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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: JFK & the Extreme Right [1]

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Date: 2023-02-16  

I’ve spent the last four days absorbed by William Manchester’s The Death of a President.

I was around 12 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated and it hit me really hard. I was in gym class on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, when the school broadcast news from Texas over the over the loudspeakers. I can remember the gym teacher crying as she told us to go to our gym lockers and change and how Louise Gabrielli and I, both sobbing, held onto each other in a changing cubicle as all around us our peers seemed unaffected by the news. I can recall for months crying myself to sleep and asking that my life be taken so that he could miraculously come back to life.

Though I don’t recall how long my grief lasted, it was a very personal grief, the depth of which I didn’t share with my friends or family members, although I know my parents were grieving as well because they had been fierce Kennedy supporters. That is, until the books started coming out a few years later with information designed to desanctify Kennedy. Then my mother was ferocious in a new grief, thata of losing her hero a second time, and she was determined that if she had to lose him again, well, then everyone she knew had to find out what she had unearthed in her obsessive reading of all things related to Kennedy. She figuratively relentlessly crucified him.

The biggest thing I recall her decrying was the Cuban missile crisis when she read that Kennedy had agreed to take our rockets out of Turkey in exchange for the Russians removing theirs from Cuba. I don’t know where she found this information because according to the John F. Kennedy library:

In a separate deal, which remained secret for more than twenty-five years, the United States also agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey. Although the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba, they escalated the building of their military arsenal; the missile crisis was over, the arms race was not.

But back to the book. One of the things which stuck me was how the fears going into Dallas in 1963 were centered on fears of actions against the President by members of the radical right. The conservative movement in the US, due in great part to blowback from McCarthyism and the Red Scare was a powerful force in the political arena during the Kennedy administration. In fact, right wing radio was without doubt as ubiquitous as it is today.

According to the Cato Institute’s article How JFK Censored Right‐​Wing Radio

In the early 1960s, President Kennedy’s administration launched one of the most successful censorship campaigns in U.S. history. The subjects of Kennedy’s ire were conservative radio broadcasters, who constantly attacked the administration’s policy proposals. Worried about his reelection chances, Kennedy instructed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to target the offending broadcasters with tax audits and heightened regulatory scrutiny. Within a few years, this censorship campaign had driven conservative broadcasters off hundreds of radio stations; it would be more than a decade before the end of the Fairness Doctrine enabled the resurgence of political talk radio.

In a 2013 New Yorker article The John Birchers’ Tea Party:

As it happens, I’ve been doing some reading about John Kennedy, and what I find startling, and even surprising, is how absolutely consistent and unchanged the ideology of the extreme American right has been over the past fifty years, from father to son and now, presumably, on to son from father again. The real analogue to today’s unhinged right wing in America is yesterday’s unhinged right wing in America. This really is your grandfather’s right, if not, to be sure, your grandfather’s Republican Party. Half a century ago, the type was much more evenly distributed between the die-hard, neo-Confederate wing of the Democratic Party and the Goldwater wing of the Republicans, an equitable division of loonies that would begin to end after J.F.K.’s death. - snip- In their new book, “Dallas 1963,” Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis demonstrate in luxuriant detail just how clotted Dallas was with right-wing types in the period before Kennedy’s fatal visit. The John Birch Society, the paranoid, well-heeled, anti-Communist group, was the engine of the movement then, as the Tea Party is now—and though, to their great credit, the saner conservatives worked hard to keep it out of the official center, the society remained hyper-present. Powerful men, like Ted Dealey, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, sympathized with the Birchers’ ideology, and engaged with General Edwin A. Walker, an extreme right-wing military man (and racist) who had left the Army in protest at Kennedy’s civil-rights and foreign policies—and who had the ear of Senators Strom Thurmond and John Tower. It was Walker who said of the President, “He is worse than a traitor. Kennedy has essentially exiled Americans to doom.”

And here’s another quote which reveals how eerily similar the political climate was back in the 1960s.

Medicare then, as Obamacare now, was the key evil. An editorial in the Morning News announced that “JFK’s support of Medicare sounds suspiciously similar to a pro-Medicare editorial that appeared in the Worker—the official publication of the U.S. Communist Party.” At the same time, Minutaglio and Davis write, “on the radio, H.L. Hunt (the Dallas millionaire) filled the airwaves with dozens of attacks on Medicare, claiming that it would create government death panels: The plan provides a near little package of sweeping dictatorial power over medicine and the healing arts—a package which would literally make the President of the United States a medical czar with potential life or death power over every man woman and child in the country.” - snip- The whole thing came to a climax with the famous black-bordered flyer that appeared on the day of J.F.K.’s visit to Dallas, which showed him in front face and profile, as in a “Wanted” poster, with the headline “wanted for treason.” The style of that treason is familiar mix of deliberate subversion and personal depravity. “He has been wrong on innumerable issues affecting the security of the United States”; “He has been caught in fantastic lies to the American people, including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce.” Birth certificate, please?

In reading through the key events which occurred during JFK’s short presidency, I was amazed at how many I had not recalled happening during his tenure in the White House. Of course, we all remember the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. And while I had recalled his declaring that the US would have a man on the moon by the end of the decade, I didn’t recall that the first American in space was in 1961 and that John Glenn orbited the earth in 1963. I had forgotten Kennedy launched the Peace Corps as one of his first official actions and wasn’t aware that so many events dealing with segregation in the south took place prior to November 22, 1963.

What about you? Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Did you consider him a liberal politician?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/16/2153303/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-JFK-amp-the-Extreme-Right

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