BBC hatchet job on JFK

[mada85]

This year being the 50th anniversary of the election of President Kennedy, it should come as no surprise that the BBC is out to sully his memory. Andrew Marr, a 'journalist', has made a TV programme about Kennedy called JFK: The Making of Modern Politics. Don't think of that as a positive title though. Marr is in fact suggesting that the corruption and flaws in modern politics started with JFK's election campaign in 1960.

Marr's article on the BBC website is: President John F Kennedy and the art of dirty politics.

Fifty years since he was elected US president, there is still an aura around John F Kennedy's White House, yet arguably the dirtier side of modern politics has its roots in his rise to power.

Marr's article is laced with cynicism about JFK. I've been reading JFK and the Unspeakable, by James Douglass. The subtitle of Douglass' book is Why he died and why it matters. It matters a great deal that Kennedy was killed, yet Marr attempts to dismiss JFK as a rich playboy who was manipulated and paid for by his father in order to cement a powerful political dynasty in the USA. I found Marr's cynicism quite breathtaking when compared to Douglass' measured presentation of the events in Kennedy's presidency, and his analysis of the reasons behind the assassination.

So it comes as a shock to properly study Kennedy the campaigner. The story of how a rich, preppy party boy from Massachusetts managed to raise a roar for underdog America loud enough to carry him to the White House is gripping. But uplifting it certainly isn't.
[...]
It is also, however, a tale of big money, smears, bribes, wire-pulling and bottomless cynicism. If you are asking what has gone so wrong with modern politics, Kennedy's 1960 election campaign is a good place to start.

Kennedy beat Nixon not simply with his ads, his sound bites, his jingles, the carefully posed photographs and the downright lies he told about his health. He beat Nixon by not standing for anything beyond rousing banalities.

On the "missile gap" with the Russians, Kennedy knowingly hyped the danger. Nixon, as vice-president, knew the real facts but also for reasons of national security, could not reveal them. (And Kennedy probably knew that, too.)

Actually, Nixon probably didn't know the real facts. He would have known only what the CIA, Mossad and their partners in crime wanted him to know.

But today we live in a world that has become profoundly cynical about politics. I think we owe it to ourselves to look past those images and ask: aren't there better ways of doing democracy than Kennedy's?

There is some very interesting information about Joe Kennedy in Marr's article:

Kennedy's father Joe, the former (and unfriendly) ambassador to Britain, had made his fortune in steel, movies, whisky, stocks and property.

[...]

The Kennedy machine, an awesomely well organised instrument, had some obvious problems. Joe Kennedy was rumoured to have been a bootlegger, had been brought back to the US in 1940 having announced that "in Britain, democracy is finished", and was a close ally of Senator Joe McCarthy.

I wonder: 'unfriendly' from whose point of view? And perhaps Joe Kennedy knew something of which the public had no knowledge whatsoever when he said: ' in Britain, democracy is finished'. And this was as far back as 1940. In his book Web of Deceit, Mark Curtis mentions that the British government is renowned throughout NATO and its allies for its great expertise and ability to manipulate public opinion, and to present and to convince the public of only those 'facts' it wishes them to know.

Marr's article doesn't bode well for his TV programme. Here's some brief information about Marr himself, taken from Wikipedia:

Andrew William Stevenson Marr (born 31 July 1959) is a British journalist and political commentator. He edited The Independent for two years until May 1998, and was political editor of BBC News from 2000 until 2005.

He began hosting a political programme Sunday AM, now called The Andrew Marr Show, on Sunday mornings on BBC One from September 2005. Marr also hosts the BBC Radio 4 programme Start the Week. In 2007 he presented a political history of post-war Britain on BBC Two, Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain, followed by a prequel in 2009 - Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain focusing on the period between 1901-1945.

JFK: The Making of Modern Democracy is on BBC2 in the UK at 9pm on Sunday 21 November. It will then be on the BBC iPlayer but only available online in the UK.

 

[Laura]

What an evil Bastard. I recommend that we all promote Douglass' book "JFK and the Unspeakable" to counter this slime.