Columnist Froma Harrop (“The Kennedy story was never that hot,” Aug. 11) rightly debunks the mythologizing of President John F. Kennedy and the Kennedy clam by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a contender for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.
She cites examples where post-mortem hero worship by Kennedy flame-keepers has distorted the true record of JFK’s presidency.
However, there are other instances that Harrop doesn’t discuss but readers should consider.
One is RFK Jr.’s, contention that if his uncle had lived, he would have backed away from what became the disastrous U.S. intervention in South Vietnam’s civil war.
All this is conjecture, of course, because the U.S. had not reached the hour of decision whether to intervene directly until late 1964.
But people should bear in mind that throughout his political career, JFK had been an ardent proponent of the conviction that preventing a Viet Cong takeover of South Vietnam was essential to U.S. national security throughout Asia.
When Kennedy became president, as he promised in his inaugural address, his administration implemented that perspective by a drastic escalation of the U.S. involvement in South Vietnam, both in the number of Americans in that country and in their deepening involvement in the fighting there.
Faced with a deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, as he and many Americans saw it, it is hard to believe that President Kennedy would have gone back on his own actions and many statements on Vietnam.
I am convinced that if John F. Kennedy had lived, the U.S. would have intervened in Vietnam, in much the same way and with the same results as it did under Lyndon Johnson.
Chris Beam, Lewiston
Send questions/comments to the editors.
