> Jamie Galbraith (whose father was an influential advisor to
> JFK) argues that Kennedy *did* want to withdraw from
> Vietnam: <http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith.html>.
> Noam Chomsky disagrees.
I'm in the agnostic camp on this one, and appreciate that Jamie may well know something Noam doesn't. But one thing in Chomsky's favor comes from Orwell's comments on "politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely." In a footnote to "James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution" (which goes quite well with Michael Pollock's thread on neoconservatives, BTW) he wrote:
"It is difficult to think of any politician who has lived to be eighty and still been regarded as a success. What we call a 'great' statesman normally means one who dies before his policy has had time to take effect. If Cromwell had lived a few years longer he would probably have fallen from power, in which case we should now regard him a failure. If Petain had died in 1930, France would have venerated him as a hero and patriot. Napoleon remarked once that if only a cannon ball had happened to hit him when he was riding into Moscow, he would have gone down to history as the greatest man who ever lived."
Even if you disagree with the particulars (he was talking about Lenin, so I'm sure there could be a week's worth of debate over that alone), his general point makes sense.
-- Shane
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