28-07-2012, 08:16 PM
*(apologies to Christopher Hitchens)
Smashing pumpkins which have begun to sag from internal rot
But beyond that, some of the books Caro chose for his information on the Kennedy administration are surprising. Are we really to believe that the celebrated author could find time to read The Kennedys by Peter Collier and David Horowitz but he couldn't find time to read JFK: Ordeal in Africa by Richard Mahoney?
That somehow Caro thought it was important to read Seymour Hersh's discredited The Dark Side of Camelot, but it wasn't important to read John Newman's milestone work, JFK and Vietnam? With these choices made, one can see why Caro's discussion of the Kennedy administration, although longer, is no more sophisticated or nuanced than the work of Chris Matthews. [See Consortiumnews.com's ["Why Mr. Hardball Found JFK Elusive."]
The overarching irony of Caro missing JFK's earthshaking withdrawal has no mythic equal since Mr. Magoo voiced by Jim Backus
Caro presents the stereotypic two-dimensional JFK, a failing Donald Gibson treats first in Battling Wall Street: The JFK Presidency.
If there is a tragic arc from 1960-68, and there is, then that is the story line to hew to: How Johnson took a country at relative peace and great prosperity and drove it into war, economic stagflation and race riots. But you won't find it here.
War on poverty, Medicare, Great Society (buying votes): six trillion dollars
A war on the other side of the world dropping more tonnage than all previous wars: 58,000 Americans, two million Vietnamese, a billion dollars a week
Appointing Helms DCI, dropping out of the '68 race to pass the baton to Nixon over the bodies of King and RFK--priceless
Further, Caro states that because of the overthrow of Diem, Kennedy may have later altered his view of the withdrawal plan. He fails to note that in reply to a press conference question of Nov. 12, which was after Diem's overthrow, Kennedy said his goal "was to bring Americans home." (Newman, p. 426) And there is no evidence in the record that Kennedy changed his mind on this issue prior to his death.
http://jfk-press-conferences.blogspot.co...-1963.html
JFK PRESS CONFERENCE #64
(NOVEMBER 14, 1963)
The question between 7:40 and 8:45 contains the phrasing re bring them home twice around the 8:24 mark.
QED Caro presents as Noam Chomsky, Chris Matthews, and every other shill insisting there's no difference between complete withdrawal by 1965 and a half million in-country with over a tenth of that in body bags for nothing, for less than nothing, for so much less than nothing as to be the black hole of the Republicwhich opened in Dealey Plaza balistically
But yet, if one believes Caro, after finding out about Allen Dulles's duplicity in the Bay of Pigs, and being so repulsed by it that he wanted no member of the Dulles family in the administration, we are to believe that RFK asked Johnson to appoint Dulles to investigate the suspicious death of his brother. Add to that the fact, as David Talbot notes, that Bobby first suspected that the CIA had killed JFK. (Brothers, pgs. 6-7)
To pile a howler onto all this, Caro writes that Operation Mongoose was still operative on Nov. 22, 1963, with RFK in charge. In fact, Mongoose had been disbanded after the Missile Crisis, many months before the assassination. (Morris Morley, Imperial State and Revolution, p. 151)
Here Caro presents as Lamar Waldron.
Even though RFK suspected CIA in the hit on JFK he wants its old boss to investigate the hit. Lamar Caro is a genius
And Mongoose run by RFK at the time of the hit on JFKCaro has some really, really, really inside sourcesprobably an auto-colonoscopy
With what Caro does here, I don't look forward to the final volume. Now that I have seen him operate close up, he reminds me of the likes of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough. That is, historians who worship success more than the truth.
Caro is in the tradition of Doris Kearns who got twuly groupie at the sight of the hunka-hunka burning Texan, and David Beschloss who panting pronounced the current shill's I.Q. to be "off the charts" (though untested off the teleprompter).
Caro's Flawed Tale of LBJ's Rise is a typically thorough and considered review.
Caro's latest bottle is an overhyped, fatally-flawed beatification of an unscrupulous political beast clomping over the last thoughtful reformer of all policies foreign and domestic.
An opus hypus
on whom you will not hear a laugh
except inside the gates of ctkaDPF
Smashing pumpkins which have begun to sag from internal rot
But beyond that, some of the books Caro chose for his information on the Kennedy administration are surprising. Are we really to believe that the celebrated author could find time to read The Kennedys by Peter Collier and David Horowitz but he couldn't find time to read JFK: Ordeal in Africa by Richard Mahoney?
That somehow Caro thought it was important to read Seymour Hersh's discredited The Dark Side of Camelot, but it wasn't important to read John Newman's milestone work, JFK and Vietnam? With these choices made, one can see why Caro's discussion of the Kennedy administration, although longer, is no more sophisticated or nuanced than the work of Chris Matthews. [See Consortiumnews.com's ["Why Mr. Hardball Found JFK Elusive."]
The overarching irony of Caro missing JFK's earthshaking withdrawal has no mythic equal since Mr. Magoo voiced by Jim Backus
Caro presents the stereotypic two-dimensional JFK, a failing Donald Gibson treats first in Battling Wall Street: The JFK Presidency.
~~~
If there is a tragic arc from 1960-68, and there is, then that is the story line to hew to: How Johnson took a country at relative peace and great prosperity and drove it into war, economic stagflation and race riots. But you won't find it here.
War on poverty, Medicare, Great Society (buying votes): six trillion dollars
A war on the other side of the world dropping more tonnage than all previous wars: 58,000 Americans, two million Vietnamese, a billion dollars a week
Appointing Helms DCI, dropping out of the '68 race to pass the baton to Nixon over the bodies of King and RFK--priceless
~~~
Further, Caro states that because of the overthrow of Diem, Kennedy may have later altered his view of the withdrawal plan. He fails to note that in reply to a press conference question of Nov. 12, which was after Diem's overthrow, Kennedy said his goal "was to bring Americans home." (Newman, p. 426) And there is no evidence in the record that Kennedy changed his mind on this issue prior to his death.
http://jfk-press-conferences.blogspot.co...-1963.html
JFK PRESS CONFERENCE #64
(NOVEMBER 14, 1963)
The question between 7:40 and 8:45 contains the phrasing re bring them home twice around the 8:24 mark.
QED Caro presents as Noam Chomsky, Chris Matthews, and every other shill insisting there's no difference between complete withdrawal by 1965 and a half million in-country with over a tenth of that in body bags for nothing, for less than nothing, for so much less than nothing as to be the black hole of the Republicwhich opened in Dealey Plaza balistically
~~~
But yet, if one believes Caro, after finding out about Allen Dulles's duplicity in the Bay of Pigs, and being so repulsed by it that he wanted no member of the Dulles family in the administration, we are to believe that RFK asked Johnson to appoint Dulles to investigate the suspicious death of his brother. Add to that the fact, as David Talbot notes, that Bobby first suspected that the CIA had killed JFK. (Brothers, pgs. 6-7)
To pile a howler onto all this, Caro writes that Operation Mongoose was still operative on Nov. 22, 1963, with RFK in charge. In fact, Mongoose had been disbanded after the Missile Crisis, many months before the assassination. (Morris Morley, Imperial State and Revolution, p. 151)
Here Caro presents as Lamar Waldron.
Even though RFK suspected CIA in the hit on JFK he wants its old boss to investigate the hit. Lamar Caro is a genius
And Mongoose run by RFK at the time of the hit on JFKCaro has some really, really, really inside sourcesprobably an auto-colonoscopy
~~~
With what Caro does here, I don't look forward to the final volume. Now that I have seen him operate close up, he reminds me of the likes of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough. That is, historians who worship success more than the truth.
Caro is in the tradition of Doris Kearns who got twuly groupie at the sight of the hunka-hunka burning Texan, and David Beschloss who panting pronounced the current shill's I.Q. to be "off the charts" (though untested off the teleprompter).
Caro's Flawed Tale of LBJ's Rise is a typically thorough and considered review.
Caro's latest bottle is an overhyped, fatally-flawed beatification of an unscrupulous political beast clomping over the last thoughtful reformer of all policies foreign and domestic.
An opus hypus
on whom you will not hear a laugh
except inside the gates of ctkaDPF