There is a myth in recent American history that has been created by a bullet.

This myth turns a shrewd centrist politician, very much a child of the Establishment -- who did little or nothing to help along the progressive movements of his time, who served the military-industrial complex Eisenhower correctly predicted would become a cancer on American society (though Eisenhower himself had no small part in its creation), and who, in fact, brought the world closer to the devastation of nuclear war than anyone else ever -- into some sort of wonderful, magical hero who was on the way to creating a perfect society of freedom and equality until his time was tragically cut short by an assassin.

This myth continues to be as persistent as it is rooted in wishful thinking rather than fact. Because a generation together witnessed the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy shortly before the series of cultural and political upheavals that would call everything in American society into question came to a head -- at the very end of the period when many of them, at least in the middle class and above, were still 'innocent' and took the goodness of their country's institutions for granted -- his assassination resulted in an enshrinement of him as a symbol of the 'good old days' of apple pie and surf movies, and a conflation of his death with the overturn of all safety and moral certainty that happened over the following decade.

If he had not been shot at just the perfect time, he would be remembered now as the Great Raper of Vietnam and Phony-'Progressive' Head of the Corrupt Establishment that his successor Lyndon Johnson became. Instead, he was lucky: he was killed before the moral bankruptcy of what he represented was revealed in its full nakedness to millions. Now he is in the pantheon of Great American Heroes. 'He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good they die young.' (Apologies to Dion, who wrote a great song musically even if it gives Kennedy much more than his due.)

But like another bloody event 37 years, 9 months, and 20 days later that a generation thinks defined them, the real lessons of what happened on 22nd November 1963 have been lost in the flood of patriotic 'all Americans are in this together' tears. In fact, Malcolm X described the assassination best when he called it 'the chickens coming home to roost'.

Kennedy's real record

In the time of George Washington, a treaty was signed with the Iroquois tribe in which the United States formally recognised the boundaries of 'the Seneka nation' and promised to keep their hands off. Like all 400-plus such treaties with the Native Americans, it was violated. But not by Andrew Jackson, or Rutherford Hayes, or William McKinley. Nope. This one was violated by the baby boomers' Great Hero. During Kennedy's administration, 'the United States ignored the treaty and built a dam on this land, flooding most of the Seneca reservation.' (This quotation and all that follow are taken from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.) You won't hear that little tidbit repeated in any of the rosy-glossed, googly-eyed discussions of Kennedy's 'legacy' and 'accomplishments' that still -- if you'll pardon the expression -- flood the land.

John F Kennedy was no hero. He was, in fact, an anti-Communist zealot who expanded the permanent war economy and devoted himself to defending corrupt and oppressive (but pro-American and pro-capitalist) régimes against popular uprisings. This policy culminated in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, the nearly catastrophic Cuban Missile Crisis, and the beginning of combat action in Vietnam. And all of that was accomplished in less than three years! George W Bush has nothing on Kennedy for quick whipping up of made-to-order wars.

Even his widely-touted 'civil rights record' is fiction. He dragged his feet on civil rights issues, fearing loss of support from conservatives, until he was forced by those taking militant grassroots action to acknowledge the problem. Even then, under his leadership only weak (and mostly unenforced) steps were taken. Kennedy's biggest contribution to civil rights was to usurp its native militant leadership and turn its supporters into another calm, friendly 'lobby group' among many others, humbly asking the Big Powerful White People to give it a few concessions here and there.

In fact, Kennedy's place in history was far less romantic than the myth would have it. While he did not found it, he solidified and perfected the modern, post-World War II system of American political control, in which an élite of lawyers, bureaucrats, and military and industrial leaders determine what is in 'American interests' -- without consulting the mass of working-class Americans, of course -- and neutralise any dissent by absorbing it and diverting it into the 'safe' arena of bureaucratic debate within the system. There, it can be led by 'responsible and moderate' leaders who have a political and financial stake in making any changes cosmetic while maintaining the fundamental power and control of the ruling class.

'No state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state.'

The above is quoted from the Charter of the Organization of American States. One of the most notable of the many violations of this treaty engaged in by the US was committed by Kennedy in April 1961, when a US-trained army of Cuban exiles was sent to the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro that was as farcical in its ineptitude as it was imperialistic in its motives and tragic in the lives it cost.

Kennedy had long bought into the atmosphere of hysterical anti-Communism that pervaded American culture in the late Forties and the Fifties. When infamous thug Joe McCarthy was leading the modern witch-hunt trials against supposed Communists in a fit of drunken rage and paranoia, ruining lives in the name of patriotism, 'Kennedy was cautious on the issue, didn't speak out against McCarthy (he was absent when the censure vote was taken and never said how he would have voted). McCarthy's insistence that Communism had won in China because of softness on Communism in the American government was close to Kennedy's own view ...' The proof is in Kennedy's own words on the floor of the House in 1949:

Mr. Speaker, over this weekend we have learned the extent of the disaster that has befallen China and the United States. The responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State.

Translation from bureaucratese: Obviously, the overthrow of a pro-capitalist US puppet government by one that the peasant population of China actually supported was an incredible disaster and failure! How could America have possibly allowed the people of China to choose their own government?!

The continued insistence that aid would not be forthcoming unless a coalition government with the Communists was formed, was a crippling blow to the National Government.

Translation: We should never have told our pet dictatorship to compromise and attempt to allow the peasants a voice! Or at least we should have only said so for show, and never backed it up with anything. Now look what we've done! The peasants threw out our dictatorship completely, and we didn't even get a chance to help the latter repress the former!

So concerned were our diplomats and their advisers, the Lattimores and the Fairbanks, with the imperfection of the democratic system in China after 20 years of war and the tales of corruption in high places that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-Communist China. ...

Translation: 'Our diplomats and their advisers' had their priorities all wrong on the issue of China. They were worried about what was good for the Chinese! They forgot completely that a repressive US puppet government is so much better than any independent government, free or not!

This House must now assume the responsibility of preventing the onrushing tide of Communism from engulfing all of Asia.

Translation: Now that we know what happens when we leave those damn Asians to choose their own governments, we've learned our lesson. We'll never let another friendly dictatorial régime fall again! Who do these foreigners think they are anyway, choosing governments based on their own interests instead of what would help keep the US on top? Next time we're using guns!

And Kennedy kept true to his between-the-lines words. When he became President, he launched something called the Alliance for Progress, with a lot of high-sounding words about 'social reform to better the lives of the people'. But what was the Alliance for Progress, really? Like most other foreign programmes during the Cold War era, 'it turned out to be mostly military aid to keep in power right-wing dictatorships and enable them to stave off revolutions.'

At the same time he was promoting the Borg theory of foreign policy ('resistance is futile, we will assimilate your culture and adapt it to serve our own'), Kennedy was building up the military to be more and more frightening and capable of more and more horrific destruction. As soon as he was elected, Kennedy 'immediately moved to increase military spending. In fourteen months, the Kennedy administration added $9 billion to defense funds', an increase of nearly 20%.

By 1962, based on a series of invented scares about Soviet military build-ups, a false "bomber gap" and a false "missile gap," the United States had overwhelming nuclear superiority. It had the equivalent, in nuclear weapons, of 1,500 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs, far more than enough to destroy every major city in the world -- the equivalent, in fact, of 10 pounds of TNT for every man, woman, and child on earth. To deliver these bombs, the United States had more than 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 80 missiles on nuclear submarines, 90 missiles on stations overseas, 1,700 bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union, 300 fighter-bombers on aircraft carriers, able to carry atomic weapons, and 1,000 land-based supersonic fighters able to carry atomic bombs.

The Soviet Union was obviously behind -- it had between fifty and a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles and fewer than two hundred longe-range bombers. But the U.S. budget kept mounting, the hysteria kept growing, the profits of corporations getting defense contracts multiplied, and employment and wages moved ahead just enough to keep a substantial number of Americans dependent on war industries for their living.

The height of Kennedy's rabidly anti-Communist preoccupation with picking other countries' governments for them by superior force of arms came with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Though he did not originate the plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion, he was the one who gave the CIA the go-ahead to try to accomplish the impossible task of inciting a popular uprising against a popular government. Since a list of all of the actual bungles and fuck-ups that led to failure would make this essay twice as long, and would be mainly about the faults of the CIA rather than Kennedy, I will only focus on a couple of details.

Almost as a message for future generations about exactly how honest he was, Kennedy said four days before the Bay of Pigs, that 'there will not be, under any conditions, any intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces.' Of course, in a way (a very dishonest way), that's true. The United States trained the army of Cuban refugees, told them what to do, told them were to go, planned the whole thing ... but they did not actually participate directly in the invasion. (Although, there were unmarked Navy planes present. 'Four American pilots of those planes were killed, and their families were not told the truth about how those men died.')

The Americans almost intervened directly in the invasion, though. They saw their Cuban exile allies being slaughtered, and they were very anxious to help them. But Kennedy gave the order to keep the infamous non-existent 'umbrella of air support' non-existent. In other words, he sent the Cubans in to execute an American plan, with American training, overseen by the American military, and then like a coward he stood back and watched Cubans die for that American plan. That was his idea of obeying international law and not intervening in another country's affairs: send in non-American patsies to invade, and let them take the heat if anything goes wrong, so he could still say that technically the US had not invaded anyone. Presto, you get to have your invasion and eat it too! (Too bad all the Cubans ended up eating was dirt and blood.)

The embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs put Kennedy on the defensive, and of course not long afterwards he started the Cuban Missile Crisis just to prove that the US was still the boss of Cuba and the Soviet Union. His position that a few Soviet missiles in Cuba justified bringing the world closer than ever before or since to full-scale nuclear war was particularly strange, considering the aforementioned thousands of WMDs the US had pointed at the USSR. But that's just another example of his firm conviction that the rules of international conduct applied to everyone else except the US.

Aside from wounding Kennedy's pride and thus making him start the Cuban Missile Crisis just to save his reputation, the Bay of Pigs also contributed no small amount to keeping in power the very Cuban leader it was an attempt to overthrow. But other than that, it didn't really have much long-term effect on history. It was another small country with a US-backed dictatorship 'threatened' by a takeover by independent Communists that would suffer the most from the legacy of Kennedy's militarism and imperialism.

When Kennedy took office in early 1961 he continued the policies of Truman and Eisenhower in Southeast Asia. Almost immediately, he approved a secret plan for various military actions in Vietnam and Laos, including the "dispatch of agents to North Vietnam" to engage in "sabotage and light harrassment," according to the Pentagon Papers. Back in 1956, he had spoken of "the amazing success of President Diem" and said of Diem's Vietnam: "Her political liberty is an inspiration."

What was so wonderful about this Diem government whose political liberty was such an inspiration? Hmm, let's look at some stuff that happened under Diem.

One day in June 1963, a Buddhist monk sat down in the public square in Saigon and set himself afire. More Buddhist monks began committing suicide by fire to dramatize their oppostion to the Diem regime. Diem's police raided the Buddhist pagodas and temples, wounded thirty monks, arrested 1,400 people, and closed down the pagodas. There were demonstrations in the city. The police fired, killing nine people. Then, in Hué, the ancient capital, ten thousand demonstrated in protest.

No wonder Kennedy liked this guy so much! He didn't take any crap from those monks or anyone else! Everyone in the country hated him so much, people were setting themselves on fire. But that didn't stop him; he just arrested and shot them so they couldn't set themselves on fire anymore. Plus, he supported US economic interests. What more could a guy like Kennedy ask for?

The end result of all this, appropriately left dangling in its ominous implications without comment:

Under the Geneva Accords, the United States was permitted to have 685 military advisers in southern Vietnam. Eisenhower secretly sent several thousand. Under Kennedy, the figure rose to sixteen thousand, and some of them began to take part in combat operations.

'Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all ...'

A lot of people suffer from the delusion that Kennedy was some sort of champion of civil rights. The facts paint a different picture. When he became President, Kennedy 'seemed cautious about the race question, concerned about the support of southern white leaders of the Democratic party.' In his first year as president, the New York Times reported, 'He is not spoiling for a fight with the Southern conservatives over civil rights. '

At first he made a 'promise to bar discrimination in Government-insured housing', but later backpedaled and 'talked instead of postponing this until there was a "national consensus" in its favor.' In other words, he was in support of civil rights, but not as long as there were politically powerful people who opposed it. Equal rights were important, but not as important as maintaining the centrist (or, as it would be called today, 'bipartisan') coalition of liberal and conservative élites that ruled the country together. Or, perhaps even more to the point, not as important as keeping Kennedy's personal support among Southern leaders intact. The blacks could suffer as long as helping them threatened Kennedy politically, but he'd be happy to help them as soon as it was in his own interest to do so.

Kennedy inherited the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, which Congress was forced to pass by 'the black revolt, the turmoil, the world publicity' (most certainly not because it was the right thing to do). These laws, well into Lyndon Johnson's time, 'promised much, on voting equality, on employment equality, but were enforced poorly or ignored.' Of course, even if they had been enforced, they 'emphasized voting, but voting was not a fundamental solution to racism or poverty. In Harlem, blacks who had voted for years still lived in rat-infested slums.' In the spring of 1963, toward the end of the reign of Kennedy, the mythical Man Who Freed the Blacks, 'the rate of unemployment for whites was 4.8 percent. For nonwhites it was 12.1 percent. According to government estimates, one-fifth of the white population was below the poverty line, and one-half of the black population was below that line.' If Kennedy did champion the cause of the blacks, there certainly weren't very many blacks who noticed.

There was a law against segregation in interstate travel, 'but the federal government never enforced the law in the South'. When the Freedom Riders began their trips to end this situation in 1961, the federal government, led by Kennedy, did precisely nothing to protect them from being attacked and beaten. 'Again and again in Mississippi and elsewhere, the FBI had stood by, lawyers for the Justice Department had stood by, while civil rights workers were beaten and jailed, while federal laws were violated.' Brutal murders took place throughout the civil rights era, 'after the repeated refusal of the national government, under Kennedy or Johnson, or any other president, to defend blacks against violence.'

To be fair, there was one thing the Kennedy administration did to try to keep protesters alive. Kennedy's brother Robert, the Attorney General, 'instead of insisting on their right to travel without being arrested, agreed to the Freedom Riders' being arrested in Jackson, in return for Mississippi police protection against possible mob violence.' One would think that the proper legal response to racist thugs attacking people who were acting in accordance with the law would be to arrest the racists, but Bobby Kennedy proved how much smarter he was than you or me by deciding instead to arrest the victims. It must run in the family!

Perhaps the bulk of Kennedy's supposed civil-rights legacy is rooted in his support of the March on Washington in the summer of 1963. But his real impact on that event was to turn it from an effective, militant mass action led by the blacks from the streets into an ordered, respectful, entirely symbolic (and entirely ineffectual) action led by middle-class black leaders in concert with Kennedy.

When he heard that the March (in its original form) was going to happen, 'Kennedy met with the civil rights leaders and said the march would "create an atmosphere of intimidation" just when Congress was considering civil rights bills.' In other words, Congress was passing down decrees from the Great White Mountain of Authority to help out the poor black folks, and any indication that those folks might try to help out themselves would frighten them so, they might change their minds. The answer to the blacks' problems was to sit tight and wait for the powerful whites in the government to allow them a few rights here and there, and absolutely never ever ever to do anything effective to demand their rights.

Kennedy's effect on the March was best described by someone who was actually there, Malcolm X:

The Negroes were out there to march in the streets. They were talking about how they were going to march on Washington. ... That they were going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed. They even said they were going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land. I'm telling you what they said. That was revolution. That was revolution. That was the black revolution.

It was the grass roots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death; I was there. When they found out that this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in ... these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, "Call it off," Kennedy said. "Look you all are letting this thing go too far." And Old Tom said, "Boss, I can't stop it because I didn't start it." I'm telling you what they said. They said, "I'm not even in it, much less at the head of it." They said, "These Negroes are doing things on their own. They're running ahead of us." And that old shrewd fox, he said, "If you all aren't in it, I'll put you in it. I'll put you at the head of it. I'll endorse it. I'll welcome it. I'll help it. I'll join it."

This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it ... became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all. ...

No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover. ... They controlled it so tight, they told those Negroes what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn't make, and then told them to get out of town by sundown.

Thus 'Kennedy moved to incorporate the Negro revolution into the democratic coalition' (the 'democratic coalition', of course, being another Newspeak code phrase for the rule of the lawyers, bureaucrats, businessmen, and generals of both parties). In other words, he

was trying -- without making fundamental changes -- to control an explosive situation, to channel anger into the traditional cooling mechanism of the ballot box, the polite petition, the officially endorsed quiet gathering. ...

But it did not work. The black could not be easily brought into "the democratic coalition" when bombs kept exploding in churches, when new "civil rights" laws did not change the root condition of black people.

This was Kennedy's real 'civil rights legacy'. It is because of people like him -- those following his precedent in the Seventies -- that the civil rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties was emptied of its fire and turned into just another lobby group to the still fundamentally white ruling class. It is thanks to him that the self-reliant radical militancy of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers gave way to the tepid liberal petitioning of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

'The decisive middle ground of American politics'

When Kennedy came into office in 1961, 'the lowest fifth of the families received 5 percent of all the income; the highest fifth received 45 percent of all the income. ... About 200 giant corporations out of 200,000 corporations -- one-tenth of 1 percent of all corporations -- controlled about 60 percent of the manufacturing wealth of the nation.' Given this situation, and Kennedy's reputation for being a progressive, one would think he might have tried to do something about this.

Yet the overwhelming message of his first year in office, summed up in the first budget he presented to Congress, was that, 'liberal Democrat or not, there would be no major change in the distribution of income or wealth or tax advantages.' He supported tax breaks for giant corporations, he 'urg[ed] the unions to keep wage demands down so that prices can be competitive in the world market', and he generally fawned over and sucked up to powerful business leaders, assuring them he would do nothing to threaten their stranglehold over the country's wealth and power.

This was perfectly consistent with his moves to beef up the military, prop up brutal puppet dictatorships in the Third World, and give only a few token, meaningless concessions here and there to the blacks, but of course quite inconsistent with the mythical picture of him as a forward-thinking campaigner for justice, peace, and equality. The Times summed up his first year in office thus: 'During these twelve months the President has moved over into the decisive middle ground of American politics.'

In fact, what little progress did occur in civil rights and other areas during Kennedy's time was not, as the myth would have us believe, initiated by him. It was forced on him by mass action from below, against his will and against his inclinations. When he entered office,

all seemed secure. Nothing had to be done for blacks. Nothing had to be done to change the economic structure. An aggressive foreign policy could continue. The country seemed under control. And then, in the 1960s, came a series of explosive rebellions in every area of American life, which showed that all the system's estimates of security and success were wrong.

Kennedy was not part of the revolts against the corrupt Establishment. He was part and parcel of that Establishment itself. Samuel Huntington, a former advisor to the White House, made 'probably the frankest statement ever made by an Establishment adviser':

To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's "Establishment." ...

The day after [the President's] election, the size of his majority is almost -- if not entirely -- irrelevant to his ability to govern the country. What counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders of key institutions in a society and government. ... This coalition must include key people in Congress, the executive branch, and the private-sector "Establishment." ...

Truman made a point of bringing a substantial number of non-partisan soldiers, Republican bankers, and Wall Street lawyers into his Administration. He went to the existing sources of power in the country to get help he needed in ruling the country. Eisenhower in part inherited this coalition and was in part almost its creation. ... Kennedy attempted to recreate a somewhat similar structure of alliances.

Kennedy, like all other post-World War II presidents, was a servant of his own interests and those of this 'coalition'. He supported progressive movements only when he saw political advantage in them, and immediately turned against them as soon as they threatened to become militant and independent.

Lee Harvey Oswald did John Kennedy a tremendous favour. He saved him from the turmoil and embarrassment Lyndon Johnson would later suffer. Oswald's bullets not only nailed Kennedy's coffin shut, it also nailed the Myth of Kennedy, the Great American Hero, to people's minds, and turned a skillful -- but entirely conventional and principle-free -- politician into an almost Holy Saviour who fought for truth and freedom.

Like the events of 11th September 2001, Kennedy's assassination, we have been told, was an attack by evil forces on all of American society. (Whether those forces were Communists, the CIA, an insane lone gunman, or even aliens is irrelevant to this point.) His death, supposedly, brought us together and taught us how wonderful the United States is. But, as with 11th September, the truth is much more prosaic. Kennedy's own political game of playing off one side against the other in order to keep him and his 'democratic coalition' in control came back to bite him in the ass.

As Malcolm X would tell us if he were here, the chickens have to come home to roost sometime. It's a shame that Americans' reaction to 11th September demonstrates that some still haven't learned the lesson after four decades.