It’s giddiness time for liberals. The future is theirs, they think, and they are skipping toward it gleefully, but also mean-spiritedly, tossing out all kinds of insults at conservatives and the Bush administration, often gratuitously, with no semblance of thought or intellectual honesty.
A case in point is Richard Holbrooke, an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, who uses the excuse of a New York Times review of a book on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis to disparage President Bush and company while wholly missing a much more obvious and pertinent point about implications for today’s presidential contest.
The book, “One Minute to Midnight” by Michael Dobbs, explores how forces in both the Soviet Union and the United States pushed for military aggression that could conceivably have led to a nuclear exchange.
President John Kennedy himself had initially wanted to take out Soviet missiles discovered in Cuba with an air strike. But with a secret deal on removing U.S. missiles from Turkey and other maneuvers, he averted the worst — while still getting Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to dismantle the Cuban weapons.
Holbrooke is full of enthusiasm for Kennedy (“He rose to the occasion like no other president in the past 60 years”) while fretting about “what would have happened if the current administration faced such a crisis.” He figures it reasonable “to assume that the team that invaded Iraq would have attacked Cuba.”
Leave aside the fact of the Bush administration’s care in dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea, a nation that if pushed the wrong way could have killed millions of South Koreans, and focus instead onhow the Cuban missile crisis came our way.
By the calculations of a number of historians, it was at least partly the result of the ineptitude of the young, inexperienced Kennedy, who did not exactly rise to any great heights when he backed the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba or when he came across as a pushover in an ill-advised summit with Khrushchev.
The invasion of Cuba by exiles — paid for and supported by the United States — had been cooked up by the CIA during the Eisenhower administration, but it hardly follows that the prudent, war-knowledgeable President Dwight Eisenhower would ever have gone along with it. Kennedy did, and while the exercise proved a disaster for the exiles, it did scare the victorious Fidel Castro into seeking missiles from an acquiescing Soviet Union.
A second huge Kennedy error was the summit that some wiser heads warned him to avoid and that he himself came to regret, one scholar reminds us. Kennedy was made to seem incompetent by Khrushchev, who figured his “weak” international antagonist would not get in the way of building a Berlin Wall or placing missiles 90 miles off our shores.
Maybe it’s not true, as the statesman Dean Acheson once said, that Kennedy escaped a Soviet war through “dumb luck” instead of skill, but it’s almost certainly true that Kennedy helped bring this danger his country’s way. And it’s true, too, that Holbrooke is disingenuous in neglecting this widespread assessment.
Who, after all, is comparably inexperienced on today’s political scene? Who seemed weak when going further than needed on the question of U.S. nuclear retaliation, and who tried to look tough with an irresponsible speech about attacking terrorists in Pakistan against our ally’s wishes if necessary? Who has said that as president he would have meetings with any enemy who wanted one?
Surely Holbrooke, no matter how giddy, has heard about Barack Obama.
