American Values, Revisited

A trip back to the ‘50s and ‘60s…and to a different world

(Source: Getty Images)

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Youghal, Ireland...

Honey Fitz can talk you blind
on any subject you can find
Fish and fishing, motor boats
Railroads, streetcars, getting votes.

~ Popular ditty in Boston, circa 1912

We are reliving the Kennedy years.    

RFK, Jr. sent us his book – ‘American Values.’ It takes us back to the ‘50s and ‘60s…and to a different world. Today, we recall that era only dimly. But the thing we remember about it, reminded by Mr. Kennedy, is that it was a time of remarkable optimism…and naivete, bordering on delusion. In 1963, “a record 85% of Americans trusted that government by the people could be made to work for the people.”

“Ask not what your country can do for you,” said John Kennedy in his inaugural address. “Ask what you can do for your country.”

Nobody snickered.

We look back on those words and wonder: could anyone take them seriously?

And what did they mean? Wasn’t the government meant to serve ‘The People.’ Not the other way around? How did the feds – who were supposed to be ‘public servants’ become their masters?

The Best and Brightest

Those heady, glory years were a time of great hope and faith. The federal government had won WWII and demonstrated the atomic bomb; it could do almost anything, even put a man on the moon. The best and brightest of America’s young people longed for ‘public service.’  

Today, we realize that the feds can do much less than we thought. They could put a man on the moon…but when they tried to stop communists in Vietnam, or drug dealers at home, they failed miserably. Nor could they boost the economy with their new, post-1971, gold-free money.   

As time went by, the failures mounted up. Laws were written by lobbyists and passed by Congress to benefit special groups, not ‘the people.’ GDP growth went down, not up – despite the biggest tech breakthroughs in decades. Inflation rose in the ‘70s. From 1975 to 2023, real wages were nearly stagnant. Vietnam was a failure. Iraq was a failure. Afghanistan was a failure. The war on poverty was a failure. Cars still don’t fly. Cancer still kills. We’re $32 trillion in debt (about 100 times more than when JFK was killed)…adding more at the rate of over $2 trillion per year. And our life expectancies are falling.

Frequently, in these pages, we lament the lack of cynicism among the voters.  Where have they been for the last half century? Didn’t they notice the unkept promises…the fraud…the corruption…the failures? They still seem ready to believe the most outlandish things. Who would ever believe that you can stimulate an economy with fake money and fake interest rates? Or get rich by going into debt? Can we really put Americans back in high-wage jobs by prohibiting Mexicans from working for low wages? Can we really control the planet’s climate? The borders of the Ukraine?   

Greater than Good?

Of course, the Kennedy brothers – Jack and Bobby – wanted to win elections. They had a line of talk designed to get them where they wanted to go. They learned it from their grandfather, ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzpatrick, the smooth-talking mayor of Boston and member of Congress. They learned political calculation  too…perhaps from their other grandfather, Joe Kennedy.

But there was something more. Rich, privileged, smart, handsome (and Jack was a war hero!) – did they aim higher, towards the good rather than the great?  

Typically, world improvers are clever people. They are good salesmen, good at selling themselves and getting other people to do what they want them to do. Hitler practiced his gestures in front of a mirror. Napoleon let his actions – at the front of an army – speak for him, proving to the French that they were unstoppable as long as the Corsican was in charge. The two great men, separated by 130 years, were each able to unite Europe, by force…and re-model society, for a while. Bonaparte remained at the top for 10 years. The Third Reich lasted 12.

But the Kennedys had a different idea.  

While Bobby took on the mafia, Jack set up the Peace Corps in 1961. The Special Olympics was founded by sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver in 1968.

Back Channel Diplomacy

Several of our friends joined the Peace Corps in the ‘60s and ‘70s. They lived in mud huts in Africa…or or rusty tin shacks in South America. Whether they did any good or not, we don’t know. But they believed they could do good.  

But not everyone liked touch football, and not everyone wanted to play ball with the Kennedys. Jack and Bobby soon came to see America’s military/industrial/spook/Congressional complex in a new light. It was not helping to spread the real virtue of the American experiment, but to twist it into vice.   Assassinating foreign leaders…instigating revolutions and coups d’etat – the war mongers were taking the US farther and farther away from the honest democracy America was meant to be.

In the Cuban Missile crisis, Kennedy ignored his military advisors (except Robert MacNamara). Instead of making a ‘first strike,’ with nuclear weapons against the Kremlin, he opened a back channel directly with Nikita Khrushev. The Russian president had his own hardliners, trying to push him into military action too. But somehow, Kennedy and Khrushev worked out a deal that was honorable for them both. The Russians removed their missiles; the Americans vowed not to invade the island.

(Note that this was very much the mirror image of the proposal by Vladimir Putin on the eve of his invasion of the Ukraine. The Ukrainians, backed by their American advisors, rejected the deal.)

A Kind of Peace

Later, Kennedy worked out a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.  

In a famous speech, delivered 60 years ago this past Saturday, Kennedy explained what he was trying to do:

“What kind of peace do we seek?” he asked.

“Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

“I speak of peace as the necessary, rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war — and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.”

“On October 11, 1963,” writes Robert Kennedy, Jr., “five weeks before his death, JFK bypassed his own National Security Council and issued National Security Action Memorandum 263, making official the withdrawal from Vietnam of ‘1,000 US military personnel by the end of 1963’; and the ‘bulk of US personnel by the end of 1965.’”

But the desire for peace put the Kennedys at war with the most powerful industry in America, the one Dwight Eisenhower warned about in 1961, the aforementioned “military, industrial complex.”

It turned out as a cynic might imagine. ‘Camelot’ came to a sudden end.

More to come…

Regards,

Bill Bonner