A New Series on How Revisionists on Both Sides of the Aisle Have Been Attempting to Rewrite History to Fit Their Political Agendas: Introduction and Part 1

 

Introduction

As I've mention in some of my articles on the subject I'm the son and grandson of relatively well-known historians. Perhaps for that reason I have long taken great offense at those so-called scholars who make their living selling tomes in which they revise American history to fit their various political agendas.

This has been going on for decades, perhaps even centuries and in a sense it has been unavoidable. Biographers and certain scholars will go out of their way to frame their subjects in the most favorable light possible. I accept that as an inevitability. What I find far more despicable are academics and writers who clearly have an axe to grind and have made up their mind about the subject of their work before they even picked up a pen and then choose to cherry-pick statistics and information in order to make their work fit what they've already decided is the fact.

To be very clear this is something both conservatives and progressive academics are equally guilty of. I have more than enough examples available that I encountered well before the rise of social media and even the current political climate. And I have no doubt that, the less research and actual work that a generation raised on screens and gets their news on YouTube and TikTok is willing to do, it's only going to get worse in the years and decades to come. I've already seen quite  a few examples of it in the last few years.

As someone who has history in his blood I take these revisionists with a very harsh eye whether they are the Howard Zinns of the world or the Dinesh D'Souza's. In a way I find their offenses worse then those of the current generation: as they are more educated and can see the effect this has on the world, they should know better. These sins are far from the worst in our polarized political America but if you have read my historical articles you understand why I take it more personally then most.

This series will be an attempt to look at the violations of this trust that both the far left and the far right have been more than guilty of in the far-too-many works of revisionist propaganda they have sold to the public as history. Because I try to show my work when I point out the flaws in their research I'm going to show some of the volumes I've used that contradict their agendas. Considering many of them existed at the time they did their research the fact that they were aware of them and chose to ignore them demonstrates their deliberate actions to mislead their readers on the past in the same way that cable news and social media have been doing about the present.

And because of a historic date that we will be talking about ad infinitum in the next week, I feel that's as good a place as any to jump right in.

 

Part 1: Post Hoc, Ergo Prompter Hoc

Sixty Two Years Later There's Still No Proof JFK Wouldn't Have

Started the Vietnam War

 

Not long after being sworn into office Harry Truman would say: "Heroes know the time to die."

He would say he was talking about Lincoln but anyone who knew him was aware he was just as easily talking about FDR. And since Truman was fine using an assassination as a metaphor I don't see any reason not to use that same phrase could explain why so many people feel this way about John F. Kennedy.

That comparison is not fair in many ways: Lincoln and FDR usually finish one, two when they are ranked my historians as the greatest Presidents in history and for all their very real flaws both men more than merit this ranking. As I've argued multiple times in my articles Kennedy is without question the most overrated President in history not just in comparison to those above but to the other 46  holders to the  office to this point. That he almost always ranks in the top ten above  -and in the most recent ranking he is tenth all time (ahead of among others James Madison, Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson) makes it clear that he has a special place in history. He is the only President in history who is given a high grade because of his potential rather than his achievements.

This is where the comparison to Lincoln and FDR is the clearest. It's not just their accomplishments that cause some historians to hold them in high regard but the track record of their successors in the aftermath of their rise to power that makes them think higher of them. This logic was best summed up by our most famous fictional President on The West Wing in the second episode

The episode's title is Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc which is Latin for: "after it, therefore because of it." As Bartlet states: "One thing follows the other, therefore that first thing caused the other. But it's not always true, in fact its hardly ever true."

Once you understand that statement a certain regard for each President makes sense.

Had he lived Abraham Lincoln would have been able to bring about a fully realized version of racial equality and healing in Reconstruction. How do we know this? Because Andrew Johnson screwed it up when he had the chance. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Had he lived FDR would have managed to negotiate with Stalin in a peaceful manner and the post-war world would have been one where the Cold War never took place. How do we know this? Because under Truman relations between America and the Soviet Union completely broke down leading to the Cold War. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Had JFK not been assassinated he would not have expanded our involvement in Vietnam and the Vietnam War and all of the ramifications our nation is suffering from to this day would never have happened. How do we know this? Because LBJ expanded our involvement in Vietnam and starting fighting a war they knew we couldn't win. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

The latter, of course, has essentially become the grist mill for the greatest conspiracy theory of all time, certainly the most famous among many in the left. Oliver Stone has spent much of the last thirty years preaching it from the rooftops in both his fictional films and documentaries despite the fact he has no more evidence then when he began and what he does have actually comes from a genuine conspiracy theorist. But it's more or less dogma among so much of our entertainment mill, whether it comes from The X-Files or even standup comedy. Bill Hicks actually joked that Kennedy was killed in order to keep all future Presidents in-line. That in sixty years no evidence has come to contradict the Warren Commission and more evidence has come to light contradicting the central thesis of this argument – that there was no indication that Kennedy planned to tone down the war in Vietnam and was doing much to actively expand it – has done nothing to eradicate this logic in the minds of true believers.

I'm not going to discuss that conspiracy theory because I'm not going to give those theories oxygen. Instead I'm going to concentrate on what will no doubt be regurgitated ad infinitum again and again: the myth that JFK would never have gotten us deeper into the Vietnam War.

Let's start with the fact that Kennedy was ever considered soft on communism. He famously ran to the right of Richard Nixon during the 1960 campaign, his administration was actively involved in multiple plots to assassinate Fidel Castro during his term and in many cases worked with the Mafia hand in glove to do so.  I will give credit to him for getting us through the Cuban Missile Crisis to be sure, but at the end of the day he did so through the same diplomatic solution that Ambassador Adlai Stevenson suggested at the start of the crisis and was essentially left out in the cold from that point until the end of it.  Never mind the fact that had it not been for sheer fate and human error the nuclear apocalypse might still have happened anyway.

Leading up to November of 1963 the administrations hands weren’t exactly clean involving Vietnam even as they spoke about not getting further involved in the war. Just a month before Kennedy was assassinated, the President of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown in a coup. The CIA knew about this but did nothing to stop it or his assassination. Even Robert Kennedy himself acknowledged in an interview not long before he began to consider his challenge to Johnson that based on the information they had at the time, Kennedy would have likely increased the number of soldiers involved. Of course Bobby didn't make that part of his 1968 Presidential campaign.

The clearest argument about the fallacy behind LBJ's actions is the same one that so many historians ignore in regard to Harry Truman's and Andrew Johnson's when they took office. The latter two ascended to the President in the midst of a national crisis: when both Johnson and Truman became President the major conflict their predecessor had been involved was close to ended but not yet resolved. Both men had not been privy to their predecessors plans for the war nor the peace afterwards. Both had to deal with agreeing to bring about continuity with no real knowledge of what that would look like. Lincoln's is more forgivable then FDR's (the latter famously never shared his strategy for a post-war world then anyone, much less his likely successor) but in each case the man who had the vision and the majesty to lead America forward was gone suddenly and the Cabinet and his advisors had only the vaguest idea of what that world would look like.

To be sure both Vice Presidents (particularly Andrew Johnson) were flawed men and both are guilty of numerous mistakes going forward. But in this revisionist thinking the circumstances of their coming to power is never considered in regard to what they did next. And because both of their predecessors were dead it's easier to say that Lincoln or FDR – or JFK – would have done the right thing because no one can prove a negative.

In Johnson's case its worth remembering he retained Kennedy's cabinet and kept the majority of them in those positions after he was reelected. (The sole exception of note is Bobby Kennedy.) Given the fact that men like Rusk, Bundy and  McNamara had been extremely cold war acolytes well before they took office there's no evidence to suggest that they would give different advice at the Gulf of Tonkin to JFK had he lived then they did give to LBJ. And considering that the circumstances would have been the same – Kennedy would have been facing reelection and would have wanted to shore up support from his right to neutralize Goldwater – what evidence is there that Kennedy would have done anything differently?

For that matter we have infinitely more evidence in the decades to come to back up the fact that JFK, like all his family, saw everything through a political lens. Those who worship the idea of Camelot choose to ignore Kennedy's fundamental flaw when it came to the critical domestic issue of the era: civil rights. As I wrote in an earlier article:

One of the administrations biggest flaws was that it completely underestimated the brewing discontent among the African-Americans in the South. When the Freedom Rides began in May of 1961, John Lewis, one of those riders said that it was done as a test to the Kennedy administration. When he was told about it, in fact, he thought it would serve as a distraction to a meeting with Khrushchev and cast America in a bad light. He demanded it to be called off, and only after being rebuffed did the Attorney General order federal marshals to Alabama. Civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy and Thurgood Marshall publicly made it clear they would not settle for words. Eventually he would order integration of public bus stops but refused to either announce a civil rights bill – or even address it in the State of the Union.

Kennedy’s approach when it came to incremental change pleased few, and even after two years Kennedy only seem to pay attention to civil rights when there were issues and crises. There were plenty of those in the first two years of his administration but all of his actions were devoted to solving the immediate crisis and not long-term solutions. Kennedy was well aware of the balance of power the South had in the Senate, but this did little satisfy those African-American voters who had voted him in 1960. His deference to Southern  members of Congress did not help him legislatively; most opposed his domestic policies outright. Only in January of 1963 was a civil rights bill introduced in Congress – and it was introduced by a group of House Republicans led by New York’s John Lindsay.

Kennedy was more or less embarrassed into action by this and the following February introduced a voting rights bill with minor education provision and an extension of the Civil Rights commission, among other minor details. It pleased no one and was swiped at by everyone, especially Republicans like Governor Nelson Rockefeller. At this point Humphrey was using his weekly leadership breakfasts to pester Humphrey and stood firm even when Kennedy publicly rebuked him.

Finally in May, motivated by massive protests in Birmingham in which King had been briefly jailed, Kennedy finally realized he had to draft a major civil rights bill. No one in his administration believed it had a remote chance of getting through Congress before the 1964 election. Even Thurgood Marshall thought Kennedy’s action was noble, but that he was betting his Presidency on the most polarizing issue of the day.

 

I find it difficult to believe that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have passed in anything close to the form it came out had it not been for Kennedy's assassination. I really do believe only a Southern President like LBJ as well as someone who clearly understood how politics worked and how to manipulate the system could have gotten it done in any measure.

And that's because for LBJ but not JFK Civil Rights was a cause dear to his heart. It was in large part due to his work as Senate Majority Leader the first civil rights bill had made it through Congress since Reconstruction. That it was basically 'thin soup' doesn't change the fact that LBJ made the effort and would do so again in 1960.  And for all his very real flaws LBJ did have a sense of morality that I've never been convinced his predecessor had. Johnson thought a Presidency should be used to do what he knew was right. By all evidence JFK thought that should be ranked below political concerns.

There has always been a certain elitism when it comes to progressive historians that for whatever reason causes them to mock the kinds of working class people they claim to uplift. Truman wasn't a college graduate, was a failed businessman, was far more salt-of-the earth and spoke in a blunt fashion. Yet revisionists tend to prefer the upper class, Harvard educated, millionaire of a political family that FDR was. Similarly JFK came from a family of enormous wealth, much of it from corruption, was Harvard educated, and had far less experience when he ran for President then the field in 1960, among them LBJ.  And yet for decades Kennedy was the idealized hero to these same academics and LBJ the villain. One doesn't deny there were valid reason to despise Johnson but in order to do so JFK (and his entire family) was basically placed on a pedestal and turned into saints while the flaws of their successors were essentially magnified until they became all they were.

No one should deny the very real tragedy of the assassination of JFK – it was one of the most seminal events in the 20^th century. But one can't pretend that immediately afterwards the myth of Camelot came into being and Kennedy has become the default for who all Presidents that have come afterward must be compared to.  And not because of any legislation he passed or great policies he got into law, the usual standard for a President's greatness, but because he lived fast, died young and in the eyes of the world, left a good-looking corpse. Each year we learn more and more about what a contemptible human being Kennedy was: his womanizing, his connections to organized crime, how he basically started turning the White House into an inner circle where only his closest colleagues and family were given insight over the chain of command. When you throw in everything we know about where his money came from and how so much of his rise is due to his being on television, it's impossible for anyone to objectively not compare him to the current President in so many ways.

But I'm certain that when those reflections come in the next week, no one – certainly not Oliver Stone or Doris Kearns Goodwin – will dare compare 35 to 45 (and 47). He will be hailed as a young man cut down in his prime rather than a man who might very well have lost reelection had he lived, a leader of stirring words that never truly matched his actual actions, the kind of leader we should have today rather then the ones we get. The possibility that Kennedy was no different then the ones we have today, may in fact have been worse, is not the point and why would you like to put a tarnish on a dead man? The fact that's basically been the job of so many historians as well as the work of conservatives and progressives alike for decades is something that never applies to JFK and probably never will.

Because like Truman said, he knew the time to die. Before the bill came due, before history rushed to judgment, before he made the same mistakes his successor did as well as ones unique to him. That's how the world works with those we worship. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.