Brian Domitrovic argues JFK's economic pivot from Keynesian spending to supply-side tax cuts, signed by LBJ in 1964, ignited the Reagan Revolution. Domitrovic details Kennedy's anti-communist legacy, his rejection of liberal advisors like Paul Samuelson, and claims the assassination allowed the left to misrepresent him as a big-government liberal. This narrative shift allegedly altered the Democratic Party's trajectory, leading to the Vietnam War under Johnson and fundamentally reshaping American political history. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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
unidentified
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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, 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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
unidentified
But yeah, when it comes to foreign policy... Fair to think, we're talking about two different ballgames here.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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 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?
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.
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 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.
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.