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Team of Rivals: JFK's Lessons for Commander-in-Chief Obama
When he assumed office in 1961, President Kennedy installed a luminous team of "the best and the brightest" atop his national security apparatus. Robert S. McNamara, the president of the Ford Motor Company, was tapped to run the Pentagon; Dean Rusk, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, was the new secretary of state; and McGeorge Bundy, the dean of the Harvard University faculty, was named the president's national security adviser, with a mandate to conceptualize and coordinate the management of American foreign and military policy.
Days after taking office, the new president was presented with a plan to topple the regime of Cuban leader Fidel Castro with an invasion force of just 1,300 exiles being trained in Guatemala. "Defense and CIA now feel quite enthusiastic about the invasion," Bundy reported to Kennedy in early February.
In one of the worst misjudgments of his presidency, Kennedy approved the invasion. Within a day of the brigade's landing on April 17, 1961, the operation was doomed, as the exile fighters were swiftly surrounded by 20,000 Cuban troops while their escape route into the mountains was blocked by 80 miles of swamp. Yet when confronted with imminent failure, Kennedy refused to provide the U.S. air cover that the CIA assumed he would feel compelled to authorize. "Kennedy had refused that support," Bundy later observed, "and the lesson was burned into his mind: the Commander-in-Chief had better be careful to ensure his own control over the use of American combat forces. He is the one who will inevitably be held accountable for their success or failure."
Kennedy applied that lesson almost immediately. On April 26, just days after the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Joint Chiefs of Staff instructed the U.S. Pacific Command to prepare for potential air strikes against North Vietnam and perhaps southern China, all in response to new advances by the communist Pathet Lao insurgency in Laos. The majority of Kennedy's advisers favored the deployment of combat troops to South Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos itself. If that failed to produce a cease-fire, Kennedy was advised to use tactical nuclear weapons and air strikes against the Pathet Lao. If China or North Vietnam intervened, those countries should be bombed and, if necessary, attacked with nuclear weapons.
In a withering cross-examination Kennedy exposed the plan's profound risks and misguided military assumptions. He summarily rejected his counselors' advice. "If it hadn't been for Cuba," Kennedy told his aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., "we might be about to intervene in Laos. I might have taken this advice seriously."
Kennedy was forced to reject his counselors' military recommendations once more in 1961, as momentum built to deploy the first ground combat forces to South Vietnam, where the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem faced an increasingly potent communist insurgency. Kennedy's advisers badgered him with more than half a dozen different proposals to Americanize the war. "The chances are against, probably sharply against, preventing the fall of South Vietnam by any measures short of the introduction of U.S. forces on a substantial scale," McNamara, Rusk, and the Joint Chiefs argued in a memorandum to Kennedy that November. For his part, Bundy advised Kennedy to be prepared to deploy a division of combat forces -- roughly 20,000 troops -- to prop up the regime in Saigon. "Laos was never really ours after 1954," Bundy explained to the skeptical president. "Vietnam is and wants to be."
As he weighed their recommendation to deploy American combat troops to Vietnam, Kennedy was encircled by his secretary of defense, his secretary of state, his national security adviser, and the top Pentagon brass in Washington and in Saigon. But long before becoming president, Kennedy had spoken out against the disastrous French experience in Vietnam, citing it as a cautionary rationale for the United States to never fight a ground war there. In the summer of 1961, Kennedy also told various advisers that he accepted the conclusion of General Douglas MacArthur, who insisted that even a million American infantry soldiers would not be sufficient to prevail in a land war in Asia. In fact, Kennedy would later tell another adviser, Michael Forrestal, that the odds against U.S. forces beating the Vietcong were 100 to 1. And so in November 1961 Kennedy rejected his counselors' advice. He would offer military aid and training to Saigon, but he would not authorize the dispatch of ground forces. It was one of the seminal decisions of his presidency, and his advisers never again proposed engaging American ground combat troops in the war.
Three further lessons emerge from Kennedy's experience in 1961 that President-elect Obama would do well to heed in 2009:
Counselors advise but presidents decide. The disaster of the Bay of Pigs taught Kennedy that he must never defer to his advisers unless he was fully persuaded their military recommendations were sound and had a high probability of success.
Always demand a clear and achievable definition of victory. The proposed combat force deployments in Laos and Vietnam were alarming to Kennedy because they committed the United States to open-ended military campaigns with dubious prospects for success and no fixed exit strategy. Kennedy was sensitive to the risk of precipitous escalation and the risk of stalemate, and he recognized that militarily means could succeed only if the ends were precisely defined.
Do not be distracted by consensus. In November 1961, Kennedy was outflanked by a broad coalition of his advisers who believed it was time to radically refashion the American commitment to Vietnam. Following his own counsel, however, the president refused to waver, establishing a limit to the U.S. role in Vietnam that endured for his entire presidency.
Every president faces crises in his first year, and every president needs to learn how to make wise decisions in an office with demands like no other. What Kennedy's example shows is that sometimes the commander-in-chief is best served by carefully weighing the advice of his smartest and most experienced counselors -- and then rejecting it.
Gordon M. Goldstein is the author of Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, recently published by Times Books.
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Comparing Obama's possible cabinet seating of Billary Clinton to a doomed JFK surrounded by a bunch of 60s cold war hawks misses the point for no reason other than political spin. Obama may let right wing hawks guide foreign policy. As long as there's no draft, those who vote for US imperialism and are willing to die in senseless wars will enlist, deplete the ranks of the GOP and make it a lot easier for Dems to win election mandates in the future.
If Obama is to learn anything from JFK, it is to let the private Fed play monopoly with the public trust, allow foreign nationalists their patriot games in the Mid East and focus on domestic policy to save Uncle Sam from the moneychangers. In other words, he can clean house at home and let the shadow govt. play war games for right wingers willing to volunteer and fight. That way Dems reclaim our homeland sanity, Rethugs their foreign war security and everyone's happy.
To comprehend this mentality, one has to study the DeNiro film, The Good Shepherd. It is a subtle, psychological political profile of what's still wrong with this country. Behind the scenes it's run by paranoid covert ops looking for excuses to see boogie men around every corner. Cold people who can't love and trade a missing heart for the false glory of violence and death. While they play chess with foreign policy, BO will save main street and become our New Dealer.
To add to this article, most importantly during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Kennedy's advisers and the joint chiefs of staff wanted to invade Cuba. Kennedy resisted. We now know that Cuba had tactifcal nuclear weapons which most likely would have been used against us in response to an invasion. Further, in all likelihood, the Soviet Union would have had no choice but to respond to our invasion and nuclear war could have well resulted.
Also, after Kennedy's assassination, LBJ did not have the chops to resist the military's desire for a land war in Asia.
The Cuban missile never would have happened if Kennedy hadn't looked like a kid at the Vienna summit meeting with the Russians. Nor would they have put up the Berlin wall.
OBAMA"S potential picks
New and improved.
Who would you select for the rest? Will adjust based on recommendations. Remember, if you don"t like a certain choice, suggest an alternative. Let's have a real discussion.
Secretary of the State:
� Hillary Clinton (done?) -- is Bill Richardson warming up in the bullpen?
Attorney General:
� Eric Holder (DONE)
Secretary of Education:
� Arne Duncan (done?)
Secretary of Defense:
� Robert Gates (done?)
Secretary of Health & Human Services:
� Tom Daschle (done?)
Secretary of Homeland Security:
� Janet Napolitano (done?)
Secretary of Commerce:
� Penny Pritzker (done?)
Secretary of the Treasury:
� Paul Krugman
National Security Adviser:
� Susan Rice or Richard Clarke
Secretary of Agriculture:
� Jim Leach or Kathleen Sebelius
Secretary of Energy:
� Jeff Bingaman
Secretary of Housing & Urban Development:
� Shirley Franklin
Secretary of the Interior:
� Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Secretary of Labor:
� Andy Stern
Secretary of Transportation:
� Jim Oberstar
Secretary of Veterans' Affairs:
� Tammy Duckworth
United Nations Ambassador:
� Caroline Kennedy
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency:
� Kathleen McGinty
Council of Economic Advisers:
� Austan Goolsbee
Supreme Court Nominee(s) " pick two:
� Cass Sunstein, Legal scholar and Professor at the University of Chicago Law School
� Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, comprising of Connecticut, New York, and Vermont
God rest President John F. Kennedy.
God bless President Barack Obama.
Yes, JFK resisted the MIC as best he could. He was a smart, decent man.
But the real "lesson of JFK" was best expressed by Mort Sahl:
“Once the neo-fascists became bold enough to slay the President on the street, they showed their hand. They showed how arrogant they had become. Now it’s a question of symptom. That crime was a national symptom. If we can turn our back on that, we will pay a terrible price. That will be the end of this democracy.”
http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/head-shot/
"Team of Rivals" is a facade.
They are all basically cut from the same Centrist cloth.
That the Obama team tries to now pass off the change that was sold as a move away from the status quo to change as embracing the status quo as some sort of diversity is little more than a betrayal.
Let's see. . . . . Clintonista appointees everywhere, and lobbyist on his advisory team.
You Obama worshipers have got your work cut out for you.
and. . . . .I'm Lovin It.
Could have saved your ink on this one!
No Doubt that the Pres Elect actually knows Kennedy's history and has reflected on it.
That Barack O has said that he wants to surround himself with people who have opinion who will express them says that he has not a doubt a desire to have the different roads to the same issues to choose from and maybe combine them. Not unlike Abe Lincoln did. Lincoln did the same with multiple people and then made up his own mind. I believe this is how Barack O works now and has for many years. He does have his trusted core too which knows him well enough to know to speak up when they think he is off course. I look forward to the many debates we will hear about if not now, later. I trust Barack O far more than I ever trusted George Bush. I came from where "good ol' boys" were what Bush has been, so full of BS and jerky actions which made no sense. Never wanted to have a beer with the shrub but would love to have a meal with the whole Obama family or a talk with Barack O about whatever.
In the "team of rivals" paradigm is there some sort of rule that ONLY rivals from the right wing are permitted?
Rivals from the left like Dennis Kucinich surely fit into this category too?
We have seen nothing but right wing hawks and war supporters so far.
I will accept the rivals idea once a few good lefties are on the team. Otherwise this is just a big move towards the right wing.
Good point! Although Ron Paul is not a leftie he too qualifies to be part of the "team of rivals."
Secretary of Peace.
Kucinich
I agree: this is a good point.
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