December 22, 2009
Crooked Timber (Group Blog)
I don't mind who writes the laws of the future, if I can write and sing
the theme tune
Daniel Davies
Let's try and put ourselves in the shoes of a member of the John Birch
Society, circa 1968. What would the basis of such a person's political
worldview be? Basically, that the USA was ruled by a small cabal of
educated elites, who were systematically undermining the USA's
advantages against Soviet Russia, and sabotaging the efforts of the
military to protect the USA from the danger of Soviet attack. This
person might also believe that the truth about the Kennedy
assassination was covered up by this same elite cabal.
And such a person would be correct, of course.
Not joking. The historical facts are quite easy to establish here,
they've been on public record for years (since the publication of
"Secrets" by Daniel Ellsberg) and they're ably summarised in James
Galbraith's obituary of Robert McNamara, among other places. In the
early 1960s, the USA had sufficient superiority over the USSR to win
(or at least, survive) a first-strike nuclear war, and the main
war-fighting plan of the US armed forces did in fact revolve around
such a "preventive" first-strike war; it was believed that the USA
would lose several cities but had enough ICBM superiority to destroy
both Russia and China. This was, of course, horrifying, and the
educated elites who came to power with the Kennedy government in 1961
were horrified by it. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations adopted a
no-first-use policy (which was kept secret and which contradicted the
stated NATO doctrine), and spent the next six years playing for time,
while the USSR acquired a second-strike capability, after which point
the Cold War was bound to play out as a mutual deterrence game.
Achieving this new equilibrium (during a period over which the Cuban
missile crisis happened and the USA's involvement in Vietnam began),
obviously required Kennedy, Johnson and McNamara to systematically plan
for the USA to lose its missile dominance, and to overrule the
substantial military lobby in favour of using nuclear weapons before
the USSR acquired second-strike capability.
Furthermore, when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 (in circumstances
which made it look very much as if the responsibility lay with the
Cuban government, and thereby with the Soviets), Lyndon Johnson's
immediate priority was to ensure that a train of events was not set in
place which might end in his losing control of the country's slide into
nuclear war; in a telephone conversation recruiting members to the
Warren Commission, he actually said " this is a question that has a
good many more ramifications than on the surface and we've got to take
this out of the arena where they're testifying that Khrushchev and
Castro did this and did that and chuck us into a war that can kill 40
million Americans in an hour".
So does this mean that the John Birch Society had it right? Well
basically of course not. Although on the specific facts of what
happened during the 1960s, your average Bircher is a lot closer to the
objective truth than, say, David Aaronovitch, the worldview that sees
the actions of Kennedy, Johnson and McNamara as a treasonous stab in
the back of the American military rather than a scrambled and deeply
honourable attempt to literally save the world, is totally skewed.
<end excerpt>
Michael