>Do none of the
>people in the government read books, look through history and reflect
>on how these kinds of wars turn out? It's just delusional bullshit.
Kennedy read enough books to make him want to be Lincoln. Here's Gore Vidal in an interview with Jerry Brown. This was some kind of parallel universe Brown who was waxing radical on KPFK for about a year before he morphed into Oakland mayor and California attorney general:
http://wtp.org/archive/transcripts/gore_vidal.html
[...]
[JFK} was physically fragile, he had a great fatalism, and why not have his moment of glory? "After all," he said to me once, he said, "what would Lincoln have been without the Civil War?" I said, "You think it's worth having your face on Mount Rushmore, to kill 600,000 men in a war, as opposed to perhaps, 600 million in a war in Asia? He was just cockeyed, really, and ... a sad ending, very charming guy, intelligent. But if somebody that bright can get taken up by this rhetoric, and politics, it's very scary, as you yourself know, having been in this particular trade at the presidential level.
[...]