reagan was calling for complete deregulation. And so Carter took a middle road. And we in prepping for this episode, Bob and I found a Bob found an article in misuse by some unknown academic who remember his name.

BB: [00:30:20] The Ludwig von Mises was one of the Austrian economists, you know, hardcore conservative libertarian, no regulation, no laws, basically. So the Mesa Institute is kind of as far out there as you can get.

SP: [00:30:34] Let’s take us back to fatalism.

BB: [00:30:36] Oh, yeah, yeah. These are this is Milton Friedman and Hijack and all those guys, right? The Austrians, right. They are the sworn mortal enemies of the Keynesians. Right. And yeah, I’m looking around and I find this article from some guy in the Thesis Institute newsletter praising Jimmy Carter.

SP: [00:30:53] The title of the article is Rethinking Carter, but there’s a great quote in it. Do you want to read that?

BB: [00:30:57] Yeah. Let’s see the last line here. And he basically praises him for all the reasons we just gave deregulation and limiting spending on infrastructure and things like that, like the infrastructure bill today. That was an issue in the late 1970s, spending on infrastructure. So you can imagine, like a lot of that stuff we’re talking about today hasn’t been touched bridges and roads and now we have Internet and things like that. The one line you had, Scott always prepare his notes for this. He does all the heavy lifting. But at the time Ma Bell, a copper wire could carry 15 calls. And today a single fiber optic line can carry 2 million calls. So that’s the kind of infrastructure we were talking about at the time. But the last line in this article in the von Mises, since the two newsletters, however, Carter actually made it easier for Reagan to take the actions he did if the Democrats wish to lionize one of their own as the creator of the new economy, they should be looking at Jimmy Carter, not Bill Clinton. And other than you and I and some lefty economists and historians, people like Noam Chomsky, I’ve never heard anybody say that. So we are on the same side as the Austrians on this one.

SP: [00:32:11] But I’ve aspired to that for a long time.

BB: [00:32:14] I know, right?

SP: [00:32:16] And and so it’s it’s really important, like thinking about this in terms of the Trilateral Commission, what they did, thinking about Carter’s conservative economic politics. There was also the other thing the other thing I want to talk about real just touch on really quick and Bob kind of touched on this is there’s there’s two the Democratic Party is very polarized in this moment. And so there’s a there’s a pretty strong. The liberal wing, which is led by Ted Kennedy, George McGovern, people like that. And they’re in deep conflict with this more conservative wing of the party, which is led by Carter. And so clearly, Carter had won the primaries. He had been able to win the election by making a pre Reagan coalition, Carter coalition. And this is a this is also a story that continues to play out today. You could see it as being more about the wing that’s led by Rahm Emanuel and Obama ites versus the Sanders AOC wing. Right. With Biden somewhere in the middle. And so it’s Ryan Grim, who’s a bureau chief, D.C. bureau chief for The Intercept, actually wrote a great book that came out just a couple of years ago called We’ve Got the People or We Got People, which is essentially at least a four is a 40 year history of this struggle. He starts also in 1980 about the struggle between the liberal left wing and and the conservatives, mainstream establishment Democrats. But just very important thing to kind of think about the context. You know, we could also look at the Republicans and we can see the the splits there as well. And that’s actually playing out very publicly right now. But the context of what happens with the Democrats and their political divisions is very important.

BB: [00:33:59] And what that does with Carter is it moves Carter and Reagan, move everybody to the right so that when we talk about centrist Democrats back in the early 1970s, those guys were like liberal Republicans. Right, Right, right. So Carter is really pivotal. And, you know, not that I’m a seer because a lot of people were saying this in in 2016. I said, no matter who wins, I think you’re looking at a Jimmy Carter presidency like a one term kind of really lackadaisical malaise. Who knew it would be so tumultuous? But the fact is, we were right. But Carter’s presidency is not looked on favorably. You know, he was at war with his own party. In fact, Teddy Kennedy ran in the primaries against him in 1980, which is really bad whenever you have a primary challenge, just like when Pat Buchanan, remember, ran fairly strongly against George Bush in 92, you kind of knew George Bush was done for.

SP: [00:34:58] Or when Sanders ran pretty strongly against Hillary in 2016.

BB: [00:35:04] Carter defeated Kennedy because he had the mechanism of the party behind him. But by that time, you had just the country, you know, you had these energy problems. And he was advocating kind of this, you know, he’d do these he did these fireside chats, remember, and he talked about malaise and all that, like a lot of lefties liked him because he was friends with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. You know, he let Willie Nelson smoke weed at the White House and he would quote Dylan all the time. Right. But the reality was that the country wasn’t doing well. And then the big bond came, I think, with regard to and we can do this as a segue into the foreign policy stuff, which is what my article was actually about. The big bomb was Iran. It occurred in the Middle East. Iran had become America’s along with Israel and Saudi to some extent, but even more Iran. And we talked about this for a few weeks without really great show we did with Iskandar Shah, and we have to do another show on Iran because things aren’t getting different there. Obviously, you just had this hack by Israel. Israel is trying to muck up any opportunity to create and it’s not like Biden is eager to do it anyway. But Israel’s really mucking up every every chance to kind of create any kind of stability in that region. But I. The there was you have the revolution in Iran, the Islamic revolution with Khomeini. Prior to that, under the Nixon in the Nixon years. The US had established Iran as kind of a client state, a client state, but kind of a protector in the Middle East.

BB: [00:36:40] The United States. There are a couple to school. I’m being professor here. Forgive me. There are kind of a couple of schools of thought on the US role in the Middle East and especially with regard to Israel. So a lot of people say, well, the United States supports Israel because of domestic politics, right? A pack and the vote and all that. But then you have another school and Chomsky is part of that. And I think he’s right. And I’ve seen documents from Nixon which says that the United States supports Israel because Israel does America’s dirty work in the region. It’s like the cop, it’s their. Derek Chauvin Israel is America’s. Derek Chauvin Well, so was Iran. And between 1973 and 1978, Iran received $19 billion in weapons from the United States. The Shah of Iran was as reliable an ally in the region as you could get, really vicious, you know, brutal regime. And then you had this domestic opposition to to the shah emerge, the mujahideen, which is basically a word that means freedom fighter. The Mujahideen included a lot of young people who were influenced by the not just pan-Arabism like the Nasser type, but by Marx and communism. Remember, the seventies is a time where there’s a global left, right, you might say, doing before that and you had Fidel and Ho, the Vietnamese Revolution, the Cuban revolution, Mandela, the national. The you know, I’m talking about the ANC.

SP: [00:38:01] The African National Congress.

BB: [00:38:04] You know, there are these leftist movements all over. And we’ll talk about some of them because as President Carter’s move is to defeat those movements. So Iran is blowing up and Carter size with the shah. The Shah was diagnosed with cancer. He let him come into the United States for treatment at Johns Hopkins. And I forget who it was. It was I mean, Kissinger who wasn’t in his cabinet. Kissinger pressured him, but it may have been Cyrus Vance. It doesn’t matter. One of his cabinet members says, you know, if you side with the shore and let him in the country, you know, you realize what this is going to do inside Iran. And I’m not sure so but but I’m going to say it anyway, because it’s a great story. One of them I almost remember somebody saying, what are you going to do when they take the embassy? You know, So they were aware that America’s relationship with the Shah was toxic and it was going to lead to an upheaval in Iran. And it did. And so in the aftermath of the United States supporting the Shah, the shah leaves there’s a kind of a mini uprising. There’s a new government in Iran, I believe, led by guts by day. And then Khomeini returns from exile in Paris, and you have the creation of that first Islamic republic.

BB: [00:39:20] With that comes the second of the so called oil shocks of the 1970s. The first was in 1973 with the Arab-Israeli war, and then in 1979 you had the second. So there’s this Arab oil embargo. Inflation blows up. This would also leave we didn’t talk about it in the first place. This also led to the the appointment of Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve. And Volcker was a hard core hawk on inflation, which, you know, inflation for poor people isn’t a bad thing. Know, if inflation is done right, wages are raised and your debts are actually cost less because money isn’t worth as much. So for for people inflation, it’s not that bad, which is, I think, the basis of of a lot of these people. I’m not an advocate of that just to make it clear. So the the oil shocks and then the takeover of the American embassy sealed Carter’s fate. He appeared weak. He decided to stay in the Rose Garden and not leave. He was kind of a hostage. That was the word that was used, a hostage of the Rose Garden. He attempted against the advice of Cyrus Vance, who was a secretary of state. He attempted a rescue mission in the desert.

SP: [00:40:31] National Security Advisor.

BB: [00:40:32] Not security advisor. I’m sorry. Secretary of State was. No, no, it was Vance Brzezinski was.

SP: [00:40:37] I got him mixed up.

BB: [00:40:38] Yeah. Attempted a rescue mission in the desert, which was a disaster. Everybody, the helicopters went down. Everybody died. Vance resigned in protest against it, so Carter was just in dismal shape. So the election was still close, but it ended up. It was just a disaster. Carter lost heavily and then a bunch of establishment liberal Democrats, McGovern laws, Frank Church laws. I think Gaylord Nelson lost. Really? Didn’t they lose 11 Senate seats?

SP: [00:41:09] Yeah. Mike Gravel.

BB: [00:41:11] Great. In my brilliant predictions, I was saying that this the last year’s election could be like that for the Republicans. I was predicting like this massive Republican defeat.

SP: [00:41:20] So but then although we were we were betting on the Democrats, which is probably.

BB: [00:41:24] When you’re like I said, when you’re playing the Washington generals. Yeah. You’re never out of the game. Right. We’re seeing that right now. Every, you know, going back to the very beginning when we talked about Derek Chauvin, there was a poll today, over 60% of Americans are saying the police are racist and they need to be scrutinized more heavily on every major. I mean, Biden is 59 to 38 in the latest Pew poll. Right. Those are numbers Trump never, never hit 50%. So the Democratic Party has big majorities on like what is it, two thirds of Americans say, yeah, tax everybody over 400 million. 400,000, right. This is this is the democratic.

SP: [00:42:00] And corporations.

BB: [00:42:01] And corporations. Yeah. These are they’re the Washington generals of politics. And that was clearly the case then. And in 1980, it was just a they got destroyed. And that’s kind of a segue, unless you have something else. We could talk about Carter’s foreign policy, which is that’s the basis of the article I wrote last November. Jimmy Carter’s a liberal saying I was a war criminal then. And it’s my field. It’s the area I study more closely, although I kind of anything after any any aspect of American politics, especially in the 20th century and onward. I think Scott and I that’s our wheelhouse. Liberalism, political economy, things like that. We are I think I think people say we’re the best political podcast ever as well.

SP: [00:42:41] So I’m pretty you’ve definitely made it into the top 10% of all podcast, right? Right. Or at least in the top 10%.

BB: [00:42:47] Watch out, Watch out, Chop. We’re coming for you. We are coming for Chapo, man. And we’re much more interesting.

SP: [00:42:53] We’re much more interesting.

BB: [00:42:55] Donate. That’s right, man. This is our stop, Chapo. Campaign. Right. Or don’t.

SP: [00:42:59] Anti hipsters.

BB: [00:43:00] The anti hipsters campaign. We are too old to be hipsters, right? But well, I am you.

SP: [00:43:07] We’re more like hipsters, not hipsters.

BB: [00:43:08] Hipsters. In honor of our executive producer and the champion of the working class are our friend Hep, who we’re going to have to have on a show at some point again, Anyway, I don’t want to go into great detail on this, but Carter’s foreign policy fit within that new, reinvigorated Cold War framework. Remember, Richard Nixon went to China, right? Nixon, who had been like a hardcore cold warrior, came, you know, became a senator based on his attachment to McCarthyism and all that kind of rhetoric When he ended the Vietnam War, for what it was worth, blew the hell out of Cambodia, Laos, in Vietnam. But he but he also entered the war. He created that detente. Right. You know, to to to create these relationships with with both the Soviet Union and China in order to kind of break there never was that communist bloc. But he break out. He also used it against Vietnam. And then, you know, he had actually come to an agreement with the Soviet Union on nuclear weapons, the Strategic Arms Limitation talks, and then was in negotiations for another even more rigorous cutback on nuclear weapons. Salt, too. And salt, too, was in the works when Watergate happened. And then Ford picked it up. And that’s when if we ever do issue on the Committee for the Present Danger, we can talk about their role in scuttling salt to basically American military contractors, defense intellectuals, People in the military were were afraid that if you start reducing nuclear weapons, you’re not going to have as much business.

BB: [00:44:45] Right. One of the things that Nixon did after Vietnam, because defense spending went down so dramatically, was really pump up arms sales, which is why, like Iran got, you know, $19 Billion in Weapons in just the four or five year period. So Jimmy Carter became President Carter even before Reagan. We usually talk about Reagan in the new Cold War. It actually is before that. So Jimmy Carter is to the right of the previous administration. And in fact, during one of the debates in 1976, Carter debated Gerald Ford. And this is like one of the big moments that Ford was considered to have blown it. They were talking about Eastern Europe. And Gerald Ford said during a debate, Carter said that this administration, he was attacking Ford from the right, which is what Kennedy did to Nixon in 1960 on Cuba, Jimmy Carter said that Nixon Ford administration has been soft on communism, right? They have allowed the Soviet Union to dominate Poland and Czechoslovakia and all these countries. Jerry Ford, in response said, I don’t think you can say that the countries of Eastern Europe are dominated by the Soviet Union. In fact, he’s right. I mean, they’re clearly under the there was more autonomy and more flexibility in those Eastern European regimes than than the US media portrayed. Right. It was more than just a boot that was there. But Brezhnev wasn’t Stalin and the.

SP: [00:46:09] Us and more that’s taught in public schools.

BB: [00:46:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So Ford really wasn’t that far off. Carter pounced on that, and that was really big because Ford like that was like a really body blow to Gerald Ford. So Carter scored mega points by attacking Ford from the right and being this anti so Carter staking out a position far to the right of Nixon. So just let that sink in for a minute. Justice Kennedy did in 1960 on things like.

SP: [00:46:38] Cuba and and and the Republicans after Carter never. Maybe arguably in more recent times, never let the Democrats get to the right of them again on such things.

BB: [00:46:50] Yeah, although they tried.

SP: [00:46:51] Yeah, they tried.

BB: [00:46:54] Yeah. And I think that’s the one weird thing about Trump, right? You have all these these liberals now who have become big advocates of Naito and they hate Russia and they hate China. And, you know, Russia and China are clearly autocratic. I mean, China’s I think China is actually a fascist state. People have to throw that word around. China is far more fascist than anything you’ll you’ve seen in the US with the way that corporations are run in the States, run and all that kind of stuff. At any rate, so Carter did that. Now let’s just give some examples of that and we can just do it. And if you’re interested, you can go read the whole article that afflict the comfortable dot org and just do a search. That’s what we’re.

SP: [00:47:31] Going to put it in the show notes as.

BB: [00:47:32] Well. Put on this one, too. All right. So you want to just kind of go by the order in which it’s structured there. We can start with like Indonesia, and I assume you have it opened or, you know. Um.

SP: [00:47:44] Why don’t you. Why don’t you start? Okay.

BB: [00:47:47] And I just did it based on kind of some of the key elements of of Carter’s foreign policy. I did not include Iran because that’s kind of what and I didn’t really clue to Israel because it’s only after he became president, it became so critical of Israel, which I think he should be absolutely lauded for. It’s really remarkable to use the word apartheid in a title of a book about Israel is is really, really something for for somebody who had been president of the United States. You’re not going to hear that very often. I mean, look at AOC. The way she stumbles and jibber jabber is when they ask her about Israel. Right. So I want to start with Indonesia and East Timor, which we’ve talked about before, and we’re going have a show on that coming forward. I’m reading this amazing book right now called Buried Histories about the Indonesian massacres in the Sixties. So Americans know a bit about that. When we interviewed Clinton Fernandez about Noam for for our Chomsky birthday spectacle, which is done quite well, by the way, he talked a lot about Indonesian Timor because Clinton is an advocate and a scholar in Australia who studies this very closely. There’s this idea that the US looked away in Indonesia while they slaughtered people in East Timor. Tens of thousands. That’s true. It’s true. And Jimmy Carter was a big part of that.

BB: [00:49:01] Timor was an ex Portuguese colony that Indonesia wanted to annex. You know, Timor wanted independence. The Carter administration supported, supported and provided heavy aid, military, financial and diplomatic to Jakarta. So that kind of whole Jakarta method thing that all these people and the stuff we’re going to talk about, the book I’m reading is actually better than the Jakarta method. It’s called Buried History by John Russo. But Carter was a big advocate and an important piece in that what we would call the Jakarta method today. Indonesian troops in East Timor were armed roughly 90% with our equipment. One Department of State report acknowledged. So the Indonesians were killing the Timorese with American made weapons, which is unfortunately going to be kind of one of the themes of of the Carter years as the Indonesian were running out of military material. Carter authorized additional arms sales of $112 million just in 1978. And since Walter Mondale was the kind of genesis of this set Mondale to Jakarta to announce these new arms sales and continued to deny throughout that the situation in East Timor was dangerous. So Carter had a huge role to play in the slaughter and the massacre and the denial of sovereignty to East Timor, and that led to a bloodbath that would continue. Until when did the Timorese get independence?

SP: [00:50:40] I can’t remember in 2000.

BB: [00:50:42] Yeah, I’ve written about it too. I have a piece, another piece on my blog about that. It was on December 7th, 1975, I think was the invasion. Right? And so Carter was president during most of that time.

SP: [00:50:54] So. So the occupation lasts 25 ish years.

BB: [00:50:57] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the US support throughout US supported it through it.

SP: [00:51:00] Was in 99. It was 99 when. Yeah, I think so. It finally got in.

BB: [00:51:03] And there were massacres and these were all heavily subsidized by, by Washington DC, by Jimmy Carter and by Bill Clinton. You know, if you want to talk about Democrats, Clinton Clinton was on board just just as well. Angola.

SP: [00:51:19] Oh, yeah. I was going to take that one.

BB: [00:51:21] Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Just as I was going to I was throwing it to you, actually.

SP: [00:51:25] So sorry. Missed our cues there.

BB: [00:51:27] But I didn’t know we had any.

Speaker1: [00:51:29] Yeah.

SP: [00:51:32] Yeah. Southwest Africa, Angola and South Africa. Carter continued US policy and supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa. There had been a marxist government had taken over in Angola and there was actually a. A reactionary rebel front called UNITA, which was led by a pretty notable figure named Jonas of NB and who basically wage war from South Africa against the Marxist government, Angola. Kind of going back to the Nixon Kissinger triangulation is the US actually works with makes a deal with the Chinese send 800 tons of military equipment to support UNITA but lots of battles that included air attacks, raids on refugee camps, a massacre at Kaziranga in 1978 in which US backed forces killed 800 people. I also want to note that the Internet there was the sort of triangulation going on here is that the Marxist governments actually backed by the Soviet Union, and that is where they get a lot of their supplies. And it also included an international brigade of international fighters which were Cuban who actually went and fought. You need to with the Marxist government for many years. And we’re going to talk a little bit about Cuba as well by the end of this episode.

BB: [00:52:56] Yeah, and Cuba, we need to do another show there because in the 1970s especially and I talked I was talking about this recently because Raul Castro stepped down. So there’s not a Castro now in official position in the Communist Party or in the government of Cuba. The Cubans were part of that solidarity that they called a tri continental. You know, the US had the Trilateral Commission for the four for the left that was tri continental ism. And the Cubans were really active in Angola. They were vital to the liberation. Angola finally did gain its independence, and Cuban troops played a huge role in that. The famous battle of Carnival. And I’ve written about that. There’s actually I have a blog on that just you can do a search on or we can put it in the show notes or you can do a search on it. But and the important piece to this, which I can’t stress enough, because we’re going to talk about it in a second with our next the next thing we talk about is the United States is working with China. Right. Mao died, I think, in 1975. So Deng Xiaoping took over and began this. Mao would have called him a capitalist roader. Right. And also kind of reoriented China’s foreign policy. So the United States and the Chinese were working very closely now, and they were on the same side. Savimbi had once been a maoist. Savimbi was a brutal terrorist thug. Right. The US is supporting him, as is China.

BB: [00:54:29] And the United States and China are coordinating support to essentially the South Africa. I mean, the US and China were both supporting this apartheid regime in southern Africa, not just in South Africa itself, but also in in Angola and Namibia and throughout the southern part of the continent. So Jimmy Carter, who’s obviously has these great ideas about race and everything else, was defending very I mean, more than defending arming the apartheid regimes in in those places. Right. Which is what? And that’s the point. Carter is a great guy, but this is what American presidents do, right? I mean, if Carter had said, you know, we’re going to support the the MPLA, we’re going to support the Marxist, we’re never you know, he would have been like they would have invoked the 25th Amendment on him. You know, you can you can incite a riot and get away with it. Right. They’re getting away. They’ve gotten away with it. Right. But if you were to do that, people would think you’re robots or so as my people would say. All right. Speaking of China, that leads to the area that I actually know best, which is Vietnam. And Vietnam War was over right by the time Jimmy Carter became president. But that did not mean that America’s relationships or American policies with that region, Indochina, were not important. In fact, in one of Carter’s first press conferences in 1977, somebody asked him if the United States should make reparations to Vietnam, if the United States should do something to help Vietnam because of all the intense and immense destruction.

BB: [00:56:17] Vietnam was is about the size of New Mexico and had how many million tons of bombs dropped on it, 15 million refugees just devastated. And Carter said no. And his his reasoning is, to me, chilling. He said the destruction was mutual, the destruction. That’s how Jimmy Carter looked at the Vietnam War. The destruction was mutual. The US invaded Vietnam. The US killed 2 to 3 million Vietnamese. The United States. I mean, to this day in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, over 10,000 people a year die still from unexploded bombs from that war. And for Jimmy Carter, the United States owed the Vietnamese nothing because the destruction was mutual, which is utterly chilling. I think he continued to go after the new government. The Viet Nam was renamed the RV, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. And remember 1975 next door. There had been a revolution. There have been revolutions in all three of the countries of Indochina, Laos, Cambodia, Kampuchea and Vietnam at the same time. And they all came to power in late April 1975, literally within a week or ten days of each other. And the most brutal regime was in Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge. And you’ve been there so you can speak to it. And those pictures are utterly chilling, right? The Killing Fields. So the Khmer Rouge have this bizarre sense of communism led by Pol Pot, and.

SP: [00:57:44] They’re a maoist sect as well.

BB: [00:57:46] Yeah. And they I mean, just went on. I mean, I forget what the what was the overall population of Cambodia? Like six or 7 million or something like that. It wasn’t that big. And they killed perhaps a million people. Right. Just these like if you wore glasses, you were considered western. If you spoke French, you were considered Western. So they wanted to eliminate that. They were. I’ve met several years ago. Somebody was going through Houston and I met this this this older guy who was a musician. And when he was like ten years old, the Khmer Rouge killed his parents and gave him a gun. And he had to fight in the Khmer Rouge army right now. And remember, this comes on the heels of the American air war against Cambodia, which was highly destructive, too, which really laid the groundwork. The Khmer Rouge was kind of a splinter, not really that important until the United States started bombing the shit out of Cambodia and then really propelled the Khmer Rouge into power. So they’ve had these twin horrors as bad as anything really, in the 20th century. When you consider how small Cambodia was, the US attacks and then the Khmer Rouge. Right? And Carter and so the Vietnamese and you know, you can say, well, they did it. There are different. They’re different. They’ve never been the same type of communist. Right. The Vietnamese and the Cambodians right there. There had been tension there when Ho Chi Minh was still alive. So it was the Vietnamese who intervened to get rid of Pol Pot on the Khmer Rouge. Right. And it doesn’t, you know, to me, like the the motivation, whatever, if you want to use the phrase humanitarian intervention there, it’s that’s an Orwellian term. But if you’re going to use it, this is where you use it, because they did end the genocides.

SP: [00:59:34] The killing, the killing fields.

BB: [00:59:35] The killing fields in Cambodia. And what did Carter do? Carter talked to China. And and I’ve written an article about this, and we can put that in the notes, too, with in some detail about the United States and China in the late seventies. Carter in China in the late seventies because there’s documents on it now and and in January of 1979, less than a year after the Vietnamese had intervened to get rid of the Khmer Rouge, Carter was talking to Deng Xiaoping again and expressed his desire to punish Vietnam, to reduce aid to Hanoi as long as the Vietnamese are the invaders. Right. So he wants to set up a pretext. His his thing is Vietnam has invaded Cambodia. Right? But it got rid of this murderous regime that was destroying killing hundreds of thousand people. But but in Carter’s world, they’re the invaders. He’s talking to China. China and Vietnam have long been adversaries. Even though China supported Vietnam during the war, Carter increased military aid to Thailand to a group called ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and he got them all to unite against the government in Hanoi and warned the Soviet Union that if they continue to support Hanoi, that that would harm relations with the United States.

BB: [01:00:57] Carter is going full on Imperial Hawke here. I mean, this is war criminal stuff here. You’re supporting the Khmer Rouge. And then remember, when Reagan became president, Jeane Kirkpatrick went to the UN to defend the Khmer Rouge seat, saying the Khmer Rouge should hold this seat at the United Nations, not the the the government put into place by the the Vietnamese. Deng Xiaoping agreed and said some punishment in a short period of time. We’ll put a restraint on Vietnamese ambitions. The United States and the Chinese are trying to restrain Vietnam. This country has just been devastated by war, can’t get international lending. The United States. Nixon had a secret cortisol to give to the Vietnamese, I think two and one half billion dollars in reparations, which he said, Well, I’m not going to give it to him because they still have POWs, which is an utter lie. There are no POWs and MIAs that those flags are based on an utter lie there. Every public building in the United States.

SP: [01:01:54] It’s you know, it’s flies over the post office in Berkeley, California, today.

BB: [01:01:59] Yeah.

SP: [01:02:00] And that’s a propaganda campaign, a myth.

BB: [01:02:03] There’s a good book on that by Bruce Franklin, an outstanding scholar called MIA or Myth Making in America. And that’s from like Rambo and all those. Movies and all that stuff.

SP: [01:02:12] And Ross Perot.

BB: [01:02:13] Yeah. So Carter said that he understood that China wanted to get rid of Vietnam and invade, but he said an invasion of Vietnam would be very serious, serious, destabilizing force. Deng Xiaoping said, We have noted what you said to us, that you want us to be restrained. It is not that we did not consider this. We intend a limited action. Our troops will quickly withdraw. We’ll deal with it like a border incident. That’s not cryptic. Deng Xiaoping is telling Jimmy Carter that the Chinese are going to invade Vietnam. Carter doesn’t say anything. All right. That’s a green light. And in February of 1979, I don’t know how many people know this. This is like really important stuff that more people need to know. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops in February of 1979 attacked along the Vietnamese border and invaded Vietnam. The incursion only lasted about a month because the Vietnamese basically kicked their ass. Don’t mess with Vietnam, right? It was costly. The Chinese had about 25,000 or more killed. The Vietnamese probably more than that. Financially, however, the toll was great. And this is the when you talk about Vietnam after the war, the financial burden, it’s not just of not getting international lending, but of occupying Cambodia in a fight against the Vietnamese was really immense. And I mean, there’s a great deal of criticism that the Vietnamese government from Van Dong and others deserved. They they mishandled winning very badly. And Gabriel Kolko has written a great book about this called Anatomy of a Peace. But the burden of fighting against China after the intervention was was was huge. And Carter was a huge part. The main force behind that. Carter greenlit the attack on Vietnam because of the intervention, the humanitarian intervention in Cambodia, and and then worked with the Chinese to physically invade Vietnam. And and the Vietnamese economy never really recovered from that until it started this kind of heavy duty capitalist demos, which was kind of like what Gorbachev’s Gorbachev was.

SP: [01:04:31] Was perestroika is the Vietnamese perestroika.

BB: [01:04:33] It’s a market oriented thing. So they basically abandoned socialism. They abandoned the people who had won the war, the labor and the veterans and things like that. So it’s it’s a it’s a sad story. Like all around.

SP: [01:04:46] Doi is in perestroika, essentially.

BB: [01:04:50] Pretty much the.

SP: [01:04:50] Same thing. Deregulation, neoliberalism.

BB: [01:04:53] Yeah. Now the the I think the last thing on this or no, the next last and I can point to the flag behind me which I’ve had up there for a while now. A friend of mine brought this back in 1984. To Managua. And it’s a flag of for the Sandinista government there, the Fsln, which they’re in power today, but they’re a lot different. And let’s just leave it at that than they were then. But the Fsln came to power against Jimmy Carter’s wishes, did it not?

SP: [01:05:25] Oh, yeah, absolutely. One real quick thing I want to just kind of point back to is when we began the episode, we talked about the Trilateral Commission and we talked about these global frameworks that spans Western Europe, North America and Japan. And so these machinations were the Carter administration is is doing grand strategic moves with the Chinese and Southwest Africa or Vietnam or Cambodia and a number of other places. Is is that’s part of the plan. And the the thought that what’s coming from the liberal internationalist wing of the global elite, which is the represented in the Trilateral Commission, is like that’s what’s happening here is like we don’t commit US troops per se to South West Africa or Vietnam. We are supporting people who we perceive as our friend under these certain circumstances. And I actually think it’s a Chinese army from Sun Tzu is like the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which is essentially part I mean, that’s a real simple way of kind of talking about why the US developed relations with the Chinese.

BB: [01:06:34] And let me let me just throw one thing in there, too, because when the Trilateral Commission was established, it was really about Japan. In Asia, no one foresaw what would happen after Mao died. So, you know, the the entreaties and the cooperation between the United States and Beijing was was insane. Like that was unbelievable. And that was a huge bonus for these people who had kind of created this idea. You know, like the the Trilateral Commission is like the Council on Foreign Relations or something like that. It’s these guys and, you know, no. One in 1973, no one could have said, oh, you know, six years from now we’re going to be cooperating with China to to support apartheid and and attack Vietnam. Right.

SP: [01:07:20] A genocide in Cambodia and genocide can’t.

BB: [01:07:23] Right. Right. So this is I mean, if you want to kind of I don’t like giving moral evaluations of foreign policy because I just don’t see any point to it. But these are evil motherfuckers. They really are.

SP: [01:07:35] So, yeah. And so the next little theatre of operations, I guess we could say, is is going to be in the US’s own backyard, which is Nicaragua. And we had a recent episode with Professor Phil Berriman, former priest, talking about his experience as both a priest and Central America in the seventies and then as an activist with the American Friends Service Committee. But we, you know. Not enough Reagan gets. Reagan is very attached to the bloody wars in Central America in the eighties. And frankly, I think Bob and I would both agree that not enough people talk about that. But then Carter also talking about how the Carter administration policies were a prelude to what Reagan did is like. Carter was also. A player in what happened in Nicaragua. And while the Contra War and US destruction in Nicaragua, in other parts of Central America is mostly a product of the Reagan administration, Carter sets the stage for that for later in the summer of 1979, when when the Sandinista revolution made its final push to take over Managua and depose the dictator Somoza, they were actually part of a large popular front group, which was a whole bunch of different components.

SP: [01:08:59] The Carter administration, which actually supported throwing out Somoza because he was such a brutal dictator, basically didn’t like that it was being led by Soviet backed communists, the Sandinistas, and. Pushed for moderate positions, actually led to led to kind of splitting them up, up splitting up of that coalition, which was created a whole lot of problems. And. Basically when the the Sandinistas front the Fsln, they’re on Bob’s wall. You can see if you’re watching this on YouTube. Took over in July of of 1979 and they began receiving aid from other socialist states, most notably the Soviet Union. Carter authorized the CIA to begin to support resistance forces in Nicaragua, which is the the genesis of the Contra war. And so. There’s a lot of popular media and most notably in the film Salvador Bye bye Oliver Stone that Carter Actually the Carter administration was doing the right thing. In many ways, because before the before the Reagan people came in. But Carter is actually very responsible for a lot of the bloodshed that happened in Central America during the eighties as well.

BB: [01:10:18] When I tell liberals that Carter created the Contras, they just they’re an utter like they get angry. I it’s like I can show you document I have I’ve shown the documents you know and it doesn’t matter. One thing I want to say, though, because we also did the show about the nuns, remember, in December, to Carter’s credit, he’s the first person who kind of established human rights as as an issue in American foreign policy, actually created an assistant secretary of state for human rights, Pat Darian. And when we talked about El Salvador, like Robert White was really outspoken about the regime there and the death squads and Doby song and things like that. So Carter did have that in him. And like in Argentina, he played a role in ending the the dirty war there, you know, and the disappeared And in Argentina they speak very well of him. So I don’t want to again you know, like he’s he’s not like individually in his heart. I’m sure he’s a great guy. He’s kind and caring and he’s certainly done amazing things since he’s left the White House. But he was an American president, you know, and and and that’s and all of that that that entails. So the last things we’re going to do because this has gone on. But it’s good stuff. It’s really good stuff are kind of two of his longest lasting legacies which are Iraq and Afghanistan. And we can just have a kind of conversation on this. When I teach toward the end of the semester, usually the last semester, I do a really long, long background or on the United States in the Middle East as kind of a prelude to why 911 happened. Kind of I set it up that way.

SP: [01:11:52] And we had an episode on that as.

BB: [01:11:53] Well. Oh yeah, that’s right. 4911. Yeah, we did. Which we can we can have an encore next year on 901. And when I talk about Iraq and Afghanistan, the students, this is the one time one. But this is clearly one of the times during the semester where they’re like jolted, right? Because, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan, the way we look at them now, Iraq, I’m not sure how much is there. The United States had supported the Baathists. You know, they helped them overthrow the government in 1963. They had kind of a tenuous relationship with them. For a time, Henry Kissinger was sending money to the Kurds to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but then realized that that wasn’t going to happen. So we withdrew aid. And I basically tell the story because it’s one of my favorite Kissinger quotes when they asked him why he was no longer supporting the Kurds, he said covert operations is not the missionary work. And then Saddam went in in gas.

SP: [01:12:50] Is that like a Kissinger impression you’re trying to do there?

BB: [01:12:53] Yeah, it wasn’t it was that wasn’t it obvious?

SP: [01:12:55] It was a little subtle.

BB: [01:12:56] Okay. I’m not I’m not a ventral. I can talk. I can give you. If it was an Italian accent, I could have done it a lot better. But he also said that what was it then? Chile as a dagger aimed at them, aren’t they? Right. We are not. We are not going to let Chile go socialize due to the stupidity of its own voters. And this guy was dating Jill Saint John. I don’t get it, you know, Anyway, in Iraq. The Islamic revolution in Iran made Iraq a lot more important, and Iraq and Iran had all kinds of disputes over the shot Arab waterway and borders and different types of Islam and stuff like that anyway. There is no documentary evidence of it, but there’s like a lot of heavy duty innuendo and speculation and stories that in 1980, Carter’s people talked to Saddam Hussein and essentially green lit his attack on Iran. Remember, 1980, a brutal, long, bloody war between Iraq and Iran began. And the United States, which would in the 1990s call Saddam Hussein the new Hitler and talk about WMDs and all the horrible things he was going to do in the 19 in 1980 when Jimmy Carter was still president. Iraq, with heavy American support, invade Iran. And throughout that eight or nine years of war got like $40 billion of of aid from the United States. So this green light, the US green lit, the war is still kind of speculative, but it is clear that the Reagan program to support Baghdad did not emerge just out of nowhere. Right. So there’s that. And then Afghanistan, I think, is the big one where Carter’s Cold War talents really came out. Do you want to. Talk about that.

SP: [01:15:00] Yeah, just that, you know, Carter took a. Well, just to back up, I mean, and this is what we talk about in the episode of around 9/11 is that there was had been a Soviet intervention after a. A marxist government was established. And so and and there was internal dispute over that between the what we later would call the Mujahideen and the new Marxist government. So the Soviets actually staged an intervention. The right people on the right in the US would call it an invasion, but it was like an intervention supporting the government.

BB: [01:15:40] And so just let me say one thing. And when that happened in the pages of the New York Times, George Frost Cannon wrote an op ed saying, This is none of America’s business. This is part of the Soviet Union sphere. The government they overthrew is actually far more extreme and far more right wing than the government they put into power. And Kennan said, stay the hell out.

SP: [01:16:04] So. Right. And going against the ruling class in which he had been a part of and had supported for decades before that or. Decades for decades. And so what happens is that Carter takes a harder line there. Right. And so he he begins funding the Mujahideen, kind of like the way he began funding the Contras around Nicaragua. But then he also on the international stage of what I would call the public relations stage or how things are perceived. You know, Carter boycotts the 1980 Olympics, which were scheduled to happen in Moscow. He dramatically increased military spending in 1984, the 1980 1981 budget, which becomes another prologue for the for the for the Reagan administration of of increased military budgets. And then, like I said, they they began they support in a really strong way. Uh. The mujahedeen, which is the resistance against the Soviet intervention and the Marxist government in Kabul, and one of the sort of main groups of people they begin to to recruit for this are the hard line Islamic fundamentalists, which Reagan continues. This probably puts even more money into. It leads to the rise of al Qaeda, for example, which are foreign foreign fighters who are from other parts of the Middle East, who come most notably Osama bin Laden. And then the only the only other thing I’ll say is that Brzezinski actually went to the Pakistan Afghan border. This is his national security advisor and told the mujahideen fighters that God is on their side and that.

BB: [01:17:54] We should have cued that up. And although we played it in the 911 and we’ll put that into. Yeah, that’s an amazing video.

SP: [01:18:02] Oh.

BB: [01:18:04] Go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead.

SP: [01:18:05] The only other thing I’ll say is that this is what led to both the creation of al Qaeda and the Taliban.

BB: [01:18:09] Which are so our.

SP: [01:18:11] Mortal enemies of the US.

BB: [01:18:13] That’s that’s like the United States supported Saddam Hussein. Well, it created the Contras. Carter supported Saddam Hussein in 1980 and then later turned on him. Right. And then helped create. And Carter, this is Jimmy Carter helped create al Qaeda and Taliban. The the Brzezinski video is really striking. He lands in a helicopter. He’s on the near the, I think, Kashmir. Right. And then he he’s talking to these fundamentalist Muslims. And he said that that’s your country. Those are your mosques. You will return there because God is on your side. So when the United States says fundamentalist Islam is our enemy and it’s a clash of civilizations, and speaking of clash of civilizations, another person who’s really important in the Trilateral Commission was Sam Huntington. And if you don’t know who Sam Huntington is, you should. He was one of the hardcore like people like Kissinger and Brzezinski, you know, became political appointees. And they held positions Huntington didn’t. But they all came out of academia, academics, Right. Harvard, especially Huntington was called Mad Dog Sam. He’s the guy who believed that you should, like, go in and just destroy urban areas in Vietnam to get rid of the Vietcong. So it’s he’s a bad guy, too, so.

SP: [01:19:24] Harvard professor.

BB: [01:19:25] Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, this idea that it’s a class of civilizations or that Muslims are the enemies, it’s insane, because that’s who the United States was funding in, in, in. That’s what Jimmy Carter was funding against, you know, And now he is a big supporter of Palestinian rights and so on. But, you know, the overall point, I think, is is well made. Now, I think you wanted to also finish by talking a little bit about the Marriott. Was it married the Marriott ethos in Cuba or.

SP: [01:19:54] The last thing I’ll say and this is sort of bridges, bridges, domestic and foreign policy is that in Cuba in 1980, there was a an insurrection around a lot of Cubans who wanted to flee Cuba for whatever reasons they had. They’re related to people who had already fled Cuba. You know, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of politics and a lot of propaganda around Cuba and Castro and being, you know, under an under a socialist government. And so this insurrection starts and it leads to this sort of like noted episode called the Mary Alito Boatlift, where tens of thousands of Cubans were. Castro opened up the gates and said, if you don’t want to be here, you don’t have to stay.

BB: [01:20:41] He kind of called their bluff.

SP: [01:20:43] Yeah, Yeah. Hundreds, hundreds of hundreds of boats left South Florida in a very unsanctioned sort of way by the US government and began bringing in Cubans, Cubans back by the many, many full boats. And there were boats that were not really shouldn’t have made that trip. And some sank and people died and things like that. Castro also, it’s noted he he also opened up the prisons and sent people who had been in prison. He sent political dissidents. He opened up the mental institutions and just kind of like let all those folks to go in. And the Carter administration, where we’ve talked about most of these episodes, have been, you know, intentional, intentional policy to try and undermine Marxist governments, etc.. Carter wasn’t actually didn’t do that as effectively against Castro. And Castro actually played the game a little better than he did. And so the Mia Alito boatlift, which was like one of many exodus of Cubans fleeing, fleeing the socialists in Castro, mostly because they were his political enemies. It also creates this state of disarray in Florida, but also other parts of the US. And it’s one of the it was another undermining factor, much like Iran, another undermining factor for the Carter administration in 1980.

BB: [01:22:02] And helped give rise to Miami Vice and Scarface.

SP: [01:22:06] And one one thing that people don’t know is they actually put them, many of them, in refugee camps and even like jails and detention centers throughout the US, particularly in the south. And they had actually put one in Arkansas. And the the Cuban refugees actually staged a riot, which undermined the first term of an Arkansas governor that we know as lovingly as Bill Clinton these days. And he actually lost reelection that year because of the Mary Alito boatlift in the Carter policy.

BB: [01:22:37] Clinton lost. Yeah. No, he ran for Congress, too, and lost. Yeah.

SP: [01:22:41] Yeah. And then Clinton, he stages a comeback and that’s where he becomes the comeback kid.

BB: [01:22:45] But yeah. Well, again, the point isn’t to just say Jimmy Carter is a horrible, evil war criminal, although he as president was a horrible, evil war criminal. I mean, I think what what’s striking is we tend to focus on individuals. And the idea here is Carter is is a decent human, as decent a human as the ruling class will ever produce. Probably. So. That’s not how you become president. That’s how he become a governor. That’s not how the Trilateral Commission notices you. And I think it’s, again, going back to this idea of important the importance of understanding structures, of the way the ruling class operates and and how no matter what your intentions are, you kind of fit into this framework. So like today when lefties, you know, are bashing Biden, I mean, I’m not saying they should. And my point is that Joe Biden is Joe Biden. He he’s been who he is for 40 years. And so, you know, being angry at him for being Joe Biden, I’m not sure. You know, I mean, that’s who he is. You know, today I saw one of the leftists and going off about how horrible his foreign policy is. And it’s just like Trump’s. And I’m like, what? What did you what were you expecting? You know, it’s like when people get mad because he wouldn’t say defund the police. I was like, you think he’s going to come out and say, burn, baby, burn. I mean, this is this is who these people are.

BB: [01:24:15] You know, the fact that Bernie Sanders was considered too far out there, I should tell you a lot, because Bernie Sanders is essentially a Carter, mondale, Dukakis, Gephardt, liberal. There’s not much difference in that other than national health care. Right. And Teddy Kennedy actually had a national health care plan. So, Carter, you know, that’s I think that’s important to understand as as decent and good a human being as Jimmy Carter is and probably was didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all once you get into that. System of government, that system of power, once you become part of that ruling class now, and that’s why we’ve been talking about it so much. The ruling class can be reformist or ruling class can be progressive. The ruling class is in a moment right now where it’s understanding how badly neoliberalism. And then in the last four years, Trump has destabilized this system and they are now acting as as a counterbalance to that. On the Georgia voting laws and all the stuff we’ve been talking about for over a year that the media and the left media has suddenly discovered in the last three weeks. We’ve been talking about it for for forever since we started. So I think it’s a lesson worth knowing. And Carter Carter, it’s it validates the correct history, which is important. You have to know your history. But it also I think it says a lot about just kind of the nature of of American political society.

SP: [01:25:38] Yeah.

BB: [01:25:39] So.

SP: [01:25:41] Folks, you have been listening to Bob and Scott go on about Jimmy Carter and many other things. You have been listening to the Green and Red podcast. We love talking about the stuff. We particularly love our history episodes, which is why this one’s probably been almost 90 minutes. But it’s an important period that to be considered, particularly as we’re going forward in into the Roaring Twenties here. But we will be back with a new episode really soon, even after this one. We have many we have many great episodes lined up. And so if you want to support that and you want to make sure that we continue to have great episodes, even with some of the most notable left thinkers in history or in recent history, please go to our Patreon page and become a patron patron backslash Green Red podcast or make a one time donation at Green and Red podcast dot org and hit that support button and then follow us on all of our social media channels. All of the channels, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, You will see this video on YouTube. And if you’re watching it on YouTube, hit subscribe just to help us out. And then we have a medium page, which we haven’t actually put anything new on in a while, but I’m sure that we’ll be putting up some new content before too long. And just want to thank everybody out there for listening to us and supporting us. And I hope you all have a good day. Stay safe. Go raise a lot of hell. See you in the streets.

Posted in Foreign Policy, History, Imperialism, Liberals, Military, Uncategorized, Vietnam, War | Leave a comment

Syllabus, History 1302

Posted on January 12, 2023 by buzzanco

Spring 2024

History 1302

SR 117

Prof. Buzzanco

This class will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, either from 2:30-3:45 or 4:00-5:15. 

The 2:30 class is History 1302-55, section 23304/ and the 4:00 class is History 1302-56, section 23305.

Attending class is the most important thing you can do if you want to do well in this class.  If you attend class and do all the readings, you should do well.  We will also make extra credit available from time to time, and it will be based on the readings in the Texts and Interpretations books (below).

Most questions can be answered by referring to the syllabus or to Blackboard.  If not, contact your TA or contact me.  But please check the syllabus or  Blackboard first.

I’ve also set up a Facebook page for the class where I can also put up information re the class itself or the materials we’re covering, which you can join–it’s voluntary, not required– at https://www.facebook.com/groups/953860084692994    

Required Books
America: From 1865 to COVID-19 is a package from Nunn-McGinty publishers which
consists of 4 books. You need only purchase the package–all 4 books are included in it.


Many/most of you may be enrolled in the Cougar Textbook Access Program, which will provide
(CTAP) the required class materials to you. If you have questions about CTAP, contact the CTAP FAQ
page or email us at, ctapuh@central.uh.edu


If you’re not part of the CTAP program, you can purchase the book package at the bookstore or online
at https://www.nunnmcginty.com/ If you have an issues or questions about downloading or
otherwise getting access to the books, contact documents@nunnmcginty.com
The book package has 4 books included in it.

  1. From Reconstruction to Rebellion (listed as “RR” below)
  2. Readings in U.S. History (Listed as “Readings” below)
  3. Documents in U.S. History (Listed as “Documents” below)
  4. Supplemental 1378 Readings, Fall 2022 (Listed as “Supplemental” below).

Teaching Assistants

Section  1302-55:

Dmitrii Blyshko (dblyshko@cougarnet.uh.edu)

Maya Bouchebl (mwbouche@cougarnet.uh.edu)

Alex Sauceda (asauced7@cougarnet.uh.edu)

Section 1302-56:

Seth Uzman (ssuzman@cougarnet.uh.edu)

Grading:
Your grade in this course will be based on your scores on three exams [which may include
essays and IDs], two during the semester, at dates announced on Blackboard, worth 100
points each, and a final exam, worth 150 points. The tests will be given in class during the regular class times and we will provide blue books. There will also be extra credit questions
available based on the readers. Practice questions will be given out before the tests and
review sessions with TAs can be scheduled online.

In-class makeup policy: We do not want to get flooded with requests for makeups. Do
everything in your power to be here on test dates. If you miss an exam due to verifiable
emergency conditions, with proper documentation, there will be makeup tests given on a
case-by-case basis, at the discretion of the professor/TAs. On the day of your scheduled
make-up, you will be required to make up all missing tests. The only excuses for missing
that day will also be medical or other emergencies [not travel plans], for which you must
provide written documentation. If you miss the makeup test, you will receive zeroes for
those tests. Additionally, it is your responsibility to notify your TA that you have missed an
exam and to schedule a make-up as soon as possible.

Make sure you attend class regularly and keep up with the assigned readings. If at any time
you are unsure of the material we are covering, please ask the T.A. or me.
For information on Incompletes or other UH policies and requirements, consult the UH
Student Handbook.

Questioning a grade: If you have questions or other issues with the grade you received on a
test, this is the procedure to follow.

First, the TAs will not discuss your tests right after we turn them back to you (other than to
correct a math error in the grading). Please look at your exam and wait a day before
contacting your TA. Make an appointment with him/her and come to that meeting with
specific questions and concerns and be prepared to specifically explain why you deserved a
higher grade (do not simply say “I studied and thought I should have done better”). If the
TA and you do not reach an agreement, the TA will re-grade the entire test and the score
be increased, decreased, or stay the same.

If at that point you still are not satisfied, make an appointment with me and bring your
specific concerns and questions and I will go over the exam and, as above, possibly re-grade
it and give a new score accordingly. At all times be respectful and courteous toward the
TAs , and the same is expected of their interactions with you. At the end of the semester,
please do not send me an email asking for your grade to be raised because you need extra
points to maintain your GPA or to graduate or for other such reasons. Again, any
questioning of your grade must include specific questions or comments regarding the
specific questions on the test
*************************

UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON SYLLABUS LANGUAGE: SPRING 2023

Required Language for All Courses

COVID-19 Information
Students are encouraged to visit the University’s COVID-19 website for important information including diagnosis and symptom protocols, testing, vaccine information, and post-exposure guidance. Please check the website throughout the semester for updates. Consult the (select: Undergraduate Excused Absence Policy or Graduate Excused Absence Policy) for information regarding excused absences due to medical reasons. 

Reasonable Academic Adjustments/Auxiliary Aids
The University of Houston complies with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, pertaining to the provision of reasonable academic adjustments/auxiliary aids for disabled students. In accordance with Section 504 and ADA guidelines, UH strives to provide reasonable academic adjustments/auxiliary aids to students who request and require them. If you believe that you have a disability requiring an academic adjustments/auxiliary aid, please contact the Justin Dart Jr. Student Accessibility Center (formerly the Justin Dart, Jr. Center for Students with DisABILITIES).

Excused Absence Policy
Regular class attendance, participation, and engagement in coursework are important contributors to student success. Absences may be excused as provided in the University of Houston Undergraduate Excused Absence Policy and Graduate Excused Absence Policy for reasons including: medical illness of student or close relative, death of a close family member, legal or government proceeding that a student is obligated to attend, recognized professional and educational activities where the student is presenting, and University-sponsored activity or athletic competition. Under these policies, students with excused absences will be provided with an opportunity to make up any quiz, exam or other work that contributes to the course grade or a satisfactory alternative. Please read the full policy for details regarding reasons for excused absences, the approval process, and extended absences. Additional policies address absences related to military service, religious holy days, pregnancy and related conditions, and disability.

Recording of Class
Students may not record all or part of class, livestream all or part of class, or make/distribute screen captures, without advanced written consent of the instructor. If you have or think you may have a disability such that you need to record class-related activities, please contact the Justin Dart, Jr. Student Accessibility Center. If you have an accommodation to record class-related activities, those recordings may not be shared with any other student, whether in this course or not, or with any other person or on any other platform. Classes may be recorded by the instructor. Students may use instructor’s recordings for their own studying and notetaking. Instructor’s recordings are not authorized to be shared with anyone without the prior written approval of the instructor. Failure to comply with requirements regarding recordings will result in a disciplinary referral to the Dean of Students Office and may result in disciplinary action.

Recommended Language

Resources for Online Learning
The University of Houston is committed to student success, and provides information to optimize the online learning experience through our Power-On website. Please visit this website for a comprehensive set of resources, tools, and tips including: obtaining access to the internet, AccessUH, Blackboard, and Canvas; using your smartphone as a webcam; and downloading Microsoft Office 365 at no cost. For questions or assistance contact UHOnline@uh.edu.

UH Email
Please check and use your Cougarnet email for communications related to this course. To access this email, login to your Microsoft 365 account with your Cougarnet credentials.  

Webcams
Access to a webcam is required for students participating remotely in this course. Webcams must be turned on (state when webcams are required to be on and the academic basis for requiring them to be on). (Example: Webcams must be turned on during exams to ensure the academic integrity of exam administration.) 

Academic Honesty Policy
High ethical standards are critical to the integrity of any institution, and bear directly on the ultimate value of conferred degrees. All UH community members are expected to contribute to an atmosphere of the highest possible ethical standards. Maintaining such an atmosphere requires that any instances of academic dishonesty be recognized and addressed. The UH Academic Honesty Policy is designed to handle those instances with fairness to all parties involved: the students, the instructors, and the University itself. All students and faculty of the University of Houston are responsible for being familiar with this policy.

Title IX/Sexual Misconduct

Per the UHS Sexual Misconduct Policy, your instructor is a “responsible employee” for reporting purposes under Title IX regulations and state law and must report incidents of sexual misconduct (sexual harassment, non-consensual sexual contact, sexual assault, sexual exploitation, sexual intimidation, intimate partner violence, or stalking) about which they become aware to the Title IX office. Please know there are places on campus where you can make a report in confidence. You can find more information about resources on the Title IX website at https://uh.edu/equal-opportunity/title-ix-sexual-misconduct/resources/.

Security Escorts and Cougar Ride

UHPD continually works with the University community to make the campus a safe place to learn, work, and live. Our Security escort service is designed for the community members who have safety concerns and would like to have a Security Officer walk with them, for their safety, as they make their way across campus. Based on availability either a UHPD Security Officer or Police Officer will escort students, faculty, and staff to locations beginning and ending on campus. If you feel that you need a Security Officer to walk with you for your safety please call 713-743-3333. Arrangements may be made for special needs.

Parking and Transportation Services also offers a late-night, on-demand shuttle service called Cougar Ride that provides rides to and from all on-campus shuttle stops, as well as the MD Anderson Library, Cougar Village/Moody Towers and the UH Technology Bridge.  Rides can be requested through the UH Go app.  Days and hours of operation can be found at https://uh.edu/af-university-services/parking/cougar-ride/.

Syllabus Changes
Please note that the instructor may need to make modifications to the course syllabus. Notice of such changes will be announced as quickly as possible through (specify how students will be notified of changes).

Helpful Information

Coogs Care: https://uh.edu/dsa/coogscare/

Student Health Center:  https://www.uh.edu/healthcenter/  

******************

Topics and Reading Assignments


(Extra Credit opportunities will be posted on Blackboard throughout the semester)
The books will be listed as RR, Documents, Readings, and Supplemental


Week 1
Background: Reconstruction, Capitalism, Labor Wars, Empire
RR, chapter 1
Documents, chapter 1
Suggested: Interview with Richard Wolff on the economy,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o778RuarDo
*******************
Week 2
Imperialism, Markets, the Great War
RR, chapter 2
Documents, chapter 2
Readings, chapter 1
Supplemental, “Donald Trump’s American History, and the Politics of Race”
******************
Week 3
The Aftermath of War Abroad and at Home
RR, chapter 2
Documents, chapter 3
Supplemental, “Huddled Masses, Keep Out!”
*************
Week 4
The 1920s
RR, chapter 3
***************
Week 5
FDR and the New Deal
RR, chapter 4
***************
Week 6
The Onset of War
RR, chapter 5
Readings, chapter 3
***************
Week 7
War, the Bomb, and Cold War
RR, chapter 6
Readings, chapter 4
Podcast on Atomic Bomb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tdLz16ljiM&t=1013s
***************
Week 8
The War at Home: Domestic Containment (Conformity and Counterculture)
RR, chapter 7
Documents, chapter 4
***************
Week 9
Taking the Third World, Origins of Vietnam
Documents, chapter 5
***************
Week 10
The Modern Civil Rights Era
RR, chapter 8
Documents, chapter 7
Readings, chapter 5
Supplemental, “The Sit-Ins and Militant Non-Violence”
***************
Week 11
Questioning Authority: The 1960s
Documents, chapter 6
Readings, chapter 6
Supplemental, “MLK for Sale: How to Package a Radical”
***************

Week 12

 Backlash and the Rise of the Conservative

RR, chapter 10Readings, chapter 7

Supplemental, “Jimmy Carter is a Saint Now, Was a War Criminal Then”

 ***************

Week 13

 Globalization and Militarism from Reagan to Clinton 

Readings, chapter 8

 ***************

Week 14

Economic Crash and Background to 9/11

 RR, chapter 11

Documents, chapter 8

Readings, chapter 9

***************

Week 15

The U.S., Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East

 RR, Conclusion

Supplemental, “Does Russia Matter”; “Blame China, Not Capitalism”; “Cracks in the Empire”; “Is Trump a Fascist, Will There Be a Coup?”; “Impeachment: The Democrats Botch it Again”; “The Limits of Power and Donald J. Trump”

 *************

Final Exam

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Green & Red Podcast, the Best of 2022

Posted on December 30, 2022 by buzzanco

Green & Red Podcast just finished its third calendar year of episodes and we’re over 200 now, something we only dreamed about when we started . . . so thanks to all of you.

Scott and I always put out a list of our favorite episodes from the year, and here’s mine. This is always hard because we’ve had so many great guests and done so many great shows about history and politics, so we encourage you to check out our entire playlist, not just these. Having said that, here’s my list of some of my 2022 favorites

  1. The JFK Episodes–we had a lot of fun this year talking about the legacy of John F. Kennedy, and in particular the various theories behind his assassination and why the Left should not see him as a hero

Here they are:Noam Chomsky on “JFK Revisited”    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nd0cN7MVHk&t=1006s

Why Oliver Stone and “JFK Revisted” are Full of S**t     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI50H8Lh-mo&t=88s

The Buzzanco-DiEugenio Debate on JFK    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAgrAdx0wMg&t=1055s

2. The Ukraine Seminar–just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine we began doing backgrounders on the situation there and we’ve continued to cover the war with interviews and shows on the history of the conflict and the issues involved. Check out our Ukraine Seminar playlist, at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoT5Kdk4f-kJSMCpHQH_rQF3ugtKZPyaF

3. Karl Marx’s Birthday–we commemorated Marx’s birthday with a great discussion about Marx’s work and legacy with esteemed scholar David McNally, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRBla4v6c8M&t=71s

4. Pop Culture and Politics–we love doing shows on lefty pop culture and this year we had a few that were great, including

Bob Dylan’s Million-Dollar Birthday Bash w/ Michael Stewart Foley    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAN20fyXMxo&t=1727s

Leave the Gun, Take the Podcast: “The Godfather” at 50  and its Political Meaning    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6txqI7Zlqi0&t=2946s

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Cold War Culture in the Reagan Era w/ Prof. Andrew Hunt, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZg4iX6wU1k

5. The most recent show on my list, which we just did,

What’s Really Happening in Peru? Interview with Professor Carla Toche in Lima,   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFnOs9-d998&t=2865s

Bonus: Noam Chomsky on “Why the Democrats Suck” — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2NgmNo4o5E&t=177s

and our encore of a 2020 interview with Staughton Lynd, who died in November, Remembering Staughton Lynd, Encore of 2020 Interview    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll8sEfSqEn8&t=3826s

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Remembering Staughton Lynd (1929-2022)

Posted on November 20, 2022 by buzzanco

Transcript of interview with Staughton Lynd on Green & Red Podcast, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll8sEfSqEn8

staughton-lynd-interview-1Download

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Where’s the Resistance? Elections Won’t Save Us

Posted on July 6, 2022 by buzzanco

With the Supreme Court on a holy war to protect guns, fetuses, and big polluting corporations, among others, there’s a real and growing sense of panic among progressives, women, environmentalists and liberal and left-leaning Americans about the future. The Court has also agreed to put on the docket for next term a case about election law that would give the states virtually total power to conduct elections any way they want–meaning that GOP-led legislatures could give electoral votes to their candidate even if he/she lost the election in that state. It’s a scary time.

And what’s the response been? Nancy Pelosi was campaigning for anti-abortion and pro-gun Democrat Henry Cuellar in south Texas on the day the Dobbs decision came down. With her help and lots of DCCC money Cuellar squeaked past his pro-choice opponent. Joe Biden responded to the Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade by making an empty speech and then cutting a deal with Mitch McConnell to appoint, wait for it, an anti-abortion judge to a federal seat (a plan since scotched not because Biden listened to progressives but because of the opposition from Kentucky’s other Republican Senator, Rand Paul). Liberal groups, many of whom promised to be in the streets and shut down the country if abortions were outlawed, mostly complained on social media and used the decision to raise money.

It was nothing like the summer of 2020.

The 2020 uprisings forced the ruling class to take the protests seriously because upwards of 20 million people of all races, ages, etc. mostly spontaneously went to the streets aggressively and militantly. They didn’t rely on “vote Blue no matter who” or petitions or donations to the DNC. They created instability and the ruling class blinked, albeit temporarily, but it blinked. Before the Democrats and media were able to jump into the fray and coopt the messages coming from the streets, majorities of Americans saw the police as a malignant force, believed in defunding, and even supported, with 54 percent, burning a police precinct building in Minneapolis. Corporations rushed in and took symbolic action–BLM flags on their businesses–but also made certain that Trump wasn’t re-elected because the immense instability he had created, including property destruction in major cities from coast-to-coast, wasn’t good for the economy, see https://afflictthecomfortable.org/2021/01/31/the-limits-of-power-donald-j-trump/.

As it stands now, many corporations have taken a stand against the Supreme Court’s abortion decision and will pay for women to travel out of state if they want or need that procedure. They’re not radical allies but they understand how important women are to capitalist stability and how the court’s rulings are creating even more social division and disharmony. The GOP derides them as “woke capitalists” and that’s what they are, and there’s been “woke capitalism” since liberalism emerged. In the short term, anything the ruling class does to stave off the courts is fine, but it’s not a long-term strategy. Sadly, in the absence of a sentient Democratic Party or street resistance, these corporate and financial oligarchs represent the forces of progress right now. That’s not what you want . . .

Now we’re back into panic mode with people freaking out about “fascism” and stolen elections and the Supreme Court, reminiscent of the early bleatings of the WaPo-made celebrity Timothy Snyder or the preposterous Paul Street of the once-reputable Counterpunch. Things are very bad–that can’t be denied. But hysteria is never a good strategy. The response we’re getting, which has been prevalent since election day November 2016, is that you have to donate to the Democrats or liberal NGOs and of course you have to vote.

How’s that worked out so far? Clinton won, Obama won, Biden won–and abortion rights were never defended or protected. And if the GOP is planning on stealing elections from now on, then you’re not going use your vote to stop them. Social media freak-outs about how bad the GOP is or Trump’s putative “fascism” or McConnell’s evil might be a good way to vent, but they do less than zero to help organize and build a movement.

Liberals love to talk about the Civil Rights Movement and the 60s–the antiwar movement, draft resistance, women’s liberation, environmentalists, Stonewall…..

But back then, people went into the streets, blockaded traffic, sat-in at offices and businesses, conducted major boycotts, did civil disobedience, practiced militant resistance, confronted the forces of authority, targeted businesses associated with the adversary, every day, all the time. Unions, church groups, community activists, students, and so many others participated militantly in movements of all types. They made it clear that “business as usual” would have an escalating price. They became ungovernable.

Not a lot like that is happening today, which is why the summer uprisings of 2020 were so important. The Democrats won’t save us. MoveOn and ActBlue won’t save us. Social media anguish won’t save us. A unilateral focus on voting won’t save us (in fact, 1 million voters have shifted their registration from Democrat to Republican in the past year). Those old responses need to be put away and people need to organize, organize, organize.

It’s time to be as radical as reality itself.

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Donate to Green & Red Podcast, Get Books!

Posted on July 6, 2022 by buzzanco

We’ve gotten a lot more donors this year and we really appreciate it and we’d like to have a few more. We run on a shoestring budget but we do have to pay for some tech help and promotions.

I’ve edited books on various topics in U.S. history for my classes, and so now we’re offering those to our donors. The first 3 pictures include 7 books on U.S. history . . . if you donate $35, we’ll send you one. Donate $60 and you get 3. Donate $125 and you get all 7.

The last picture includes 3 books I’ve written or edited–Masters of War; Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life; Blackwell Companion to the Vietnam War. Since they’re in short supply, we’ll send you one for a $100 donation.

Help Green & Red continue to give you great guests–people you’re really not likely to hear elsewhere in media, even lefty media–and great radical politics and history.

If you want to donate and get a book, you can email us at greenredpodcast@gmail.com or DM us on Facebook.

You can donate to Green & Red at https://bit.ly/DonateGandR

You can also become a recurring donor at https://www.patreon.com/greenredpodcast

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