JFK - myth and reality

Beyond the speculation about who killed John F. Kennedy and the reasons behind his assassination 50 years ago today in Dallas, myths have endured about his supposedly liberal, even left-wing, views and policies. Oliver Stone’s film even suggests that’s why he was shot.

While the real truth behind the assassination remains elusive after a half a century – few accept that a lone gunman in the shape of Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible – it is possible to separate fact from fiction when it comes to Kennedy’s political life.

He was a conservative in social policy, a fervent anti-communist and a defender of America’s imperial power. In his early years in politics, Kennedy had a working relationship with the notorious Joseph McCarthy, whose witch-hunts divided America.

Kennedy had only been in power a few months when he authorised the previous administration’s plans for an invasion of Cuba in April 1961. The infamous Bay of Pigs operation was intended to overthrow Fidel Castro and reverse the Cuban revolution. As we know, it ended in fiasco and defeat. This did not deter Kennedy from other foreign adventures to stop “the spread of communism”.

Kennedy was the first president to send soldiers to Vietnam, 16,732 of them, supposedly as mere “advisers,” but many of them actually combatants. He was continuing a colonial war during which the French had been defeated. Kennedy had told the New York Times after the failure at the Bay of Pigs and the erection of the Berlin Wall: “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.”  

Throughout 1963, the war in Vietnam was intensified to the point where Kennedy himself decided that South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem needed to be removed  because he was seen as an impediment to winning the war. Kennedy authorised the coup that resulted in Diem's overthrow and assassination on November 1, 1963.

There have been attempts to distance Kennedy from the decision to remove Diem. But analysis of documents released by the National Security Archive in 2009 together with audiotapes, confirms that the decision to go for a coup involved the president and was not taken behind his back by officials and the CIA.

After Kennedy’s death, the war in Vietnam was stepped up to the point where 500,000 US soldiers were involved. Over 500,000 Vietnamese were killed, along with nearly 60,000 American soldiers. The United States pulled out in 1975 after defeat on the battlefield and the country was unified after North Vietnamese forces entered Saigon.

On domestic policy, Kennedy was a social conservative and lukewarm supporter of the civil rights movement. For example, he tried unsuccessfully to talk Martin Luther King out of his march on Washington in August 1963, which ended with a multi-racial rally of 250,000 demanding economic justice.

King held the crowd spellbound with his inspiring, momentous “I have a dream” speech about how “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’”.

He rebuked the country’s leaders for breaking the promises contained in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, to guarantee the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “Instead of honouring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad cheque, a cheque which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"
 

King was also gunned down, killed in Memphis where he was supporting a strike of low-paid municipal workers, in April 2008. Historically speaking, his loss to the American people has proved greater than that of a president who for all his charisma was a man who upheld the status quo.          

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Obama's 'tiger' comes to Washington

The veteran US civil rights campaigner Jesse Jackson has given voice to the deep contradictions that lay behind this extraordinary moment in politics on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the country’s first African-American president when he declared: “On Tuesday, it will be high noon in our politics, yet it is midnight in our economy.”

Today is Martin Luther King day in America, celebrating the birthday of the black leader who was assassinated in 1968. At that point, King was aiming to unite black and white workers to challenge capitalist interests and had an acute understanding of the class divisions in America.

Jackson says that the greatest challenges to the incoming president are “a financial system choking on its own excesses. Healthcare is broken. There is unaddressed and catastrophic climate change. Gilded age inequality and rising poverty abound”.
Even as vast amounts are being spent on the inauguration, poor Americans like the 2,102 citizens of Moun Bayou in the Mississippi delta, cannot even afford 25 cents to buy a school uniform for their children in thrift shops. Moun Bayou was the first town in the country to be run by black people.

Jackson and Obama are only too aware of the hopes the new president carries and the shoulders of people like King he stands on. Obama pointedly referred to King yesterday Obama as he spoke from the spot where King delivered his “I had a dream” speech. Despite the unprecedented economic and financial crisis, an amazing 79% of Americans are currently optimistic about the incoming adminstration. And if inspiration and talent could resolve America’s problems, there’d be no problem about the future. Many of the country’s best-known and loved musicians, actors, artists and poets are contributing to to create an amazing atmosphere. Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow, Jay-Z, Alicia Keys, Bono, Mariah Carey, Wynton Marsalis and Beyoncé plus noted poets and performers are raising the political temperature.

The New Jersey singer Springsteen, for example, is amongst the politically articulate, noted for his anti-war lyrics and lyrical elegies to America’s rustbelts. He has been one of Obama’s strongest supporters, playing at five election rallies in 2008, saying: “We had a historically blind administration [Bush] who didn't take consideration of the past; thousands and thousands of people died, lives were ruined and terrible, terrible things occurred because, there was no sense of history.”

He summed up the historic meaning of the inauguration and the dramatic change symbolised by Obama’s election: “You proceed under the assumption that you can have some limited impact in the marketplace of ideas about the kind of place you live in, its values and the things that make it special to you. But you don't see it. And then something happens that you didn't think you might see in your lifetime, which is that that country actually shows its face one night, on election night.”

Obama is seeking keep up the momentum from his supporters. Speaking at the pre-inaugural concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial yesterday, he said the election proved that there is “no obstacle that can stand in the way of millions of voices asking for change”.

In steering a populist course Obama will be up against deeply entrenched interests. In a “permanent campaign”, he will seek to keep his 13 million supporters involved by email and social-networking techniques as a counter-weight to the vast power of the military-industrial complex associated with Bush and previous presidents.

As we said before, Obama is riding a tiger. There is no way that the proposed trillion dollar pay-out to the banks and big business will resolve the problems of the US economy, which are rooted in the contradictions of the capitalist system itself and are insoluble in the conventional sense.

As in the UK, the next generation of workers and youth will be made to pay for the financial ruin incurred by bankers and big business. The alternative is for the mass movement that swept Obama to the presidency to be taken forward to re-found the US, and with it the world economy, by carrying through a new American revolution to add to the one referred to by the president-elect yesterday. A World to Win’s campaign to acknowledge the crisis not just of capitalism but of bourgeois democracy itself can take strength from events in the US without falling prey to Obamamania.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Martin Luther King's unfinished business

Martin Luther King, who was assassinated 40 years ago today in Memphis, where he was supporting a strike of low-paid municipal workers, is more often than not characterised as leader of the civil rights movement in the United States and man driven solely by religion. But King was much, much more than that and by the end of his life was advocating change of a revolutionary character, challenging the power of American capitalism.

In August 1963, under Kennedy’s presidency, King led a multi-racial rally of 250,000 in Washington demanding economic justice. It was the largest gathering in the capital’s history, and where King held the crowd spellbound with his inspiring, momentous “I have a dream” speech about how “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’”.

King rebuked the country’s leaders for breaking the promises contained in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, to guarantee the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “Instead of honouring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad cheque, a cheque which has come back marked 'insufficient funds,'" he said. Moreover, in a distinct rebuff to America’s black separatist movement, King urged unity, declaring: “Many of our white brothers as evidenced by their presence here today have come to realise that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and they have come to realise that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We can not walk alone."

From 1965, King started to attack America’s war in Vietnam. Exactly a year before his death, he delivered “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”. He insisted that the US was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and denounced the government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. King also said that people around the world would look with indignation and see “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries”.

In private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In a speech in front of his staff in November 1966, King told them: “You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry… Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

In 1968, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organised the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. He criss-crossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington — engaging in non-violent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection". King cited systematic flaws of racism, poverty, militarism and materialism, and that "reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced".

His family have never supported the official version of the assassination, which has James Earl Ray as the lone gunman. Ray was an escaped convict who later retracted his confession. He had neither the motive, money or mobility to have killed King by himself. Jesse Jackson, who was with King on April 4, 1968, says: “Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray.”

A report published today by the Service Employees International Union explores the economic implications of King’s movement and message. "Beyond the Mountaintop: King’s Prescription for Poverty", concludes that 40 years after King spoke of a promised land of social and economic justice, “we seem to be paralysed outside the gates of the city”.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor