28-06-2012, 10:23 PM
Jim,
Your vision is impaired.
So too are your abilities to read for subtext and reason logically;.
My reference to the "couldn't control him" quote was sarcastically expressed negative criticism of Janney's work -- or at least most of it. Your inability to grasp this is, in a word, Fetzer-esque.
If there was humor there, it was so subtly expressed that it was negligible. Therefore to jump from that to compare me with Fetzer is in a word, unjustified.
Let's talk about change -- of sort that JFK may have experienced during his presidency. But first let's try to add basic logic to your reading skill set.
Even if JFK did not evolve intellectually or spiritually during his presidency -- which is to say, even if he was an enlightened humanist before January, 1964 and experienced unprecedented stasis in the areas thereafter -- this tells us nothing about his willingness to act in ways contrary to said enlightenment.
In other words, he may have been willing to compromise his values -- for reasons relating to electoral politics and/or geopolitical strategies, for instance -- to the degree that he was rightly or wrongly perceived to be "controllable" during a meaningful portion of his presidency. It's the "any more" construction that is most important here.
Now, my understanding of the human mind and the human spirit leads me to conclude that your argument regarding JFK's unchanging attitudes in certain critical areas over the final three-plus years of his life is utter balderdash. I am as familiar with his youthful embraces of enlightened/liberal political and social standards as I am with his later Cold Warrior posturings.
This is so qualified, so limited, so ill defined that I really don't know what to say. Let me be clear, as Burnham said, Kennedy was enlightened way before he got to the White House. And he was at loggerheads with the Dulles/Ike foreign policy credo numerous times in the fifties. Just read his magnificent 1957 speech on Algeria. Then, in 1961, he began turning things around almost immediately in Congo, Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia. (BTW, this will be the centerpiece of my book this fall.) The only place I can find where this was excepted was Cuba. But when the opportunity came, he took advantage of it. And it had nothing to do with Mary Meyer. It had everything to do with Donovan and Castro. Now, In Janney's book, which I don't think anyone here has read, there is not one word about any of this 1951 -1957 education. And he calls JFK a Cold Warrior when he became president. Which is so ignorant as to be ludicrous. To use just one example,if that were the case, Kennedy would have sent in the Navy at Playa Giron. He did not. Instead he fired Dulles, Bissell and Cabell.
JFK's heroism is best understood as his positive response to the changes roiling internally. The stasis for which you argue has no basis in centuries of observation -- scientific and spiritual -- of the human condition.
Kennedy's heroism, if you want to call it that, was that when he was in Saigon in 1951, he did not want to listen to the canned briefings by the French emissaries there to meet him. He ditched them and found a young man named Edmund Gullion who had a good reputation from the State Department. There, he got his education about how democracy vs. communism was really a cover for imperialism versus nationalism in Vietnam. That is a lesson he never forgot. Which is why Gullion was moved into the White House in 1961, and Kennedy broke with the Dulles/Eisenhower precedent in a matter of weeks.
And that history lesson turns the whole Janney/Leary line into a gallon bottle of snake oil.
[/QUOTE]
Your vision is impaired.
So too are your abilities to read for subtext and reason logically;.
My reference to the "couldn't control him" quote was sarcastically expressed negative criticism of Janney's work -- or at least most of it. Your inability to grasp this is, in a word, Fetzer-esque.
If there was humor there, it was so subtly expressed that it was negligible. Therefore to jump from that to compare me with Fetzer is in a word, unjustified.
Let's talk about change -- of sort that JFK may have experienced during his presidency. But first let's try to add basic logic to your reading skill set.
Even if JFK did not evolve intellectually or spiritually during his presidency -- which is to say, even if he was an enlightened humanist before January, 1964 and experienced unprecedented stasis in the areas thereafter -- this tells us nothing about his willingness to act in ways contrary to said enlightenment.
In other words, he may have been willing to compromise his values -- for reasons relating to electoral politics and/or geopolitical strategies, for instance -- to the degree that he was rightly or wrongly perceived to be "controllable" during a meaningful portion of his presidency. It's the "any more" construction that is most important here.
Now, my understanding of the human mind and the human spirit leads me to conclude that your argument regarding JFK's unchanging attitudes in certain critical areas over the final three-plus years of his life is utter balderdash. I am as familiar with his youthful embraces of enlightened/liberal political and social standards as I am with his later Cold Warrior posturings.
This is so qualified, so limited, so ill defined that I really don't know what to say. Let me be clear, as Burnham said, Kennedy was enlightened way before he got to the White House. And he was at loggerheads with the Dulles/Ike foreign policy credo numerous times in the fifties. Just read his magnificent 1957 speech on Algeria. Then, in 1961, he began turning things around almost immediately in Congo, Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia. (BTW, this will be the centerpiece of my book this fall.) The only place I can find where this was excepted was Cuba. But when the opportunity came, he took advantage of it. And it had nothing to do with Mary Meyer. It had everything to do with Donovan and Castro. Now, In Janney's book, which I don't think anyone here has read, there is not one word about any of this 1951 -1957 education. And he calls JFK a Cold Warrior when he became president. Which is so ignorant as to be ludicrous. To use just one example,if that were the case, Kennedy would have sent in the Navy at Playa Giron. He did not. Instead he fired Dulles, Bissell and Cabell.
JFK's heroism is best understood as his positive response to the changes roiling internally. The stasis for which you argue has no basis in centuries of observation -- scientific and spiritual -- of the human condition.
Kennedy's heroism, if you want to call it that, was that when he was in Saigon in 1951, he did not want to listen to the canned briefings by the French emissaries there to meet him. He ditched them and found a young man named Edmund Gullion who had a good reputation from the State Department. There, he got his education about how democracy vs. communism was really a cover for imperialism versus nationalism in Vietnam. That is a lesson he never forgot. Which is why Gullion was moved into the White House in 1961, and Kennedy broke with the Dulles/Eisenhower precedent in a matter of weeks.
And that history lesson turns the whole Janney/Leary line into a gallon bottle of snake oil.
[/QUOTE]