August, 2007

August 2, 2007 - In 1947 a young John F. Kennedy wrote to Claiborne Pell saying of World War II, “It turned my father and brothers and sisters upside down and sucked all the oxygen out of our smug and comfortable assumptions.”  Kennedy was planning his 1948 maiden campaign for Congress in the Boston district from which his grandfather had gone to Washington.  He was a genuine war hero whose parents had lost a son and a son-in-law in combat.  In his letter to Pell he said, “Now, after all that we experienced and lost in the war, we finally understood that there was nothing inevitable about us.” 

He was writing of his family but he might as well have been writing of his country.  Korea and then Vietnam were to prove that there was nothing inevitable about US military power.  In neither conflict was the United States able to impose its will on a vastly less powerful foe.  Kennedy himself would be drawn into Vietnam by that shared American belief that victory in any conflict in which its military was engaged was inevitable.  Johnson’s escalation was driven by a sincere belief that a US military victory was inevitable.  Nixon’s secret plan to end the war with air power was built on a similar foundation .......click here for entire article