Trump in a missile crisis: a fearful prospect

Probably the saddest criticism Michael Wolff has made of Donald Trump is that everyone who knows him sees him as a child.

This, Wolff says, means that Trump’s constantly seeking instant gratification. When he wants something, he wants it now. He has trouble understanding that anyone can stand in his way and, if they attempt to, his instinct is to try to bulldoze over them.

Recently, I’ve been listening to a great book by Larry J. Sabato on the The Kennedy Half Century. It’s concerned not only with the short presidency of John F. Kennedy but the long legacy he left behind. It’s a compelling tale.

JFK
For all his flaws, 
it’s a chilling thought that Trump now occupies his office

In particular, I was held by Sabato’s description of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet Union had begun to station missiles on Cuba, only 90 miles off the US coast. That represented a direct, immediate, existential threat to the United States. In turn, that brought the world to the brink of the greatest man-made catastrophe in history. It would have taken little to trigger a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union which would certainly have killed millions and might have left the planet uninhabitable.

Many of Kennedy’s military advisers pushed for an immediate strike on the missile bases. The reasoning was simple enough: the bases are the problem; a surgical strike takes them out; they provide the solution.

But Kennedy’s greatest blunder, the Bay of Pigs invasion right at the beginning of his presidency, had taught him a lesson. He’d allowed his military and CIA advisers to talk him into backing an invasion of Cuba by US-trained and armed insurgents. The operation had ended in colossal and shameful failure, and Kennedy was left looking both dishonest and guilty.

If anything came out of that fiasco, it was the lesson not to be persuaded too quickly by the military and CIA. As my wife pointed out to me when I told her this story, it’s just like asking a surgeon whether an operation is a good idea: that’s what surgeons do, they operate; they’re most unlikely ever to advise against surgery. So it is with soldiers: the military option is the one they’re drawn to most strongly, because it means doing what they do.

During the missile crisis Kennedy, burned by the Bay of Pigs experience, held back. After much debate, he chose a more cautious approach. He drew a “quarantine” zone around Cuba and announced the US would prevent any shipping entering it.

It’s interesting that he avoided the word “blockade” which is generally seen as an act of war, and Kennedy didn’t want to take quite so irrevocable a step that early into the crisis.

He had made his resolve clear, but also showed he was looking for a solution by peaceful means if at all possible. The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, reacted to both messages. He ordered ships he’d already sent towards Cuba to turn back and return home. And he offered Kennedy a deal: he would dismantle the missile bases in return for a commitment by the US not to invade Cuba.

Both happened. War was avoided. A small thaw began in the Cold War.

Within a few months the US and the Soviet Union were negotiating a Test Ban Treaty, ending further atomic bomb tests in the atmosphere. It was one of Kennedy’s proudest achievements to see it ratified by the US Senate, one of his last successes before being assassinated.

Sabato points out that the defusing of the crisis was down to a lot of calm assessment of options and highly intelligent decision-making by two leaders. Both had understood that no apparent gain from war would be worth the devastating price it would exact.

But what would have happened with a President in the White House who couldn’t brook any delay in gratifying his desires? Might he not have gone straight away for the military option? After all, that was the one that promised the quickest solution to the most immediate problem. Does a man incapable of deferred gratification see any other option as more attractive?

Trump is sitting where Kennedy sat. Kim Jong-Un is playing the Kruschchev role. That’s not just a measure of the decline there has been in political standards.

It’s also frankly frightening.

Dreading the half century

The date comes inexorably closer: in just over a week, on 22 November, we’ll be marking the half century since John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

It’s going to be agonisingly painful. The worst is going to be watching so many people mouthing platitudinous tributes, though we know that they wouldn’t vote for him in a month of Sundays, if they had the chance.

Not of course that they’d have that chance today. No one with Kennedy’s track record with women would even get a look in for a run for the White House, let alone winning. Kennedy’s behaviour in this respect would leave Bill Clinton looking like a shrinking teenager at a school dance but, with a complacent press, JFK sailed right on through all of that whereas poor old Bill got impeached for his pains (well, Hillary’s pains, not to mention Monica’s).

Of course, Bill wasn’t just paying the price for a quasi-JFK-ish inability to keep his flies zipped. He was also paying for Richard Nixon’s opponents who had the gall to impeach him. The guys on Nixon’s side of the aisle had never forgiven the way Tricky Dicky was treated, and were chomping at the bit for a chance to get their own back.

Jimmy Carter was far too decent to give them the pretext, so they had to wait for Bill. And did he give them the opportunity they wanted. In spades. You could almost see them mouthing the words ‘we’re going to get us a piece of Democrat President.’

None of them see the irony that the action against Nixon was for a major offence: abuse of power, betrayal of his oath to uphold the constitution, a breach of a 200-year old principle that no one, not even the highest office-holder in the land, is above the law.

Clinton’s offence was serious, but essentially domestic.

These characters clearly can’t see the implications of equating the actions of a man who subverted the very nature of US government with those of a philanderer. Sad. I wonder if anyone could explain to them what it says about their own side?

The heirs of those guys are in the Tea Party now, and I dread to hear them praising another, murdered Democrat. Perhaps they won’t. Perhaps they’ll have the decency to keep their traps shut.

On the other hand, they are the Tea Party, so they probably won’t.

There’s nothing new about all of this. Right and left of the US likes to speak highly of many other dead presidents. Jefferson, for instance, or Lincoln.

You think anyone in the Tea Party would vote for either of them if they came back and ran for office today? Free thinkers? Committed to Liberal principles? Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, for Pete’s sake. Can you imagine the shutdown there’d have been if the Tea Party had been around when that particular bit of big government was going through?

I at least will be commemorating the anniversary on Friday week with sorrow. Losing JFK, above all to such a despicable act, left the world a sadder place. But I have to confess that he isn’t the Kennedy I miss most. That honour goes to the man I fear is the best president the US never had, his brother Bobby.

Three Kennedy brothers.
Was the greatest the smallest?

We’ll never know how he would have performed as president. But I still feel he deserves that accolade, if only for one event in his tragically short life. 

On the day Martin Luther King was murdered, Bobby Kennedy was campaigning for the Presidency in Indianapolis. He learned of the death as he was travelling to a rally deep in an African-American district; many of his aides felt it would be too dangerous to proceed with the plan, but he insisted.

He gave no campaign speech but informed his audience, many of whom hadn’t heard the news, of what had happened, to its howling dismay. He didn’t flinch but went on to make a brief call for peace which included the words:

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

There were riots that night in over a hundred US cities, but not in Indianapolis.

Now there’s a man whose absence we should still be regretting.