JOHN F. KENNEDY: AN IDEALIST WITHOUT ILLUSIONS:

[Bruce Patrick Brychek]

05.31.2017:Dear JFK Murder Solved Forum Members and Readers:As we reflect upon JFK's 100th Birthday Anniversary, we must face our own Analyses of the Dichotomy of What "We the People..." MIGHT HAVE BEEN TODAY, HAD JFK LIVED, vs. THE REALITY OF LIFE FOR THE MASSESIN AMERICA TODAY, AND HOW AMERICA IS VIEWED THIS VERY INSTANT GLOBALLY.After reading the below analysis, I would appreciate individual Analyses, Comments, Ideas, Reflections, Suggestions, and Thoughts of WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN vs. THE TSUNAMI OF PROBLEMS DROWNING AMERICAN'S, THE AMERICAN DREAM, AND AMERICAN SPIRIT TODAY, REALISTICALLY. Certainly there is No Absolutely Correct Input, or Silver Bullet. (05.31.2017, BB).JOHN F. KENNEDY: AN IDEALIST WITHOUT ILLUSIONS:By: JEFF SHESOL, MAY 29, 2017President John F. Kennedy, center, with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, at the White House in 1961. Credit John F Kennedy Presidential Library/European Pressphoto Agency.One evening this month, the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosted a birthday celebration. But the guest of honor was absent. President John F. Kennedy, had he lived, would have turned 100 on Monday, May 29.The courtyard was filled with friends of the Kennedy family, alumni of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 campaign for president and of Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate staff, Kennedy biographers and, not least, some actual Kennedys — including Caroline Kennedy, the president’s daughter.The audience greeted her warmly but appeared, on the whole, subdued. Speakers referred, here and there, to President Trump, who now sits at the desk where Kennedy once worked. It was hard to escape the feeling that the Kennedy legacy — the America he envisioned and helped build – is in eclipse.It is hard to imagine a president less like Kennedy than Mr. Trump. But it’s more than that. Kennedy’s belief in what his speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, called “the politics of persuasion,” as opposed to “the politics of violent confrontation or chaos,” is under challenge even in his own party. This is a danger that Kennedy foresaw, and warned against.Kennedy’s legacy has always been hard to pin down. It has been inflated, exalted, disputed and debunked almost from the moment Kennedy was assassinated. Much of it resides in the realm of feeling — more a Kennedy gestalt than a Kennedy record. His domestic agenda, the New Frontier, had essentially stalled by the last of his thousand days in office. His vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, rightly receives credit for realizing many of those ambitions — a civil-rights bill, Medicare, education reform, tax reform, a comprehensive antipoverty program — after Kennedy’s death. It is no wonder that so much of the focus, in the decades since, has been on Kennedy’s style: his crisp, midcentury-modern look, his wit, his will to power.Yet this sells him short. “I believe the times demand new invention, innovation, imagination, decision,” Kennedysaid in 1960, in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, and this is what he offered and inspired. While he did not depart dramatically from the liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, he infused it with a new urgency and clarity.Former President Barack Obama, in a speech on May 7 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, observed that, “to those of us of a certain age, the Kennedys” — he was including Robert and Ted — “symbolized a set of values and attitudes about civic life that made it such an attractive calling. The idea that politics in fact could be a noble and worthwhile pursuit. The notion that our problems, while significant, are never insurmountable. The belief that America’s promise might embrace those who had once been locked out or left behind. The responsibility that each of us have to play a part in our nation’s destiny, and, by virtue of being Americans, play a part in the destiny of the world.” That is as good a definition of the Kennedy legacy as any.But is that also its epitaph ? Every ideal on Mr. Obama’s list is under assault. The nobility of public service, for one. When the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, made his fortune, it was partly to further his political ambitions, for himself and his sons. “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches,” John Kennedy once said, without irony. The Trumps have turned that on its head, using the White House as a marketing tool, a profit-making luxury brand.Also out of favor: Kennedy’s idea that America’s promise belongs to all, even the poorest. This is mocked by Mr. Trump’s budget plan, which would slash the supports that keep families from sinking deeper into poverty: Medicaid, student loans, disability payments, food stamps. Mr. Trump’s budget would also eliminate Vista, a program proposed by Kennedy (and created by Johnson) that enlists volunteers in serving low-income communities.Kennedy’s pledge to act as “faithful friends” to America’s allies has given way to the self-defeating smugness of “America First.” Mr. Trump embodies what Kennedy intended to warn against that day in Dallas, in a speech he had prepared but never got to deliver: demagogues making arguments “wholly unrelated to reality,” deluding themselves that “strength is but a matter of slogans.”Democrats, for their part, are proving uncertain — and in some cases, unwilling — stewards of the Kennedy legacy. It’s certainly true that, across the party, there is broad attachment to the values and attitudes that Mr. Obama described. Nearly all Democrats share Kennedy’s belief that without an effective, ethical and active government, the “fabric of law and progress” will unravel. And many still feel a pull toward the family itself: The party is developing a collective crush on Rep. Joseph Kennedy III of Massachusetts, a grandson of Bobby Kennedy, who has attacked Republican plans to undo the Affordable Care Act — and has called the nation to its higher ideals — with such moral force that some progressives are hoping he will run for president.But the fact remains that the most popular politician in the country, according to a recent Harvard/Harris Poll, is someone who once said that a Kennedy speech, in 1960, left him “physically nauseated” and led him to abandon “conventional” politics in favor of “revolution.” That was Bernie Sanders, who appears to reject Kennedy’s belief that politics is a means of practical achievement, not mainly a form of exhortation.Kennedy once told the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. that the problem with Theodore Roosevelt was that “he talked a lot but didn’t do very much.” Kennedy gave grand speeches, but had no real patience for talk — least of all talk “unrelated to reality.” When he set goals, he announced plans and asked to be judged by their results.There is little question where he would have come down in last year’s debate between Mr. Sanders and Hillary Clinton over what counts as leadership: the sweep of one’s ambition, as Mr. Sanders saw it, or as Mrs. Clinton argued, a record of accomplishment. There can be no doubt what he would think about Mr. Sanders’s calls for “socialism” or “revolution.” Even as a young man, as one of Kennedy’s biographers, Robert Dallek, writes, he was “put off by strict ideological advocates” and pat answers to difficult questions; he “prided himself on his realism and pragmatism.”Kennedy’s elevated tone would be a tough sell today. (Bobby or Ted Kennedy’s more impassioned rhetoric might be closer to the mark.) Indeed, a growing cadre of Democrats — including the new party chairman, Tom Perez — are straining to sound like Mr. Sanders, to match his moral fervor. It’s not hard to see why. Not only does Mr. Sanders have the loudest, most insistent voice in a party that, six months after the election, remains bereft and leaderless, but also his stridency echoes the mood on the left. Rarely in American history have our politics appeared so Manichaean, a battle between darkness and light.Mr. Sanders and his supporters are making a forceful — and essential — case against greed, inequality and the corrosive influence of money in politics; they are highlighting the ways in which institutions, both political and financial, are failing many Americans. But they are short on, or even indifferent to, solutions. Ideas like a single-payer health plan or free college for all offer psychic satisfaction but not a substantive way forward – so, too, populist attacks on “the system,” “the establishment” and “the billionaire class.” This is the politics of catharsis, and necessary in its way. But as Kennedy said in 1960, “the American people expect more from us than cries of indignation and attack. The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high.”Lines must be drawn; Donald Trump must be resisted. But he will not likely be defeated until there is room again, in politics, for idealists “without illusions,” as Kennedy once described himself. The Democratic Party will regain power when it recommits itself, as it did under Kennedy, to action and achievement and the redemptive power of politics. What is needed is not revolution; what is needed is repair. Kennedy made clear that change is difficult; it demands sacrifice and, above all, a commitment to, not a contempt for, the slow, often maddening, machinery of self-government.We do not need another John F. Kennedy. But we do need leaders who can make his legacy their own.Jeff Shesol (@JeffShesol), a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, is the author, most recently, of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court.”As always, I strongly recommend that you first read, research, and study material completely yourself about a Subject Matter, and then formulate your own Opinions and Theories.Any additional analyses, interviews, investigations, readings, research, studies, thoughts,or writings on any aspect of this Subject Matter ?Bear in mind that we are trying to attract and educate a Whole New Generation of JFKResearchers who may not be as well versed as you.Comments ?Respectfully,BB.

[Bob]

Being a writer who has written thousands of articles over the years, I always make sure I have an agenda or a point to each story I write. Likewise, when I read a story, those are the things I look for from other writers. It's also helpful to know the background of the writer as well.In the case of the story Bruce posted, we find out the background of the author, who is Jeff Shesol. What did Shesol do in his former life? He was a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton.You could tell that in the way he was trying to disparage Bernie Sanders and make Hillary Clinton look like she is much closer to JFK in terms of being a politician. When JFK was running for President, he did make speeches that were to the right of Richard Nixon in terms of keeping up with the Soviets in the arms race. But as he became President, he soon learned that the CIA and the Military Industrial Complex wanted him to rubber stamp their even more right agenda, which he did not adhere to. Case in point is the Bay of Pigs fiasco. That was the straw the broke the camel's back in JFK's mind. And it happened just three months after his Presidency began. He refused to be put in that same situation regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. The decision (the blockade) he made in October of 1962 saved the world from a nuclear war and most certainly World War III. Had he listened to the Joint Chiefs/CIA and attacked, that's what would have happened.His instincts about Vietnam were also correct. The U.S. should have had all troops out of Vietnam by 1965 like JFK had wanted. Instead, 58,000-plus brave Americans died, along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, as the war dragged on for over a decade.Comparing JFK to either Sanders or Hillary is pretty easy, if you look at the policies of each one.JFK was no hawk with his policies. Cuba and Vietnam prove that. Sanders voted against the war in Iraq, while Hillary voted for it, plus was hawk-like in her role as Secretary of State. See Libya.JFK did not trust the CIA and wanted to break it apart. Sanders spoke out vehemently about the CIA use of torture. Meanwhile, Hillary and the CIA go way back. Back to the days when the CIA was running drugs out of Mena, Arkansas when her husband was Governor there.JFK was implementing changes to the Federal Reserve and pushing to lower the oil depletion allowance from 30% to 15% (which could mean a loss of $300 million per year to oilmen). Sanders is as anti-corporation as a politician can get, plus wants to break up the big banks. Hillary is joined to the hip with both Big Banking (Wall Street speeches) and Big Oil.The bottom line is that Shesol was obviously trying to put out a pro-Hillary type story, saying the Democrats need to repair their party and that they don't need a revolution. Shesol is wrong. The Dems do need a revolution. Why? People like me have become Independents because of the way the party has become so corporate under Wall Street's watch.I also have several friends who were once Republicans who are now Independents like me, because they don't like the direction of that party.That is why the United States badly needs a third party. This last election proves that.