Slate has an interesting article about the origins of the Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theories and links to Watergate. It's pretty much the thread that Oliver Stone started with his film JFK and finished with NIXON. I am certainly a person who thinks there is more to the story than we've been told, but can only laugh at the notion that it somehow all ties back to Vietnam, when that was hardly a front burner issue during Kennedy's assassination. What was going on in Eastern Europe and even Cuba had more relevance in 1963.
Hippies and baby boomer elites are still caught up in Vietnam, though. The generation cannot let it go. Every time we’re fired upon in a war it’s Vietnam all over again. Kennedy is sainted because he could have prevented Vietnam. Watergate was a good way to get us out of Vietnam.
North Vietnam was simply a country that our leaders didn't have the stomach to defeat. No different than Korea. The only lesson that needs to be learned is don't commit yourself to a war if you don't intend to do the things necessary to win it. We don't need any more glorifications of unwashed Haite Ashbury types that were protesting because their college deferments were revoked. Vietnam could have been a step in defeating communism. Had we prosecuted that war properly, the Berlin Wall could have fallen much sooner.
Kennedy wasn't as Left Wing as some would like to remember him. He called for tax cuts and developed programs like the President's council for physical fitness that promoted self-achievement. It's often conveniently ignored that Jack and Bobby Kennedy were close friends with Joe McCarthy and they shared a hatred of communism. Kennedy scheduled back surgery so he wouldn't have to vote on McCarthy's censure in the Senate. McCarthy was even Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's (Daughter of Bobby Kennedy) godfather.
Kennedy may have actually fought Vietnam to win. Those who speculate that he was killed to help escalate the war ignore who he was at that time and before. That people like Frank Sinatra who supported Reagan in 1980 also supported Kennedy in 1960 is a reminder of the likenesses. Kennedy made his mistakes by letting the Russians put up the Berlin Wall and knowingly letting the leader of South Vietnam be assassinated. But his kind of tough foreign policy Democrat doesn't exist today, and it's a leap to think that he was going to be a dove in French Indo-China.
If Nixon had won in 1960, history could have been different. It’s hard to say if Nixon’s troubles in the 1970s were the result of his inferiority to the Kennedys or if the conflict in Vietnam made him a more Machiavellian leader. Nixon’s early Vietnam policy may have been handled differently and that could have made all the difference.
It was tough losing a young vibrant President like Kennedy. His handling of Vietnam may have been proof that a strong military and foreign policy isn’t in conflict with the goals of the Democrat Party. That may have saved us from the George McGoverns and Jimmy Carters and given us the Scoop Jacksons and Lloyd Bentsons. Or maybe not.
I think we can all speculate on how history would have been different, but there is scant reason to believe that all idealism left with Kennedy, or that he was killed because he was the messiah. All those rich post World War II kids that had it easy were bound to rebel against their "meaningless" lives. Had it not been at Vietnam, it would have been something else.
ANOTHER TAKE: THE WASHINGTON POSTS LINKS KGB WITH CIA THEORY
We can piece together this concerted effort only now with the release of documents from Soviet archives -- some disclosures authorized, some not. Taken together, they prove that the KGB played a central, pernicious role in fomenting the belief that the CIA was involved in Kennedy's assassination.
Read the whole article by Max Holland here.
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