Tuesday, January 6, 2015

JFK's Pre-1960 McCarthy Era Politics--Part 2



In the early 1960s--prior to his elimination in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 from the world of U.S. power elite presidential politics--JFK was viewed as a politically liberal Democrat by most people in the USA and the world. Yet during the McCarthy Era of the late 1940s and 1950s, JFK was apparently both pro-capitalist and very anti-communist in his political rhetoric and voting record. As Thomas J. Whalen recalled in his 2000 book Kennedy Versus Lodge:

"...On January 25, 1949, Kennedy received permission to address the House for one minute and proceeded to condemn the Truman administration for `losing China'...Kennedy's intransigence deepened with the onset of the Korean War in 1950. He vigorously supported American military action against communist North Korea and denounced the trade of strategic materials between the United States and its allies with communist China as `trade in blood.'..."

The same book also indicated one reason that JFK--the son of ultra-rich Kennedy Dynasty founder Joseph P. Kennedy--may have been so pro-capitalist and anti-communist during the McCarthy Era:

"...Kennedy did not come by his stridency on the issue of communism by accident. He grew up listening to his father,...millionaire businessman Joseph P. Kennedy, deliver lectures on the evils of Marxism-Leninism. Stern and humorless, Joseph Kennedy lived with the fear that socialism might someday replace American capitalism, thereby eliminating all the material gains he had accumulated for himself and for his family.

"To help forestall the likelihood of such an event, the elder Kennedy adopted a militant anti-communist approach. He...contributed large sums of money to anti-communist causes such as Francisco Franco's successful attempt to overthrow the socialist-led Republic of Spain. As U.S. ambassador to Great Britain in the late 1930s, he even urged British prime minister Neville Chamberlain to appease Nazi Germany rather than seek an alliance with the Soviet Union. His reasoning was that such a policy would encourage Hitler to march eastward against Russia, thereby bringing down the final curtain on Soviet communism..."

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