What Do Rob Ford and JFK Have in Common?

   

A connection with the Underworld.

Friends of Rob Ford may have enjoyed the documentary “JFK’s Women: Scandals Revealed,” which the CBC showed last Saturday in the series The Passionate Eye.

From the press release:

“During his campaign for the Presidency in early 1960, Kennedy began a relationship with a young divorcee, Judith Campbell Exner. Campbell was an intimate of some of America’s powerful Mafia bosses. The film reveals evidence that eye witnesses believed the meeting between Campbell and Kennedy was engineered by the Mafia, as a way of gaining influence over a potential future President.

“The film shows how JFK grew up in a liberal Boston family in which the men were expected to have mistresses. During the war, he had a relationship with a Danish journalist, Inge Arvad, who was suspected of having Nazi connections. He was warned to stop the affair, but he persisted. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover kept tape recordings of JFK’s love-making to Arvad. It was the beginning of a lifelong tension between the two men.

“Using new documentary evidence and recently released FBI files, the film goes on to demolish the hagiographic myth of JFK and Camelot that still persists over 40 years after his death. Even by 1963, JFK continued to be reckless in his personal life. His belief that he was untouchable, despite his blatant and extreme womanising, threatened to lead to his political downfall.”

A video about Rob Ford’s connections will no doubt be shown in the near future.

The Military–Industrial Complex: 1961–2011

What do George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower have in common? Both made memorable farewell speeches. Washington said the U.S. must “…avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.”

Eisenhower went further. Fifty years ago he warned against “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex.”

This phrase almost immediately entered the political lexicon and was widely interpreted as meaning that a permanent ruling class, encompassing the Pentagon and its corporate suppliers, was on the verge of controlling the American government, even in peacetime.

Ike was far from a peacenik but a solid Cold Warrier who, like his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, believed in massive retaliation and even opposed containment of the Soviets. He was a firm supporter of the domino theory and of the Vietnam war, both under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The purpose of his remarks was merely to prevent the military from wasting money.

Source: David Greenberg in Slate, January 14

• • • •

Is President Obama a tool of the military–industrial complex? He firmly denounced the Iraq war from the beginning, but during his presidential campaign he made the war in Afghanistan his war because, unlike Iraq, he considered it a “good” war. But many analysts at the time took the view that the war, even though it followed 9/11 and was a NATO enterprise, was not winnable and that the reasons prompting the exit from Iraq also applied to Afghanistan. Why did he not agree with them?

Probably because he assumed the Pentagon would not agree with them. He believed that without its support he would not be able to implement the policies that he considered essential.

Obama no doubt knew all about the threat General MacArthur posed to the Truman administration.

The truth is that no government, anywhere in the world, unless it has in place solid civilian controls, can be effective without the support of its military–industrial complex.