Feb. 22, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| It's President's Week here on the Rubin Report and we're partnering with Learn Liberty | ||
| to bring you five shows in five days, each highlighting a different president of the United | ||
| States. | ||
| Joining me today is an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State, and the co-author of JFK and the Reagan Revolution, A Secret History of American Prosperity. | ||
| Brian Dmitrovich, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| Dmitrovich, Dmitrovick? | ||
| Usually I say it with a hard C, Dmitrovick. | ||
| Dimitrovic. | ||
| I was a big fan of Drazen Petrovic, who was a basketball player from Croatia in the early 90s, but some people said Petrovic, and I could never tell. | ||
| Rudy Tomjanovic, the old coach. | ||
| He's properly a hot check at the sea, so I'm heretical. | ||
| Rudy Tomjanovic, that 95 Houston Rockets team is my favorite basketball team of all time. | ||
| Clyde Drexler right there. | ||
| Oh, there you go! | ||
| As a Houston guy, that has some meaning to you. | ||
| Alright, I could talk basketball the entire time, but let's talk presidents. | ||
| By the title of your book, we could probably talk about Reagan just as easily as we could talk about JFK, who we're going to talk about. | ||
| Do you have a preference out of those two? | ||
| Well, our book, JFK and the Reagan Revolution, really is two-thirds, three-quarters about John F. Kennedy, because we've forgotten that John F. Kennedy paved the way for the Reagan Revolution and his big tax cut. | ||
| All right, so JFK, since you spent two thirds of it on JFK, that's the guy we're gonna talk about. | ||
| I find with JFK that what it seems that most, at least younger people know, say under... | ||
| 45-ish, 50-ish, something like that. | ||
| They know a lot about the assassination. | ||
| History Channel runs the documentaries all the time. | ||
| You can watch the movie, JFK, a zillion other things that are out there. | ||
| But there's obviously a lot more to JFK than just the unfortunate ending. | ||
| So let's start at the beginning. | ||
| What do we need to know about early childhood, the Kennedy family, et cetera, et cetera? | ||
| Let's start with childhood. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, John F. Kennedy was born in May of 1917 in a very important family, a family that was becoming one of the richest in the United States. | ||
| His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, at that point in the teens, had graduated from Harvard about ten years before, was building his fortune within Kennedy's young childhood, before he turned 15. | ||
| uh... need his father to become one of the richest man in the country | ||
| and and actually just a peak kennedy made most of his money in what we call | ||
| the great contraction | ||
| the worst period of american economic history from nineteen twenty nine to | ||
| nineteen thirty three when he short sold the market and that's really when the candies became uh... that that | ||
| one of the top richest families in the united states | ||
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so how political was the kennedy family at that time yeah i mean it was pretty political | |
| Joseph P. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy's father, had married the daughter of an important Boston politician. | ||
| And then Joseph P. was not involved in politics until FDR, Franklin Roosevelt, appointed him the first head of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. | ||
| And then he became a big Roosevelt Democrat. | ||
| So that was the sort of beginning of the dynasty? | ||
| Yeah, in the Kennedy name, yes. | ||
| So JFK then, tell me a little bit about sort of his evolution from a young person to starting to become a politician. | ||
| Yeah, so JFK was the second son, so there was Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| who would be killed in World War II. | ||
| And he wasn't a good student in prep school and he went to Princeton actually for a semester, didn't do well there, then went to Harvard, did not do particularly well until his senior year. | ||
| Probably plagiarized his thesis, which then somehow sold 80,000 copies as a book when it was published, but with his father's help. | ||
| Really? | ||
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unidentified
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Wait, wait. | |
| Tell me a little more about that. | ||
| I haven't heard that one. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, John F. Kennedy, his father in 1938-39, I guess this would have been, at that point was the ambassador to the court of St. | ||
| James. | ||
| It was the U.S. | ||
| ambassador to Great Britain. | ||
| And was very interested in the United States fighting the Soviet Union and not necessarily fighting Nazi Germany. | ||
| And so that kind of caused diplomatic problems with FDR's foreign policy. | ||
| But JFK had extraordinary access to the files. | ||
| And so he wrote a thesis that was probably substantially ghostwritten about how England was dealing with the Germany crisis. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| And then it was published as a book. | ||
| And it sold about 80,000 copies. | ||
| Of course, Kennedy would publish another book, Profiles in Courage, and Joseph P. would pull strings so it won the Pulitzer. | ||
| It's good to come from a power family, huh? | ||
| It is pretty good. | ||
| So tell me a little bit more about how he then decided to get into politics. | ||
| Yeah, well, the decisive event really was the death of his brother in 1944, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., killed in World War II, because really all the hopes were on this son. | ||
| And he apparently was a very impressive guy. | ||
| If you look at old pictures of the son, Joe, He was even way better looking than JFK. | ||
| He was kind of bigger. | ||
| JFK was always kind of skinny. | ||
| And it really devastated the father when he was killed in the war. | ||
| And he realized, oh boy, Jack is going to be the one where we're going to have all these political hopes on. | ||
| And the father did not have high hopes for Ted at that point, too. | ||
| Robert, maybe. | ||
| But right after Kennedy got out of the war, of course he had his distinguished war career too, he ran for Congress in 1946, his father pulled a lot of strings, and he won a seat in Brookline, Massachusetts, and he was in the U.S. | ||
| House. | ||
| What does pull a lot of strings mean? | ||
| Because I just find the dynasty part of this fascinating, the idea that they're sort of grooming children, that the power elite can sort of help people get into play here. | ||
| Well, pull a lot of strings in the 1946 election, for example. | ||
| So on the ballot, Kennedy was running against a particular opponent. | ||
| His father found somebody else with the exact same name and put that guy's name on the ballot and then had a whole publicity campaign for that guy's name, I forget the exact name, to be voted for so that that would split the vote. | ||
| That takes a lot of money and a lot of kind of naked ambition. | ||
| So that's an example of the kind of hardball that he played. | ||
| So, as a slight sidebar, when you hear about all the, you know, craziness involved in politics these days, and everyone knows it's never been worse, and listen to the way people talk and all that, it's like, a lot of shady stuff has been going on for a long time. | ||
| Well, I have no idea how we could look at, say, the McCarthy era, both how McCarthy was treated and how McCarthy treated others, and say that politics was warm and fuzzy back in the 40s and the 50s. | ||
| I have no idea how we could say that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So did JFK, do you think he had presidential aspirations then when he started? | ||
| This was sort of thrust on him and he became a congressman, but was he already thinking about that, do you think? | ||
| I think so, in that it was well understood that Joe Jr. | ||
| was going to be something like President of the United States. | ||
| And so when that could not happen after his death, I think it became pretty clear to the sons, so there was still Jack, Robert, and Teddy left, and then I think six girls, that they had to take that place. | ||
| And so when he ran for Congress, yeah, I mean, it was to go onward and upward. | ||
| Yeah, so he was a congressman, how many years? | ||
| Was he a congressman right up until he ran for president? | ||
| He was a U.S. | ||
| representative from Brooklyn, Massachusetts, from 46 to 52, and then he won a U.S. | ||
| Senate seat in Massachusetts, bucking the Eisenhower trend, because he ran on the Democratic side, so he was one of the few Democratic victories in the 1952 election, so then he was a senator for eight years before he became president. | ||
| Yeah, did he have any major accomplishments as a senator? | ||
| Well, that's the interesting thing, because when we ask what were his major accomplishments as president, let's say legislatively, it really comes down to maybe one or two. | ||
| The tax cut and the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| We're going to spend plenty on those. | ||
| So there's not a lot of major accomplishments in the whole Kennedy biography. | ||
| The funny thing about his career as a legislator, in the Senate in particular, is his big enthusiasms were two things. | ||
| Number one, he was going after the mob. | ||
| Okay, which then his brother Robert would be big on. | ||
| And number two, he's an anti-communist in foreign policy. | ||
| And that's how he distinguished himself as a senator. | ||
| Yeah, so it's interesting, the anti-communist part is interesting because the parties have shifted so much these days that, I'm not saying the Democrats are communists now, but that voice, that sort of anti-socialism, communism voice would rarely be heard of from the modern left, which does tell you how these things have shifted. | ||
| Joseph P. Kennedy, his father, became persona non grata in the U.S. | ||
| government when in 1938-39 he told Franklin D. Roosevelt from his high position as ambassador in Great Britain. | ||
| We don't have to worry about the Nazis so much. | ||
| We have to worry about communism, because communism can overthrow the American way of life. | ||
| I think there's a pretty direct link there to what his son was doing in the 50s and 60s. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So he viewed it as Nazism was an external threat, not within our borders, but communism actually was something that could come from... That was Joe's feeling, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it was kind of prophetic. | ||
| Even as he was a New Dealer and all that, he said, well, the New Deal can help save capitalism. | ||
| That was an erroneous argument, but Joseph P. Kennedy was worried about the onslaught against capitalism by communism. | ||
| Yeah, interesting. | ||
| So it sounds like the Senate career was sort of Less than spectacular, right? | ||
| It doesn't sound like anything major happened. | ||
| I think Kennedy was pretty careful. | ||
| He began his Senate career ailing. | ||
| He had back surgery in 1953 as soon as he became a senator and could not attend the Senate. | ||
| He was, in fact, had to be reclined for a very long time because of his back injury. | ||
| And that's when he decided to write Profiles in Courage, his 1956 book, 1955, won the Pulitzer in 1956, about the greats of the Senate over time. | ||
| So because he was incapacitated, he wanted to show he was still doing Senate work by writing about Senate history. | ||
| God, what a beautiful thing to be in government. | ||
| You don't really have to do anything and you can write about the other guys that did some stuff. | ||
| It's an incredible thing. | ||
| All right, 1960, he becomes president. | ||
| He defeats Richard Nixon, who was vice president at the time. | ||
| I think the one thing that people really remember is that debate. | ||
| Yeah, because he was sort of this young, good-looking guy, and there was Nixon sweating. | ||
| Is there anything else we have to remember from that election cycle? | ||
| Yeah, there was a debate in September 1960, and people always say that Nixon won on the radio and lost on television, that if people just heard his words or even read the transcript, That he defeated Kennedy. | ||
| But if you looked on the television, there's black and white television, lots of viewers, Kennedy was the youthful, bronzed, which is probably from his Addison Syndrome, not the suntan, hero and Nixon look like a schlub. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Ironic because it was in black and white, but still, even having the bronze still helps. | ||
| And again, that was from one of his ailments. | ||
| That wasn't from the South Pacific. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I've read those transcripts, and I think Kennedy clearly won. | ||
| I mean, Nixon was saying things like, oh, there's been great economic growth in this country. | ||
| We're tipping into a recession right then. | ||
| 400,000 people were about to lose their jobs in the month of October. | ||
| And Nixon was saying, oh, we've had the greatest economic growth we've ever had under Eisenhower. | ||
| There have been three recessions under Eisenhower. | ||
| Now, I think Nixon lost that debate on the transcript as well. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So, just to get a sense of how parties have changed, what were the basic tenets that JFK was running on? | ||
| So, John F. Kennedy didn't know what he wanted to run on. | ||
| This is a classic Kennedy thing. | ||
| We know we must be president, so the question is, what are we to run on? | ||
| So, it was really the Democratic National Committee, or the convention, That summer, they kind of defined, for Kennedy, he had a lot to do with it, of course, what he would run on. | ||
| And he decided he would run on that the country was not growing enough. | ||
| And he made his tagline, we have to get this country moving again. | ||
| We have all these old, slow people in government. | ||
| And he kept making the point that we have a lot of recessions. | ||
| He was right. | ||
| There was a recession in 1954. | ||
| Big one in 1957. | ||
| And then it was coming right then in 1960. | ||
| And he said, we gotta get out of this rut. | ||
| And he kept saying, we have to get this country moving again. | ||
| Get this country moving again. | ||
| So that was his main theme. | ||
| And then he also talked about how we have to get a little tougher on communism because we're not moving enough. | ||
| The Soviets are starting to pass us by. | ||
| And those were his big themes. | ||
| So when you say that within a 2018 context, it's hard to believe, as I referenced earlier, it's hard to believe that a Democrat would be running against sort of slow, inefficient government, but that is what he did. | ||
| It's kind of incredible. | ||
| Now, the Republicans back then were the big deficit hawks. | ||
| They were like, okay, maybe we've had some recessions, but we have a budget deficit and we have to keep taxes high, tax rates high, so we take care of the budget deficit. | ||
| Wouldn't be prudent. | ||
| That old George Bush line, I mean, that's very applicable. | ||
| George Bush came of age in the 1950s to have economic growth if we don't take care of our deficit first. | ||
| And that was the defensive position of Eisenhower and Nixon. | ||
| Kennedy saw that and saw an opening and ran with it. | ||
| Yeah, so what was the beginning of the presidency like? | ||
| You know, when I watch all of these documentaries now, you know, it's so much about the family and that there was this feeling of this young person in the office and all that. | ||
| I suspect there was more to it than just that. | ||
| Okay, so when Kennedy was elected in November 1960, the United States had just tipped into a recession. | ||
| There were mass layoffs of hundreds of thousands in October, probably delivered him the election win that Sorensen, his advisor, certainly thought so. | ||
| And then unemployment went all the way up, increased up to 5 billion. | ||
| By January 1961. | ||
| Do you know what that percentage was, just for reference? | ||
| 5% now doesn't sound like that. | ||
| Well, 5 million. | ||
| Sorry, 5 million doesn't sound like that. | ||
| The unemployment rate was probably going up to about 8% at that point, I'd have to check, but probably around there. | ||
| Kennedy took office amidst a snowstorm that just ended before his inaugural address, his famous inaugural address. | ||
| And the big problem was there's now a new recession. | ||
| And then when he gave his State of the Union address ten days later in January 1961, he kind of had a lot of equivalence, equivocal statements. | ||
| He said, We have to get our house in order to get our country moving again, and the government has to spend a lot of money. | ||
| So he kind of laid out two options. | ||
| We have to kind of get the government more efficient, but also get the government spending a lot of money. | ||
| So it was unclear what he was going to do. | ||
| Yeah, what does that even mean? | ||
| I mean, do you think he knew at the time? | ||
| Because those sound like statements that can't work together. | ||
| Richard Reeves, who's his greatest biographer, he wrote the great book on Kennedy in 1992, President Kennedy. | ||
| He said, no no no, what Kennedy liked to do, and I think this is true, we have all the Kennedy tapes, we can hear him on audio, the John F. Kennedy Library has amazing things online, we can hear so much from Kennedy's voice privately. | ||
| It's pretty clear that he thought himself kind of the uber intellectual | ||
| Not a philosophical intellectual but somebody who could process thoughts and he would get a lot of good advice and | ||
| then pick the best Option so that's the way he would operate. He wasn't gonna | ||
| figure it out himself He's gonna wait and see and then make a strategic decision | ||
| So you think when he brought up those seemingly conflicting ideas that he actually did mean it and that eventually he | ||
| would take one He would whittle it away with the right people behind it | ||
| And now this sort of gets to what your book was about. | ||
| Which one did he end up going for? | ||
| And was this good? | ||
| He went for both. | ||
| Okay, so Larry Geller and I wrote this book, JFK and the Reagan Revolution, about the John F. Kennedy tax cut, and the big reason is what Larry, my co-author, has had to deal with for 15-20 years. | ||
| He gets this at parties from the likes of people like Caroline Kennedy, he gets it on television, CNBC. | ||
| How dare you say that the John F. Kennedy tax cut had anything to do with the Reagan tax cut, because that tax cut was designed by Keynesians in order to stimulate demand in the economy. | ||
| And Larry said, I don't think so. | ||
| And he's right. | ||
| All right, wait, let's pause for just a second. | ||
| Can you tell me a little bit about the tax cut specifically, just so we have a framework? | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| So there was a tax cut in 1964, so after Kennedy's president, after Kennedy died, that was his brainchild. | ||
| And that actually was his main legislative accomplishment. | ||
| But he was president for a thousand days, right? | ||
| And he didn't get anything done, really, on the economy until he introduced that tax cut in 1963. | ||
| So in 61 and 62, he was doing his famous vacillating. | ||
| That's when he was thinking about, hey, the Keynesians are saying, we need loose money from the Federal Reserve, and we need a lot of social programs. | ||
| And he was experimenting with that. | ||
| Forecast came in, there's going to be another recession. | ||
| He pulled back and said, wait, we need some more deep thinking. | ||
| Keynesian said, keep doing it, but then pulled in other people. | ||
| What do you say? | ||
| No, we need a big marginal tax cut. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| When the stock market crashed in April 1962, June 1962, he said, okay, we need a big marginal tax cut. | ||
| How powerful was the presidency at this time? | ||
| You know, one of the things that we talk about on this show a lot is just that the executive branch just keeps getting more power and more power and does all this stuff via executive action. | ||
| A lot of this, when you hear about it, I think the average person thinks, wait a minute, is it the president's job, really, to be doing all this? | ||
| Isn't he supposed to sign the laws, not really be making the laws? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's interesting on that score, is that John F. Kennedy was actually not terribly interested in making unique executive actions. | ||
| Actually, with each of his executive signings, he had these signing statements that went on and on and on about how justified his signature was. | ||
| Sometimes now they just sign him. | ||
| Yeah, now it's just Trump. | ||
| Pan up, down, left. | ||
| That signature, man! | ||
| Something. | ||
| I think that's the president's, yeah. | ||
| So, he actually rejected an executive authority that his liberal advisors were imploring him to take. | ||
| And that was, his liberal advisors say, you should have a standby tax cut authority. | ||
| You should have the authority as president just to reduce taxes on your own for a period of time, maybe up to 18 months. | ||
| So if the economy starts tipping into recession, you can just sign a piece of paper and everyone's taxes will go down and it'll get out of recession. | ||
| And then if inflation starts going up or overheating, then you can take it away. | ||
| And that's effective. | ||
| And Kennedy said, no, I'm not gonna do that. | ||
| And that's interesting. | ||
| So I always describe Kennedy as my kind of Democrat. | ||
| I talk a lot about how the left has sort of lost its way, and it's lost its classical liberal roots, and they've picked progressivism, big government, over liberalism. | ||
| Do you think his political ethos, I mean, from everything I'm hearing from you so far, was he basically came from a classical liberal line of thinking, right? | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Kennedy ultimately- It sounds like there was definitely some play on both sides here. | ||
| Yeah, Kennedy ultimately did some very good things as president above all the tax cut. | ||
| You could argue the Civil Rights Act, even though I still kind of think, and Kennedy believed, and we can talk about this later if you like, That if the tax cut had just happened, the Civil Rights Act would have been unnecessary. | ||
| We can talk about that later. | ||
| The thing, though, about Kennedy is he was kind of a wild man. | ||
| I mean, he was a rich, wild man. | ||
| And I don't know how useful that particularly is in our political life. | ||
| His father was kind of crazy about what he did, how he felt he could influence politics. | ||
| And his son was kind of a chip off the old block, although his son was incapable of making money. | ||
| unlike his father, but they were both pretty wild people in charge of the United States government. | ||
| That might be an argument for shrinking government. | ||
| Yeah, well, all right, so when you say wild, I mean, we hear all kinds of stories and rumors | ||
| and all this and that. | ||
| I mean, what are you saying wild is or was? | ||
| Yeah, Larry and I talk a bit about a girl he dated, a woman named Margaret Coit, who won the Pulitzer Prize | ||
| in biography and history. | ||
| She wrote a biography, a great biography of John Calhoun in 1950 and won the Pulitzer Prize then. | ||
| Kennedy wanted to get to know her because he wanted to win the Pulitzer Prize too. | ||
| And we have her recollections of the time when she dated Kennedy right before he proposed to Jackie in 1953. | ||
| And she said, you know, he'd just drive around in the convertible and making sure he was staying on the streetcar tracks, just annoying people on the road. | ||
| And he was saying, I want to do this, I want to do this. | ||
| I just realized this guy's just a little bit out of my league. | ||
| He was kind of a force of nature. | ||
| So, alright, there are some people who are forces of nature. | ||
| So I just think from a certain perspective that might be a reason if we have government to make sure that if we have those people at the top of government, government should be small. | ||
| All right, I want to do a lot more on the taxes, and I do want to get to civil rights, but we should back up a little bit, because I haven't mentioned Jackie at all. | ||
| I actually just watched the movie with Natalie Portman. | ||
| I thought it was excellent. | ||
| What do we need to know about their relationship, the courtship, and then the amount of power that she had, or at least the uncomfortability with being the first lady, and then subsequently after he was assassinated? | ||
| Yeah, Jackie, the first guy who proposed to Jackie just died a year or two ago in his home in Nantucket in Massachusetts. | ||
| And Jackie turned down his proposal, this is in 1951 or 1952, because she and her mother did not think that he would end up being rich enough. | ||
| And I point out that he died on Nantucket. | ||
| But I think she was right. | ||
| Even he would not have been rich enough. | ||
| No, I think, now Jackie... That's hard to believe, but people don't really understand what that sort of Northeast, what do you call that? | ||
| It's not even elite, it's something else, right? | ||
| Just that family dynasty thing where these people really were connected with other people for the purposes of politics and power. | ||
| It's hard to believe it, I think, in a modern sense. | ||
| I know. | ||
| But I think what really calmed Jackie down, they were a great love match, I don't think there's any dispute about that, Jack and Jackie, but what really settled Jackie was Joseph P's wealth. | ||
| Jackie really adored JFK's father. | ||
| Adored him. | ||
| And his 400 million dollars calmed her down. | ||
| So, I think that was the absolute glue that kept them together. | ||
| Right, and she came from a lot of money, right? | ||
| I mean, the movie has had money. | ||
| Yeah, then there's a divorce, and she was married, and she was brought into the Auchincloss family, which was very involved. | ||
| A senator from New Jersey, Auchincloss representative, who voted for the Kennedy tax cut in the 1960s. | ||
| Louis Auchincloss, the famous novelist. | ||
| But they had been harmed by the 1929 crisis, and the Kennedy family had been immensely enriched by the 1929 crisis. | ||
| So there was a big wealth gap between those families. | ||
| So everything that I've seen about her, I haven't read much about her, but I've watched Grey Gardens, seen the Jackie movie and everything, that she really struggled with the public nature of this, really from day one. | ||
| But she also knew what she was marrying into. | ||
| Is that just a little bit about the complexity of her character? | ||
| Well, Jackie was this, no question, she was a sophisticated person. | ||
| I mean, she spoke French and Spanish and all that because she was interested in the ways of the world. | ||
| And she really was one of the most remarkable fashion plates in all of history. | ||
| And she stepped into those roles very well. | ||
| So, yes, she was shy. | ||
| She has that little voice that you can Barely here. | ||
| But she also understood what her potential was. | ||
| Her potential was to be an ambassador for civilization, and she stepped into that very, very willingly, and it's good that she did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so now let's jump back. | ||
| We're going to do a little more on her, but now let's jump back to those tax cuts. | ||
| So you're saying that JFK put those tax cuts into place, 62, 63, but then they weren't enacted until after he was gone. | ||
| So tell me a little bit more about that. | ||
| What happened is he didn't put those tax cuts in place, I'm afraid, in 61 and 62. | ||
| He listened to his liberal advisors who said, we have to concentrate on government spending. | ||
| Hold off on tax cuts. | ||
| Let's just concentrate on government spending. | ||
| Let's get loose money from the Fed and maybe welfare programs, spend on national parks, post offices, all bunch of stuff. | ||
| And that'll stave off recession. | ||
| That'll stave it off. | ||
| That'll stave it off. | ||
| And if we invest In education and hospitals and Medicare and welfare, the economy will grow because of that government investment. | ||
| That was the argument of his liberal advisors. | ||
| Kennedy did that for the first year and a half. | ||
| All the forecasts came in and said, oh, there's going to be another recession. | ||
| There were four recessions in the 1950s. | ||
| In 1949, 54, 57, 60. | ||
| It's going to be a fifth in 13 years. | ||
| Every 24 months, 36 months, there's going to be a recession. | ||
| When the stock market went down 30% in the spring of 1962, Kennedy said, there's going to be another recession. | ||
| I'm going to be so run out of office. | ||
| It's not funny. | ||
| We're going to switch gears here. | ||
| And that's when he gave his commencement speech at Yale. | ||
| In June of 1962, saying, we have to think about reversing our policy mix towards tight money to protect the dollar and tax cuts to expand the economy. | ||
| And then what happened? | ||
| What was the result? | ||
| Then his liberal advisors said, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, it's going great. | ||
| Don't listen to that. | ||
| What was their argument, though, at that point when they were looking at the numbers? | ||
| What was the argument? | ||
| Was this purely like operating on a philosophical level that if you just keep throwing money at the government in these programs, They waved academic articles at him. | ||
| They had Paul Samuelson at MIT and Robert Solow, two future Nobel Prize winners, whose staff at the Council of Economic Advisors, saying, oh no, we've come up with this thing called the neoclassical synthesis that says if you have really loose money from the Fed, that will get the economy moving. | ||
| Don't worry about inflation. | ||
| You can mop it up with high tax rates. | ||
| And then the revenue you get can fund programs and education and health care that will help the economy grow. | ||
| Just stick to it. | ||
| Forget about those forecasts for a recession, but that really reveals Kennedy's decision-making character. | ||
| He listened, listened, listened, and then just said, okay, you guys are wrong. | ||
| We're gonna do the opposite. | ||
| And that's, you know, that's real decision-making metal. | ||
| So then AFT in 64, when these tax cuts go into place, then what was the result? | ||
| Well, so there's still a year and a half there, if I may point out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So then, in July, Kennedy started talking to his Treasury Secretary big time. | ||
| Now, he had communicated with him daily on all sorts of matters, but Larry and I talk a lot about C. Douglas Dillon, the unsung hero of the Kennedy administration. | ||
| Just as rich as Jesse P. Kennedy, by the way. | ||
| Kennedy's Treasury Secretary. | ||
| Dillon said, you've got to protect the dollar and cut tax rates. | ||
| That's what you've got to do. | ||
| Kennedy went on national television in August saying, by the way, that's our policy. | ||
| I'm going to introduce the bill in Congress. | ||
| He did that in January of 63, big congressional debate, almost got passed before the assassination. | ||
| By that point, the markets and everyone else knew Kennedy's serious about tax cuts, and that's when the huge 60s boom started. | ||
| What did the parties think of this at the time? | ||
| Because if you think about it in the context of 2018, Democrats generally are for higher taxes, Republicans generally are for lower taxes. | ||
| So when Kennedy goes out there, listens to the advice, and says this, Was the party behind him? | ||
| Or am I looking at this only through our 2018 lens? | ||
| No, no, this is news. | ||
| This is big news. | ||
| Larry and I talk about this in the book a lot. | ||
| The party of tax rate cuts, particularly cuts on the top rate of the income tax, the top one. | ||
| Back then it was 91%. | ||
| That's unbelievable. | ||
| That's really hard to fathom. | ||
| The top rate was 91%. | ||
| It's so hard to fathom that it has to be a joke. | ||
| And it was a joke because nobody paid it. | ||
| No, it's true. | ||
| Nobody paid that rate. | ||
| Maybe 20% of people who should have been... that rate should have applied to paid it. | ||
| That's how many loopholes there were. | ||
| And the Democrats said, you see these rich guys, what they're doing is they're buying off the tax system. | ||
| They claim they're paying this rate, and then they get all these loopholes and they're hiding their money, and we get a recession every 24 months because capital's not deployed correctly. | ||
| So it was the Democrats. | ||
| Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in 1959, commissioned a huge 2,500-page study on why we have to cut the top rate of the income tax. | ||
| And it was the Republicans who said, hey, hold it! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We know what to do. | ||
| If we say we need a loophole, give us a loophole. | ||
| We're in charge here. | ||
| So Republicans said no tax rate cuts, the system's working fine, | ||
| and the Democrats said tax rate cuts to get us out of the serial recession. | ||
| Yeah, what does that say about how things flip over years in time? | ||
| Well, I think, first of all, we have to blame the contemporary Democrats. | ||
| Democrats today, the last 20 years, what are you doing forgetting your legacy? | ||
| I mean, we can go back to the 1820s to realize that the founding of the party, it was about lowering top tax rates. | ||
| When you talk about the tariff, John Calhoun and Kennedy had a lot to say about Calhoun through his girlfriend, Margaret Coyd. | ||
| Calhoun said, yeah, tariff rates hurt the little guy. | ||
| And then Grover Cleveland, income tax hurts the little guy, 1890s. | ||
| Woodrow Wilson, after he raised taxes, had three Treasury Secretaries who said, these are completely scarifying, let's lower them. | ||
| They're killing investment in this country for the little guy. | ||
| Really, you can go through just about every Democratic president has cut tax rates. | ||
| I mean, Bill Clinton cut the capital gains rate. | ||
| Jimmy Carter cut the capital gains rate. | ||
| Barack Obama was spooked by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and he kept them for one more year. | ||
| So, I mean, there's a long history of Democrats cutting the top rate. | ||
| Yeah, so then alright, so 64, now the economy starts going again. | ||
| Kennedy's gone. | ||
| Tell me a little bit more about the legacy of that, and then sort of how that got to Reagan, and then we'll get back to some of the Kennedy stuff. | ||
| Here's the basic inflection, here are the basic numbers. | ||
| The eight years of the Dwight Eisenhower presidency, 1953 to 1961, economic growth was 2.5%. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| Population growth in the baby boom was 2.5%. | ||
| This is complete stagnation with three recessions. | ||
| From 1961 to 1969, so the beginning of the Kennedy administration through the end of the Johnson administration, economic growth was 5.1%, more than double the rate of economic growth. | ||
| Now, we believe it's highly attributable, Larry and I, to the policy mix that Kennedy adopted, which is we are going to guarantee the dollar. | ||
| We're not going to try to get the dollar off the gold standard, as Nixon would. | ||
| We're going to guarantee the dollar, so we're not going to have loose money from the Fed, and we're going to get money out there by lowering tax rates, particularly on the rich. | ||
| It worked as beautifully as any public policy has ever worked in American history. | ||
| All right, so let's change gears a little bit here and talk about some of the civil rights stuff, because as all of this is happening, and there's a ton, obviously, we're talking about economically mostly, the civil rights movement was happening in its best sense. | ||
| So I guess, first, what was his innate feelings about the civil rights movement? | ||
| And then we'll talk about some of the specifics. | ||
| Yeah, I think John F. Kennedy was in favor of the Civil Rights Movement. | ||
| I think he clearly thought there should be equal opportunity and a lot of the recalcitrance that could be found in the country was regrettable and should be lifted. | ||
| When it came to policy, though, he was characteristically slow-moving. | ||
| So, how so, for example? | ||
| Like, what could he have done earlier, etc.? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I mean, now, we should note that slow-moving might make sense in that a lot of civil rights activists argue that the laws are already on the books. | ||
| I mean, there's nothing we need to do except just be true to ourselves and all the problems will be lifted. | ||
| Yeah, the Freedom Rides, he made phone calls, and when Birmingham Jail, when Martin Luther King was in the Birmingham crisis in April, May 1963, Kennedy wasn't doing a lot aside from just kind of pressure, verbally. | ||
| But the funny thing about that is that what a lot of leaders | ||
| said, and A. Philip Randolph had been saying this for a long time, is that we need jobs. | ||
| You know, civil rights is nice, but when black unemployment's 20%, | ||
| and when you don't have any shackles to rub together, would go to civil rights. | ||
| So Kennedy started to understand, oh, if we have a booming economy, | ||
| a lot of people in this country, including whites, are gonna start relaxing and say, | ||
| Sure, blacks, whites, everything, because everyone is well off. | ||
| And Kennedy perceived that's one of the reasons he cut taxes. | ||
| So I know I'm going to get some crap for saying this, but that almost seems like the Trump view of equality, that Trump has been cutting taxes I think I read just a couple weeks ago that black unemployment is at an all-time low right now. | ||
| So he was sort of taking that. | ||
| That's a page from the JFK book, basically. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| And when I talk about the Civil Rights Act of 64, 65, and 64, when Kennedy introduced in June of 63, and it was passed, I don't know. | ||
| If the tax cut had been passed, if we'd had a growing economy at 5% in the 50s, would we have even thought to have a Civil Rights Act? | ||
| I don't know, because everyone might have been getting along well enough. | ||
| Kennedy kind of came to that realization, and that's a real thing. | ||
| So if we perceive it today, we shouldn't run away from it. | ||
| That's a good association. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because I know even just by saying those two names in the same sentence a certain amount of people are going to be angry at me, but that's alright. | ||
| What was the nature of his relationship with Martin Luther King? | ||
| Because I've read a bit about it and it sounds like it was kind of complex. | ||
| There were places where they were lined up, but not all the time. | ||
| Let me answer it this way. | ||
| What was the federal government's relationship with Martin Luther King? | ||
| Because J. Edgar Hoover, of course, is still doing his thing as FBI director with all the kind of surveillance, probably harassment of Martin Luther King. | ||
| And Kennedy is paralyzed as everyone is with the FBI. | ||
| So there's that. | ||
| I mean, Kennedy is not doing anything about the kind of harassment of Kennedy. | ||
| Did Kennedy know about that? | ||
| Do we know if Kennedy knew that all that was happening? | ||
| I'd have to look at the files we have. | ||
| A lot of those remain classified, so I'm not totally sure. | ||
| Yeah, they have declassified some of this stuff just in the last year, right? | ||
| It's exposed a little more of the surveillance that was happening on MLK. | ||
| But what about their personal relationship? | ||
| Yeah, I think Kennedy appreciated King's intellectualism. | ||
| I mean, he brought King into the White House, and then he watched the March on Washington from the portico of the White House, kind of peering around the corner, and then invited everyone back afterwards. | ||
| And he apparently said, I wish I could be out there with him, and acted chummy with King. | ||
| But he did kind of keep him at arm's length. | ||
| I think he was a little worried about King's association, invidious or not, with communism, because Kennedy was very anti-communist. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So that's interesting, because from when we're taping this, it was just a couple weeks ago that it was Martin Luther King Day, and I find it's one of the strangest days to be on Twitter, not that you can garner that much information from Twitter, but where everyone sort of takes MLK and uses them for their modern day political purposes. | ||
| That's right, so the memes of some people saying he was a socialist, some people saying he was a communist, he was an environmentalist, whatever you want him to be within your 2018 lens, that's what people use. | ||
| But that's really interesting to me, that JFK had this idea built in him from childhood, as you were saying, about hating communism. | ||
| MLK had some association, at least with sort of loosely communism or socialism, or certainly had issues with the United States government and certain levels of capitalism. | ||
| So they did have, they were at loggerheads in some ways. | ||
| Yeah, I think Kennedy did not want to get burned by King. | ||
| In other words, he didn't want to kind of bring King into his inner circle and then King manifests himself as a flaming communist. | ||
| Kennedy was way too cool a character to get burned that way. | ||
| But by the summer of 63, so after the Birmingham crisis, which was the national outrage on television, Kennedy would get heckled in his speeches. | ||
| Hey, you're not doing anything about civil rights! | ||
| And that's when he really pushed the tax cut. | ||
| In that August and September 1963, which is when the March on Washington happened, and let's remember the subtitle of the March on Washington, Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington, was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. | ||
| And those are the two sides of Kennedy's legislative agenda. | ||
| Tax cut, Civil Rights Act. | ||
| Kennedy actually felt, we believe, that if you had the tax cut early enough, you wouldn't even need the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| So, that's the way kind of Kennedy walked through this kind of complicated politics. | ||
| Yeah, so he really sounds to me sort of like a politician's politician. | ||
| He doesn't sound much like an ideologue specifically in that he really was listening to the people about him. | ||
| Is there anything else we're missing to sort of get the full picture on the way he tried to govern? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he got lucky, too, and I hate to use that word in this context. | ||
| The most outrageous event in the history of the Civil Rights Movement might be the Birmingham church bombing in September 1963 when the four girls were killed by dynamite. | ||
| That actually made Kennedy's tax cut, because the event was so outrageous. | ||
| Kennedy's tax bill was being voted on in Congress right then. | ||
| The Southern Democrats Did not feel like they could make a show of defeating Kennedy's legislation because that event was so outrageous, and then it slipped through the House and passed right there. | ||
| So the Birmingham church bombing actually had a lot to do with the passage of the Kennedy tax cut. | ||
| Wow, that's interesting. | ||
| So yeah, Kennedy, he was okay as a legislator, but I mean, he got away with a lot too, and he got a little lucky. | ||
| Yeah, interesting. | ||
| So, speaking of luck, let's talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis a little bit, because I guess this really is the... Well, I guess you would argue that the tax cuts really are his biggest legacy, but I think most people think of the Cuban Missile Crisis. | ||
| So, just kind of set the stage. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Well, I just want to point out, in terms of his legislative agenda, I don't think it's disputable that the tax cut was his most important, maybe civil rights act. | ||
|
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But yeah, when it comes to foreign policy... Fair to think, we're talking about two different ballgames here. | |
| Now, that played right to Kennedy's strength, I'm afraid, because if it was going to be clarified, there's going to be a contest between the U.S. | ||
| and the representative of communism, the Soviet Union. | ||
|
unidentified
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The U.S. | |
| was gonna win. | ||
| So that played right into his hands. | ||
| Okay, so that, we know that that's built into him from childhood. | ||
| Just give me Cuban Missile Crisis 101, a little bit of what led up to it, and what his decision-making was that ended up being so wonderful. | ||
| So Nikita Khrushchev is the premier of the Soviet Union and his new client state in Cuba ever since Fidel Castro had taken over in 59. | ||
| And Khrushchev sent nuclear missiles to Cuba so they'd be 90 miles away from U.S. | ||
| territory in Florida. | ||
| When this is discovered, Kennedy tells the Soviets they have to get out immediately. | ||
| The Soviets don't agree. | ||
| Tension could lead to the firing of missiles, and Kennedy gets Khrushchev to face down. | ||
| Kennedy gets him to say, OK, we'll pull our missiles out. | ||
| And it was big egg on Khrushchev's face back in the Soviet Union. | ||
| One tidbit about that. | ||
| The documents that came out in November on the presidential assassination do seem to indicate that Khrushchev gave the order after that humiliation to all networks globally that Kennedy should be assassinated and Lee Harvey Oswald may have begun his preparations because of that directive. | ||
| All right, so I do wanna talk about the assassination, obviously, and even just the way you said that there's so much of it that's hard to piece together, and how far do you wanna go down the rabbit hole and follow the conspiracies and all that, but we will get to that. | ||
| But what was the final moment that got Khrushchev to turn down? | ||
| I mean, did Kennedy basically say, well, I know there's the line, of course, but was it really communicated like, this is going to be World War III right now? | ||
| I think to answer that question, we have to speak Russian and have access to the archives, because I think what happened is that Khrushchev felt pressure at home. | ||
| As a lot of people have said, the Soviet Union really was a status quo power, and the Politburo began asking Khrushchev, are you going to take our lives away from us? | ||
| Are you going to take our summer dachas on the Caspian Sea away from us, and our 10% of us in the Soviet Union who have a nice life? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Would you please back down? | ||
| It seems that whatever Kennedy was doing, the real folding happened on the Soviet side. | ||
| And Khrushchev was not the first among equals. | ||
| I mean, he did not, he was barely premier of the Soviet Union. | ||
| So it seems that, and we don't have enough information on this because it's behind these source walls, that the Russians backed down because they realized Khrushchev was acting crazily. | ||
| This may sound like an amateur question, but did they ever actually speak, the two of them, through translators? | ||
| Or everything goes through the communicators? | ||
| Geez, I'm gonna have to review, there's a great book on this called One Hell of a Gamble, which has all the documents. | ||
| It's an amazing book by Ernest May and Phil Zelikoff from the 1990s, so let's look that up. | ||
| How much after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I mean, that really changed everything in American foreign policy, right? | ||
| I mean, it really was a huge catalyst for a lot. | ||
| Well, we argue in our book that the big change, foreign policy-wise, came a year later when Kennedy countenanced and assisted in the assassination of the South Vietnamese President Diem in November, just a couple weeks before Kennedy's assassination. | ||
| And that seems to have been the tipping point in Vietnam. | ||
| I'm telling you, I've been listening to a lot of the Kennedy tapes on Vietnam, with McNamara and everything else. | ||
| It is true that Kennedy had no real interest in a long-term war in Southeast Asia. | ||
| No, he didn't. | ||
| What on earth he was doing helping to assassinate Diem? | ||
| I have no idea and that was a big mistake. | ||
| So was that really just because he had this, again, he had this thing drilled into him from his father from childhood about communism and maybe that overrode The intellectual part of him that said, let's not get into these intractable wars? | ||
| Yeah, I think, I think GM in Vietnam was one of those people that Madden Kennedy, because he again, like King, he didn't want you to bring him into his circle and then have you burn him. | ||
| The American guy, he's our guy in South Vietnam, and he just kept alienating people and making life difficult for the monks. | ||
| And Kennedy's like, hey, you're supposed to be our guy, and I'm John F. Kennedy. | ||
| So at some point, Kennedy will break and just say, okay, you're gone. | ||
| Gone at this point meant assassinated. | ||
| That is rare in the Kennedy ambit. | ||
| And it ended up being not good for American and Vietnamese fortunes for the next 10 years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What else do we need to know about just sort of the personal side in terms of what was going on in the White House during those years? | ||
| Yeah, I mean he ran an elegant White House and all that. | ||
| He did have his girlfriends really kind of did that side of him did desecrate the White House. | ||
| I think we have to understand. | ||
| How much do people know? | ||
| I think it's hard for people to understand in a modern sense of what could it have been before social media and before everyone had a phone and all that. | ||
| What did the average person know about that at the time? | ||
| Or what was the media even saying about that? | ||
| Kind of the wisdom of crowds. | ||
| I think the electorate largely understood what was going on, even though there's no hard evidence in the papers and so forth. | ||
| And there really wasn't any hard evidence. | ||
| I mean, now we know about his swimming nude and the pool and the Secret Service having to hold his drinks and all that stuff. | ||
| And we know all about that now. | ||
| Judith Exner may have been killed by the Communists because she was a plant. | ||
| Not Judith Exner, but Gifford Pinchot's niece. | ||
| I believe that because Kennedy had so many kind of crazy affairs in the White House, the press felt that it was burned. | ||
| Like, we're not allowed to report this, and that's really what gave us Watergate. | ||
| Because Nixon's things were kind of small in comparison, and the press was like, we got burned then, we're not going to get burned again. | ||
| Wow, that's fascinating. | ||
| I've never heard anyone lay it out like that. | ||
| So basically, they kind of played along with JFK because they were trying to be nice. | ||
| Maybe he was a little bit of their guy, sort of. | ||
| But they felt embarrassed by it. | ||
| I mean, they felt used. | ||
| I mean, we're just shutting up about this? | ||
| And then the next time a suggestion of that came around, they just went with a sledgehammer. | ||
| Interesting, that's really interesting. | ||
| Sorry, so obviously we have to talk about the assassination. | ||
| Tell me a little bit, just in the weeks leading up to it, what was going on in the presidency? | ||
| Yeah, I think that was really Kennedy's highest time as president. | ||
| Thurston Clark has written a great book about Kennedy's last hundred days, from August to November 1963. | ||
| But he really was coming into his own. | ||
| And I think that's true, actually. | ||
| He kept talking to the Secret Service agent, hey, isn't this a great day to be alive? | ||
| I mean, he was really into it. | ||
| His tax cut was going through, his civil rights cut was going through, the Soviets were gone. | ||
| He just assassinated ZM, that's a footnote. | ||
| How public was that, by the way? | ||
| Oh, it was public, yeah. | ||
| It was completely public? | ||
| Well, no, it was presented as a palace coup, that it was internal, so the American fingerprints were not clear at the time. | ||
| And his ambassador, his new ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, who he defeated in the Senate race, In the fifties, he was kind of the fall guy, so it appears that he put somebody in Saigon who would have to endure the dirty work. | ||
| So, aside from that, Kennedy's enjoying watching Polaris missile launches, and he's laughing at the Senate Finance Committee, which is trying to hold up his tax cut, and he's just like, you guys can try to hold it up, but you know I'm going to win. | ||
| So he's really kind of coming into his own in November 22nd. | ||
| I don't know how to ask this question properly, because everyone's seen so much about it, but the news starts breaking, and it's hard to imagine what breaking news would be like at that time now. | ||
| Can you kind of frame that a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, we can see these. | ||
| They're on, you know, YouTube. | ||
| Soap operas back then were live, so there would be live actors, you know, acting out the soap opera. | ||
| And they were broken into, and you can watch these again on the internet right now, with bulletins from Walter Cronkite and so forth saying that there's been an incident in Dallas, the president's been shot, and then they would go back to the live acting, and then the actors would just start acting again about the drama of the soap opera. | ||
| But it took probably about 45 minutes to an hour for people to realize that it happened. | ||
| When did the conspiracies start popping? | ||
| Like, immediately, were people going, something is wrong here? | ||
| You know, why was he taking this sort of circular route around with the topless car? | ||
| And all of that stuff. | ||
| Were people immediately doing that? | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, the trip to Dallas itself was controversial. | ||
| It was in the planning in October, November, because Dallas was a hotbed of kind of what we might call white supremacy. | ||
| And people worry, well, and Kennedy said it's nut country down there. | ||
| They're kind of anti-Kennedy, even though they voted for Kennedy because of Johnson on the ticket. | ||
| So everyone was worried about his not getting a good reception in Texas from the kind of, call them racist, | ||
| you know, whites, if you want to use those terms. | ||
| But the trip was totally successful on those counts. | ||
| He went to Fort Worth and a huge celebration and he went to Dallas and everyone loved him. | ||
| And the last words perhaps spoken to John F. Kennedy were from Connolly's wife in the car, well, it's all over now and you can't say that Texas doesn't love you. | ||
| And then he was blown away. | ||
| Wow, incredible. | ||
| So, you know, I think the first time that I paid any attention to this was probably in high school when I saw the movie JFK. | ||
| I assume you've seen the movie JFK. | ||
| So how far, as someone that really cares about this story and all that, I mean, how far down all these rabbit holes are you willing to go? | ||
| It sounds like some of it's still unfolding as new documents still come out, but just for you, as someone that is interested in this. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple aspects of the assassination that we have to take seriously, that we have to kind of lose our sophistication about, oh, Oswald acted alone. | ||
| No, hold it. | ||
| Dilley Plaza is the best place possible for an assassination. | ||
| That's where it happened. | ||
| That should interest us in terms of conspiracy theories. | ||
| Can you explain why? | ||
| I mean, there's that slow turn, just the points of vision, all of it, right? | ||
| It's at the end of the parade route, so the parade is over, and then there has to be a right turn and a left turn that goes then downhill. | ||
| So, the parade's over, which means the intensity of the experience is over, and the Secret Service's interest will start to wane, and that was absolutely essential in the assassination. | ||
| So there's that setting, and then there's a school book depository right there within the grassy knoll. | ||
| And an overpass, too, at Stemmon's Freeway. | ||
| Well, it's a perfect place for assassination, so therefore we should stop this pseudo-sophistication about how Oswald acted alone. | ||
| The other thing, too, is Kennedy was absurdly good at making enemies. | ||
| I mean, he just made enemies. | ||
| I mean, his father made enemies for a living. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| By the way, we've talked for 45 or 50 minutes now. | ||
| We haven't even said in Military-Industrial Complex 1, which obviously had some issues with him which we can touch on as well. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, and Oswald also had connections to beat the band with the mob, the Soviets, the Cubans, you know, I mean, so that's also very fruitful. | ||
| Jack Ruby, Oswald was killed. | ||
| Jack Ruby has connections to beat the band, so these are all suggestive. | ||
| Nonetheless, James Pearson's book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, is the best book ever written about the Kennedy assassination. | ||
| And it is about the liberal reaction to the Kennedy assassination, because liberals, to this day, That's an interesting way of phrasing it. | ||
| in Dallas, and that's just crazy. | ||
| He was killed because he was an anti-communist. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty clear that Ali Ahri Oswald killed John F. Kennedy because John F. Kennedy | ||
| was anti-communist, and we now are starting to piece together that he may have felt | ||
| he was acting on orders from the Soviet Union. | ||
| What he may have felt, that's an interesting way of phrasing it, what do you mean may have felt? | ||
| Well, Oswald is quite a character, and what was going on in his head, we don't know. | ||
| We do know that he met, he went to the Cuban Embassy to meet a Soviet assassination expert in September 1963. | ||
| The documents that just came out imply That it was understood in late 1962 that Nikita Khrushchev, after getting burned in the Cuban Missile Crisis, may have sent out some kind of broad order into the global Soviet network that it would be desirable if the President of the United States were assassinated. | ||
| And that order may have been called back because of pressure within the Politburo. | ||
| Hey, Khrushchev, you're still acting like a nut. | ||
| Khrushchev was forced out in 1964. | ||
| But once you squeeze the toothpaste out of the tube, it's darn hard to get it back in. | ||
| So it may be, this isn't speculation, but grounded in some sources, that Oswald was part of that initial outreach and then may not have stopped and then went ahead with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So basically you're willing to go down these routes. | ||
| You sort of have to. | ||
| I mean, the more I read about this and the more of these documentaries I watch, You know, I've got a Carl Sagan book right there and I always quote, you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. | ||
| So I don't know that we have the extraordinary evidence, but there were so many pieces in play here that make it seem hard to believe. | ||
| Yeah, I think the one thing that is firming up pretty well is that Oswald killed Kennedy because he perceived Kennedy to be anti-communist. | ||
| So, it was the left that killed Kennedy, because Kennedy was too right-wing. | ||
| That's been lost over the last 50-some years. | ||
| That is firming up through a lot of sources. | ||
| That's the most important thing, I think, to conclude. | ||
| Then, what the deep story of Oswald's connections are. | ||
| Okay, that's interesting. | ||
| From the Grassy Knoll. | ||
| No, there's no shot from the Grassy Knoll. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| Anyone who's been to Dealer Plaza realizes that's a physical impossibility. | ||
| All that stuff. | ||
| It does appear, very clearly, that Oswald fired those bullets. | ||
| He hit the traffic light. | ||
| Then he hit Kennedy in the neck, then he hit Kennedy in the, | ||
| it was the magic bullet that's very easy to see with a heavy case bullet, full metal jacket. | ||
| Yeah, that will act that way. | ||
| The ballistics aren't a question. | ||
| Oswald shot Kennedy. | ||
| What was it like after, the few weeks after the assassination? | ||
| Yeah, Johnson was disoriented. | ||
| His staff, Kennedy's people wanted to resign. | ||
| They didn't like Johnson. | ||
| The one thing he realized though, is that I have to act to memorialize Kennedy. | ||
| And the one specific step he took was he told the Senate, guess what you're doing? | ||
| You're passing his tax cut right now, which they did because he could intimidate the Senate. | ||
| That gave us the tax cut of 1964 and then Kennedy's promise was fulfilled and that 5% growth kept cruising through the 60s. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was the general, even taking it away from the political side, the general feeling in the country after that? | ||
| Yeah, this whole thing about lost innocence. | ||
| I was just in Fort Worth a couple weeks ago, and I can't believe Fort Worth and Dallas have a big rivalry. | ||
| Fort Worth thinks it's much better than Dallas, where it's 30 miles away. | ||
| And everywhere in Fort Worth there are these reminders of Kennedy's last moments when America was innocent were in Fort Worth. | ||
| And then he went to Dallas where he was killed. | ||
| So that myth of American innocence is perpetuated. | ||
| I don't think it particularly makes a lot of sense. | ||
| In terms of, first of all, Kennedy was killed because he was anti-communist. | ||
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Right. | |
| So I don't know that the narrative makes sense on that grounds, too. | ||
| And, I mean, look, the Civil Rights Movement, you know, which was a great benefit to the United States, well then pushed through and flourished after 1963. | ||
| So that kind of lost innocence I've never quite understood. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So basically the three markers, really, are the economic, Well, Vietnam. | ||
| I mean, Kennedy would have never let Vietnam be the disaster it was. | ||
| He would have never let that happen. | ||
| that's important to talk about. Well, Vietnam, I mean Kennedy would have never let Vietnam | ||
| be the disaster it was. He would have never let that happen. | ||
| So Oliver Stone is completely wrong that, you know, that Kennedy was killed by right-wingers | ||
| who wanted the Vietnam War. | ||
| But it is, I think, inescapable to conclude that Kennedy would not have presided over | ||
| the Vietnam War like Johnson did. | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious, as a historian and someone that deeply cares about this stuff, when you see all of these movies, I mean, we make everything into movies now, right? | ||
| There's JFK and there's Lincoln and there's everything. | ||
| Now there's like 18 Winston Churchill movies and all that stuff. | ||
| How much does that concern you? | ||
| Like, at some level, it's great, people are getting the basic ideas about this stuff, but then in the case of the JFK movie, which I really loved, by the way, and I can, as you can see, I can play those conspiracy games, but that it also is hinting at, you know, there's a real implication that Johnson maybe had something to do with it in the JFK movie and all that stuff. | ||
| So how much does that worry you, that we get all of our information now from movies and docu-series and all that? | ||
| I mean, history is cult-like. | ||
| I mean, history originated in the Stone Age around campfires. | ||
| Tell me stories about it. | ||
| I mean, it's not a closeted academic subject. | ||
| I mean, academics have a lot to say, but there has to be very, you know, good interaction, healthy interaction between all these kind of so-called vulgar forms of history, which are wonderful, better in certain ways than academic history. | ||
| I just thought Aldous Stone is a great movie maker. | ||
| I mean, I love his movies, and Platoon is an incredible movie, the others. | ||
| But he has an extra grind about Vietnam. | ||
| I mean, it was the capitalists who gave it to us. | ||
| It was the right who gave it to us. | ||
| No, if you kept the anti-communist president and you got to realize he was anti-communist, he would have realized how to deal with that crisis. | ||
| All right, so to wrap this all up, I thought the right way to end this would be We've talked a little bit about the sort of modern day context and the modern day lens on some of this stuff and you've referenced how sort of the parties have kind of flipped. | ||
| Some of the things that JFK was saying then would not be things that Democrats would say now. | ||
| What do you think his political alignments would be these days? | ||
| Right. | ||
| If John F. Kennedy had lived, I don't think the Democratic Party would have flipped. | ||
| So let's say John F. Kennedy has two-term presidency. | ||
| Somehow we don't really have a Vietnam War. | ||
| He, you know, is ex-president in 1969. | ||
| Do the Democrats spend the next 20, 30 years saying, that Kennedy tax cut had nothing to do with cutting the top rate? | ||
| No, he would have enforced discipline on that conversation and the Democrats would have been born along as the party of tax cuts so that investment flows into the real world and there are lots of jobs for the regular guy. | ||
| So no, I think the Democratic Party would have been a lot different if he had lived. | ||
| Wow, so he really was the, is it fair to say then you think that he was sort of the last somewhat small government Democrat at some level? | ||
| Yeah, I think what happened is that the left took advantage of the assassination because Kennedy wasn't around to defend himself specifically because of the assassination. | ||
| The left said, aha, we can misrepresent his record. | ||
| We can hold him high as some kind of big government liberal. | ||
| And then he became that, and Caroline and John John were kind of callow enough to go along with that. | ||
| Ted, certainly. | ||
| And that became the icon of John F. Kennedy. | ||
| John F. Kennedy himself would have never let that happen. | ||
| So I'm trying to place where he would be at right now, and I'm guessing so right. | ||
| So if he was basically for tax cuts. | ||
| He believed in a strong military at some level because he was fighting communism, yet also had all these issues with the military industrial complex. | ||
| I'm trying to figure out how would you frame that type of political person these days? | ||
| It's like sort of libertarian, but then with a little bit of a neocon. | ||
| Yeah, well these days would be very different. | ||
| I don't even think we would have had Bill Clinton because Kennedy would have been around to be the elder party leader. | ||
| And people wouldn't have been able to get away with a lot of the misrepresentation that they have in order to make the modern Democratic Party. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So did the assassination and then subsequently the whole family sort of falling apart and Robert Kennedy and everything else, I mean, that really did set, it set the nation in a strange way, but it really did something crazy to the Democratic Party inherently because its whole machine sort of You mentioned RFK. | ||
| Yeah, RFK probably was going to have another marginal tax cut. | ||
| Then he's blown away in 1968. | ||
| Ted Kennedy continued to talk about tax cuts through the mid-70s, and then only in 1980 became this kind of big statist government type. | ||
| So, yeah, it could have been a lot different if the Kennedy boys had lived. | ||
| Yeah, do you think we're done with the dynasties? | ||
| I mean, it seems to me now that, you know, Hillary lost, so it seems like perhaps we've had our last Clinton, although I'm sure Chelsea's gonna run for senator from New York or something like that. | ||
| You know, the Bush family really, after Jeb did so horribly, it seems like that might be done, although George P. Bush down in Texas, maybe he'll do something. | ||
| Maybe Trump is gonna step aside and let Ivanka run next time or who knows. | ||
| But I sense that the dynasty thing really has, people's sort of exhaustion with families that have this much power, really has reached a peak. | ||
| And that would seem to be a salubrious phenomenon. | ||
| I think again the assassination is at fault here. | ||
| If John F. Kennedy had had two full terms, would the nation have felt the obligation to find out about all these other Kennedys? | ||
| Probably not, but the cutting short of that political career I think is what gave life to all these other Kennedys running for office. | ||
| Wow, it's fascinating stuff. | ||
| Well, I've thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
| We're gonna put the link to your book right down below. |
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