It was a Friday afternoon around two o’clock, and some of my fifth grade classmates were getting restless. We’d be going home soon, eagerly awaiting the weekend as usual, and with Thanksgiving six days away a longer weekend to look forward to. Hanging on a hook under the blackboard was a plain phone receiver with a direct line to the principal’s office. Now and then it would buzz with an ordinary message – gym class canceled, an upcoming field trip, that sort of thing. On this Friday afternoon it buzzed and Miss Schneider, our old maid teacher, answered it. “Hello,” she said in her cheerful way. “Oh no….When?….Oh dear god.” It was obvious that this was no routine call. “Oh that’s terrible….Oh dear god.” She hung up the phone and turned around to face us. “Please everyone, be quiet and pay attention because I have some terrible news.” She took a few moments to compose herself. Then she said, “President Kennedy was assassinated.”
Lola, the girl whose desk was next to mine in the front row, gasped, and I heard more gasps behind me. I could not process what I had just heard. “Is he dead?” I wondered out loud. “Of course he’s dead,” Lola snapped. No one in my classroom cried, but I later learned that other teachers and students in my elementary school wept openly upon hearing the news.
Three days later I stood silently with my parents in front of the television screen, watching the funeral procession. Mourners lined the sidewalks, some crying into their handkerchiefs, as Kennedy’s flag- draped casket, resting on a horse-drawn caisson, slowly made its way through the streets of Washington. Tears ran down my mother’s face. My father broke the silence only once, and I remember his exact words: “That’s how great men are lost.” Like so many people, my parents were taken by JFK’s charisma, and though they certainly weren’t liberal Democrats, they probably voted for him in the 1960 presidential election.
Everyone I knew liked or loved President Kennedy, who was the second youngest to assume that office. I certainly looked up to him. Of the thirteen presidents in my lifetime, only Ronald Reagan came close to him in popularity. To us kids, who knew nothing about politics, there was an aura of youth and leadership about him, enhanced by his image as a devoted husband and father of two adorable little children – that enchanting Camelot myth. And in retrospect, with the help of the mind- bending media, he cast the same spell over most adults. Much like the events of September 11, 2001, his murder was a national trauma. For a year or more after his death, his photograph hung in the post office, government buildings, and private homes. It was something for a ten- year-old to live in that time.
But there was another side to the story and I didn’t begin learning about until twenty years later. JFK was despised by a lot of patriots for a lot of good reasons. Whatever one thinks about the Cold War – whether there was a genuine international communist conspiracy to enslave the world, or that it was mostly political theatre – and after all these years I’m still undecided myself – Kennedy was on the wrong side almost every time. It went back to his career as a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, when he was a cheerleader for “liberation” movements in Africa in the waning days of European colonialism. This carried over into his first year in the White House when, with his unequivocal support, a multinational United Nations army attacked Katanga, a breakaway province of the Congo, which had plunged into savagery and civil war immediately after being granted independence from Belgium in June 1960. Under a staunchly pro-Western, anti-communist native leader named Moise Tshombe, greatly admired by both Whites and Blacks, Katanga had seceded from the chaos, but Kennedy, the UN, and certain mining interests were determined to bring the new nation back under control of the central Marxist government. After sixteen months of on-again, off- again fighting they succeeded. This terror campaign against a civilized, sovereign country – one of the few bright spots in Africa – earned JFK the wrath of patriots throughout the U.S. and Europe, especially Belgium. He was a globalist all the way, with a blind, abiding faith in the farcical United Nations.
The most famous foreign policy blemish on JFK’s brief presidency was the botched Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961 – the plot to overthrow the Castro regime using American military force stiffened by a unit of anti- Castro Cubans who had fled their country after the communist revolution and settled in Florida. As with his assassination, there are conflicting versions of this event in which the CIA was heavily involved, but it appears that Kennedy approved the plan, then got cold feet after the assault began and called it off, depriving the 1400 Cuban volunteers of air cover and stranding them on the beach to Castro’s tender mercies.
In fact, JFK was consistent at talking like a tough anti-communist and acting the opposite way. This was evident in his dealings with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev. If the Bay of Pigs was his low point, his high point was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the two superpowers teetered on the brink of nuclear war – or so the story goes (I remember, as a frightened child, the tension in the air) – and the president supposedly stood firm while Khrushchev backed off and removed his missiles by ship from Cuban soil. In reality, though it was not reported, there was no thorough inspection of the cargo leaving Cuba and Kennedy made some quiet concessions, which included closing U.S. missile bases in Italy and Turkey and pledging that the U.S. would not interfere in Cuban affairs again. He went so far as to order the military to harass and interdict, at sea and on land, any activity by Cuban exile groups aimed at reclaiming their country.
This pattern was also repeated in southeast Asia. At the same time that he was dramatically increasing the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam, ostensibly to ward off the communist threat from the North, he demanded that the leaders of neighboring Laos create a coalition government by installing Soviet-backed communists in cabinet posts. When they refused, he retaliated by cutting off financial aid to the country. All this was a prelude to the Vietnam War. Kennedy set the stage for that pointless and obscene conflict, which began in March 1965 under the beast Lyndon Johnson.......
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NN SEZ: This is pure gold. It's fair to the clan but erases all doubt that the world would have been way better off without any of them. Sanity in politics is hard enough to come by, but combining Irish yankees and huge big bucks is begging for catastrophe.
Never mind the Irish part -- look what a horrible bastard Trump is. The article goes into that. This masterpiece may be a National Vanguard original -- please click to at least scan the whole thing.
nationalvanguard.org/2023/11/just-another-kennedy/
I dreamed JFK got shot before it happened. Was in 6th grade on the day. They closed the school and bused us all home early with no word of explanation, but the truth was rumored. "I hope Saint Peter lets him in," joshed I.
It was depressing but no particular trauma for my Southern Republican family in jew jersey -- or anybody we knew, even Dummacrat friends. My recollection is that most people had no particular use for JFK. Political cartoonists lampooned him endlessly, even in our local daily commie rag. Anybody remember the sendups of his accent etc in Li'l Abner?
And where were you at 12:30 on 11/22/63?
Click for Full Text!