Page 22 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • November 20, 2013 The hero under the fading whitewash At one great moment in history, John F. Kennedy may have saved the world from a nuclear catastrophe. Unknown to the American public, a U.S. pilot named Rudolph Anderson had been shot down and killed over Cuba by Soviet hot-heads. Some of Kennedy’s advisers - - the same sort of people who bombed Germany and Japan into rubble when the issue was no longer in doubt and killed thousands of French and Korean civilians -- urged a massive air strike on Cuba. Kennedy, an independent thinker who used his advisers as advisers and not as mentors, decided to keep talking. He brokered a deal with the Soviets that got the Soviet missiles out of Cuba and caused them to lose some face. (He quietly took our own missiles out of Turkey, but nobody knew about it while he was alive.) The alternative Kennedy wisely rejected -- a bomb- ing that could easily have gone nuclear -- would not have destroyed America, just the major American cities at a cost of tens of millions of American. Check out some photo- graphs of what Germany and Japan looked like in 1946 to imagine what it would have looked like. European Russia and urban China, however, would also have been totaled and the nuclear fallout would have contaminated the entire Eurasian continent. Russian joke: “When the sirens sound, go to the subway and take your bed sheets. There is sure to be a shortage of shrouds.” Kennedy may have saved world civilization. He deserves a hero’s honor for that. The rest of his career consisted of bold bungles long covered by a coat of whitewash thick enough to plaster the fossilized bones of a tyrannosaurus rex. We need to remember that. The four-hour broadcast of “JFK” chips off some large bits of the whitewash and leaves others in place. Advance warning: Evan Thomas is one of the writers brought in as a talking head, and since we worked at the same newspa- per 40 years ago and his books sell a lot better than mine, my dark blue eyes may occasionally flash green with envy. Having read his books while glowering and sulking, I grudgingly admit that Evan never deliberately distorts facts. He just makes more money than I do, and that, of course, is unforgivable. Now let us chip some whitewash. Joe Kennedy comes off as ambitious, but his ambition is somewhat normalized by PBS. He is shown as being anti-interventionist when some people argue that he was anti-British. Franklin Delano Roosevelt took him off the case as ambassador to the United Kingdom because he objected to FDR’s moves to get the U.S. into the war. It was worse than that according to Sey- mour Hersch, who reports that when anti-Nazi Germans asked for American political support to overthrow Hitler, Joe Kennedy betrayed the German anti-Nazi group to their own government. This would have been a death sentence, except that Joe Kennedy reported them to the Abwehr (military intelligence), which was also involved in plotting against Hitler. The anti-Nazi Germans were spared for four more years until they tried to kill Hitler and were hanged. Did Joe cost us a chance to get rid of Hitler without getting into another war? That should have been mentioned. The show tells us that John Kennedy’s first willful col- lege choice was Princeton, but his father insisted on Har- vard. JFK actually started Princeton, but could not cut the academics. My daughter, an honors graduate of Princeton, says everybody there knows the real story. JFK’s father then wangled his son’s way into Harvard. FDR also attended Harvard. According to Thomas Fleming, FDR thought our real enemies were the Prussian militarists -- the same people who wanted to bump off Hitler, and the same men Hitler later hanged after they tried to kill him. PBS skipped that one. JFK, under his father’s wing, wrote a book called “Why England Slept,” which praised Neville Chamberlain for buying time by knuckling under to Hitler at Munich. Bogus! In 1938, the Germans would have gotten a very bloody nose had they attacked the Czech border fortresses if Britain and France rallied to attack Germany in the West. Instead, the best “German” tanks used to invade France two years later were Czech-made, while the German-made tanks could not stand up to the much better French tanks. Militarily, the Germans should have lost the Battle of France. They won because the Hitler-Stalin Pact turned the French Left against their own government and because the French ultra-Right was anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi. Blather about mighty German tanks is a useless cliché. The best World War II tanks were Russian, then French. The Anglo- Saxons, the Italians, and the Japanese were in a four-way tie for worst place. The heroic personal aspects of JFK are amply and accurately covered. He was a sickly boy who made him- self worse by taking all sorts of medications that further undermined his health, but he had tremendous courage in the face of pain and the prospect of an early death. While more people than we care to remember lied to get out of World War II, JFK lied to get into the Navy and then passed up a safe stateside job in military intelligence to seek out combat. PT-109 got some mild paint chipping. PBS shows PT- 109 in combat. Kennedy’s actual combat before that awful night when the boat was rammed was almost nil. The narra- tor, however, questioned Kennedy’s seamanship in getting a small 70-knot PT boat rammed by a big 40-knot Japanese destroyer, but appropriately honored his courage and initia- tive in saving most of his crew with an arduous three-mile swim. A fair assessment would be that Kennedy was a bun- gler before the ramming of PT-109, but a hero afterward. He got two medals for clumsily losing a boat and two men, but saving 10 others. This may have started a pattern ful- filled during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Kennedy’s political career was marked by the same courage. He had to climb stairs by putting first one foot, then another, on the same step, while his back hurt terribly, but he shook hands from dawn to dusk running for Con- gress. He collapsed in the street at the Bunker Hill Parade, but was on his feet the day after and won the Democratic primary, then easily carried the Congressional election. He Varsity victory was 29. PBS left out the part about the Kennedy family’s intense admiration for Senator Joseph McCarthy, the accused witch hunter of communists in the U.S. government. Bobby Ken- nedy was one of McCarthy’s top legal advisors. Many, if not most of the people McCarthy accused, were actually guilty. JFK was absent from McCarthy’s censure hearing, as Lyndon Johnson pointed out. This was no accident, nor was it sheer laziness. By this time, JFK had been diagnosed with Addison’s disease, an adrenal failure associated with low energy and early death, but when his jealous rival for the White House, Johnson, had this reported, the documentary hon- estly reports that the Kennedy family lied about it, and the American people fell for it. Joe Kennedy, meanwhile, brought in Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. -- one of FDR’s sons -- to proclaim that he and JFK were both five-year service veterans during World War II while Hubert Humphrey was, at least by implication, a World War II draft dodger. Things like that mattered in the 1950s. Humphrey, who had a fine record on labor rights and civil rights, lost out. The PBS show mentions that Chicago and West Virginia were close in the election and that Kennedy won by one- quarter of one percent. In fact, Joe Kennedy put the fix in with the Chicago Mob and West Virginia crooks and that is probably why Jack got elected. This has been reported many times and confirmed. Nixon might have won on a recount in 1960, but passed up the chance. The show honestly reports that JFK was not much inter- ested in civil rights except as the violent mistreatment of African Americans played into the hands of Soviet pro- pagandists, PBS implies that the credit he received for the Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps overstated: Khrushchev had already turned back the Soviet blockade-buster ships when JFK reached out to make a deal. The fact that JFK instinctively declined to invade Cuba when the Russians had 43,000 soldiers and tactical nuclear weapons there is clearly to his credit. That shining moment cannot be taken from him, nor can his enormous physical courage in push- ing his sickly body through what must have been absolute torture. His last year as president saw progress in civil rights and a sanctioned coup in Vietnam that led to a war where 58,000 Americans later died and Johnson and Nixon -- who actually brought the civil rights legislation onto the books -- got to take the all the blame for Vietnam and little or none of the credit for ending segregation. The American Experience “JFK” is a whole lot more accurate and responsible than the Oliver Stone feature film of the same name, where Kennedy is murdered with the complicity of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, corporate war con- tracts, Cuba exiles, and a segment of the gay community. The American Experience, in fact, simply shows Jack and Jackie taking a second honeymoon in Dallas followed by the news of his death, and the assessment that he might have been a great president had he not been murdered. Tune in next week to find out who probably killed him. Northern Highlands varsity field hockey team won their second state level game against Wayne Valley 2-0. The two goals were scored by senior captain Lauren O’Keefe (1) and junior Caroline Quinn (16). Northern Highlands record is now 20-1. (Photo courtesy of Joanie Troast.)