06-09-2009, 03:48 PM
Paul Rigby Wrote:We have ignored for too long the clear and unequivocal contemporaneous critique mounted against Kennedy by the Right and its pundits who saw Kennedy talking war and acting for peace, and excoriated him for it. Here is an example of what I mean:
Quote:Henry J. Taylor, “Where’s the Bloody Horse?,” The Washington Daily News, Wednesday, 15 November 1961, p.45:
“Our public is not reacting happily to the laterals, back-tracking, and occasional fake passes which emanate from Washington in the face of our perils.”
The press of the period is littered with such examples - all assiduously and necessarily avoided by Chomsky - but we've done a poor job of assembling them and making them known.
Another example:
Quote:The Washington Daily News, Tuesday, 9 May 1961, p.21
Escape to High Ground?
By Richard Starnes
New York, May 9 – Writing of the late Ernest Bevin, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson said:“...He understood power. He knew that choices had to be made, often choices between unpleasant alternatives, and never was misled, as so many well-meaning people are, into believing that the necessity for choice can be transcended by a flight of eloquence.”
The words, in Mr. Acheson’s soon-to-be published “Sketches From Life,” were written before President Kennedy’s dilemma regarding Laos became so embarrassingly public. But their applicability is clear, just as it is clear that Mr. Kennedy’s seconds have suddenly lost their stomach for risking their tiger’s record in a showdown over Laos.
Doris Fleeson, a fine reporter who has been called the Den Mother of the New Frontier, wrote recently: “Influential senators and editorial opinions are paving the way for him (President Kennedy) to withdraw from his exposed Laos position to the safer and higher ground of the United Nations.”
This we may regard as the present position of men in the enlightened spectrum of the New Frontier. It seems to dispose of any real possibility of war over Laos, which is assumed to be a good thing. But it also disposes of Laos, which those of us who remember the President’s press conference of March 23 must regard as a bad thing.
If an escape to “high ground” is now regarded as essential American policy, where were the policy makers when Mr. Kennedy was saying, “If these attacks (on Laos) do not stop, those who support a truly neutral Laos will have to consider their response...No one should doubt our resolution on this point...The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence...I know that every American will want his country to honor its obligation to the point that freedom and security of the free world and ourselves may be achieved.”
That was a forthright statement of policy that cheered many Americans who had grown sick of taking the back of some international hoodlum’s hand. But now it is apparent that it was more “flight of eloquence” than rock-ribbed policy, and that anyone who doubted “our resolution on this point” was well advised to do so.
Laos, according to such military specialists as Sen. J.W. Fulbright, of Fayetteville, Ark., is the wrong place to fight a war. And from this one must assume that one honors one’s obligation to the principal of freedom only when the geography is convenient, the climate comfortable, and the enemy not really playing for keeps.
Okinawa was a poor place for a war, and so was Guadalcanal, and no sane person would have launched an offensive against the Siegfried Line. But we fought in all three places, and countless others equally hairy, and in those days nobody suggested that wars had to be fought on a smooth field as if they were a polo match
Ornery kids brawling in school yards very early learn that you don’t draw a line in the dirt with your big toe and challenge a guy to cross it unless you’re prepared to hang one on his chin if he does cross it. If your dare is accepted and you retreat and draw a more convenient line in the dirt, you quickly become the laughing stock of the school yard. And, of course, sooner or later you run out of dirt to draw the line.
Curious how Chomsky, Cockburn et al never manage to find any of this stuff!