Today marks the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, so to mark the occasion one of our illustrious right-wing pundits, George Will of the Washington Post, engages in historical revisionism. Will has always been one of the more reliable apologists for George W. Bush's torture policies and never misses an opportunity to attack Democratic presidents past and present. Today he accuses John F. Kennedy of erecting the Berlin Wall. JFK, according to George WIll, was simply a "callow" spoiled brat who was no match for Nikita Krushchev:
On May 25, six weeks after Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit Earth, Kennedy said that “extraordinary times” demanded a second State of the Union address. In it he proclaimed “the whole southern half of the globe” a “great battleground,” especially emphasizing a place on few Americans’ minds: Vietnam. Then he flew to Vienna to meet Khrushchev — “Little Boy Blue meets Al Capone,” a U.S. diplomat said.
Khrushchev treated Kennedy with brutal disdain. In excruciating pain from his ailing back and pumped full of perhaps disorienting drugs by his disreputable doctor (who would lose his medical license in 1975), Kennedy said that it was the “worst thing in my life. He savaged me.” British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said, “For the first time in his life, Kennedy met a man who was impervious to his charm.” Kempe writes, “From that point forward Khrushchev would act more aggressively in the conviction that there would be little price to pay.” Kempe says that when Robert Kennedy met with his brother back in Washington, “Tears were running down the president’s cheeks.”
In a terrible act of appeasement to communist tyranny and a betrayal of the German people, JFK - according to this right-wing narrative - gave his tacit approval to the Berlin Wall:
The Cold War ended 27 years later, when the Iron Curtain suddenly became porous and the Wall crumbled. Tens of millions of East Europeans might have been spared those years of tyranny, and the West might have been spared considerable dangers and costs, if Kennedy had not been complicit in preventing the unraveling of East Germany.
But the lessons of history tell a different tale. By 1961 the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States. Krushchev threatened not just to destroy all of Germany, but obliterate all of Europe if the US and its allies attempted to reunite Germany with military force. The GDR was facing an existential threat as tens of thousands of its most productive citizens fled across the border: Ulbricht begged the Kremlin to act. JFK was prepared to go to war to protect West Berlin from further encroachment and dispatched Lyndon Johnson to Berlin to deliver the message. LBJ was greeted by over a million cheering Berliners.
George WIll apparently blames JFK for not launching a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union for sealing the East Berlin border - for what other option did the US president have at that moment? Kennedy was not prepared to see hundreds of thousands - or, more likely, millions - of casualties of war. "Better a wall than a war," was Kennedy's assessment. Unlike George WIll and his Republican pals in Washington, JFK had actually experienced the horrors of war and was not eager to put Europe and US through another.
When John F. Kennedy appeared in Berlin in June of 1963 to announce to the world "Ich bin ein Berliner!" he was greeted by Berliners as a champion of freedom, not a traitor. Every German I know who saw Kennedy or listened to the speech on the radio recalls it as a moment of great inspiration and hope. Today JFK is remembered in Germany as one of our greatest presidents, and no attempts by right-wing revisionists can diminish his memory.
George Will is such a crock. I don't know how he gets away with his "respectable" reputation.
Posted by: Hattie | August 16, 2011 at 02:51 AM