Those who think “Fake News” started with Trump and the media’s “slobbering love affair” with a U.S. president started with Obama should have seen John F. Kennedy’s term. Imagine Obama’s term with no Fox News, internet or talk radio. That’s about what JFK enjoyed. And tragically, the fairy tales Kennedy’s court scribes concocted about JFK’s Pattonesque handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis prevail in media/academic circles even today.
In fact, you’d never guess this from the “think pieces” from today’s “Best and Brightest” in the Fake News media, but that Khrushchev swept the floor with Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis was a mainstream conservative conclusion throughout much of the Cold War.
Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, for instance, represented opposite poles of the Republican establishment of their time.
“We locked Castro’s communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal,” growled Barry Goldwater about the JFK’s Missile Crisis “solution.”
“Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” complained Richard Nixon. “Then gave the Soviets squatters’ rights in our backyard.”
Generals Curtis Le May and Maxwell Taylor represented opposite poles of the military establishment.
“The biggest defeat in our nation’s history!” bellowed Air Force Chief Curtis Lemay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal.
“We missed the big boat,” complained Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning of same.
“We’ve been had!” yelled then Navy Chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK “solved” the missile crisis. Adm. Anderson was the man in charge of the very “blockade” against Cuba.
“It’s a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy,” wrote Alexander Haig. “The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy’s men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the America’s.”
William Buckley’s National Review devoted several issues to exposing and denouncing Kennedy’s appeasement. The magazine’s popular “The Third World War” column by James Burnham roundly condemned Kennedy’s Missile Crisis solution as “America’s Defeat.”
Even Democratic luminary Dean Acheson despaired: “This nation lacks leadership,” he grumbled about the famous “Ex-Comm meetings” so glorified in the…
