John Kennedy vs. Donald Trump

Today Peggy Noonan offers a decidedly strange reflection on President Trump. She asks whether the Trump administration is capable of handling a foreign policy crisis. Since Trump has been in office for more than two years she might have reflected on his handling of foreign policy, but, she didn’t.

Stranger still, Noonan compares Trump to John F. Kennedy. As you might know it is impermissible to speak ill of the martyred president, but it ought to be possible to examine his foreign policy record dispassionately. On that score Noonan fails. She idolizes JFK and uses him as a foil to disparage the Trump administration. It does not make for her finest column.

She writes:

John F. Kennedy had the Bay of Pigs three months into his presidency and the Cuban missile crisis the following year.

As it happened John Kennedy made a complete mess of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Organized by the CIA a band of anti-Castro rebels tried to invade Cuba at a place called the Bay of Pigs. The initial plan, drawn up during the Eisenhower administration, had involved both naval and air support. The Kennedy administration provided some slight air support, but called off all further support after word got out that the invasion was being led by the United States. The invaders were captured or slaughtered. Fidel Castro won a major propaganda victory and JFK was shown to be inept and ineffectual.  Chickening out does not make for a great foreign policy success.

Noonan suggests that Kennedy learned from the Bay of Pigs that he could not go it alone. If that was what he learned, he learned nothing. The problem was not going it alone. The problem was cowardice under fire.

Noonan goes on to wax poetic about the strong and resolute way that John Kennedy handled the Cuban missile crisis. She does not mention that the crisis was manufactured by Kennedy himself when, in the course of a meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, he ineptly allowed Khrushchev to believe that he would accept the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Kennedy had gone it alone in a conversation with Khrushchev… he had spoken off the cuff about something he did not really understand.

The news was reported widely, most especially be veteran New York Times correspondent James Reston. There is no excuse for not knowing the background of the crisis or for recognizing that Kennedy’s ineptitude produced it.

Kennedy’s hagiographers have spent most of their working hours portraying the young and incompetent president as stern and resolute. They were merely trying to cover up the president’s failure at Vienna.

And while we are opining about foreign policy crises, how about Vietnam? The Kennedy administration escalated American involvement before JFK was assassinated. JFK got us involved in Vietnam. Naturally, Kennedy’s hagiographers claim that he would have withdrawn his troops, rather than increase their number. And yet, the people who got America involved in Vietnam were, more often than not, Kennedy’s people. The war was directed by members of the Kennedy-Johnson administration. Among them Ivy League intellectuals like McGeorge Bundy.

Naturally, JFK’s supporters have done everything in their power to separate him from one of America’s greatest foreign policy catastrophes, the first war that America lost. And yet, his fingerprints were all over the policy. One of its chief architects, Bundy, was also involved in the Bay of Pigs.

If you want to speculate about Donald Trump’s ability to handle a foreign policy crisis, you do better to look at the record. Not to speculate. But, if  you want to hold up the sainted John Kennedy as the exemplar for deft handling of such crises, you do better to look through the spin at the facts. JFK was one of America’s worst foreign policy presidents.