Not the “New Frontier” they intended. JFK was no dove. He was no peacenik. The legacy of his administration is greatly muddled in the public mind I think, by his tragic assassination. It was JFK and “Mac” the knife, who ushered in “the greatest arms race in history according t o Ambrose.
Really? The nuclear weapons race between the USSR and the USA? It wasn’t the Republicans? It wasn’t Nixon or Reagan, or affable old Ike? Nope. Not according to Ambrose. The arms race, which produced the ability to destroy our world many times over, though maybe exacerbated by Nixon and Reagan, started with Kennedy.
“13 days” is a great film about the Cuban Missile Crisis that I used to show my tenth graders. Well worth watching and good extra credit for this unit. Get a handle on JFK and his administration’s stance vis-a-vis Cuba and you’re in the hunt for a solid quiz score.
The entire time i thought the Soviet Union would throw their nuclear weapons, but since they didn’t and all Americans did was “talk” it was entertaining to see the conflict in Cuba in comparison to Turkey’s missiles. I found the Ex Com to be useless and always trying to get Kennedy into a bigger mess.
I dont understand why the USSR shot down our U-2 plane, nor was it clear as to what made Kennedy so positive that our weapons and military troops were so dedicated and well organized.
According to Ambrose all the leaders learned from the near death experience, all expect De Gaulle. I thought it was also interesting to see Robert Kennedy’s role as a brother and politician; he was always coming up with great negotiations and thought is was clever to compare his brother to a possible Tojo, whom i looked up and found was the prime minister in Japan and who single handedly summoned the bombs on pearl harbor.
I did not realize the extent to which Kennedy was pushy during his presidency. He screwed up the Bay of Pigs. He also decided to retaliate against Khrushchev’s testing of the bombs with his own testing instead of allowing him to appear ahead in the bombs race and push the Partial Test Ban Treaty into existence. Which is another interesting part of Kennedy’s military plans. He thought that by arming the United states with an additional 19.3 billion dollars worth of weapons would be the solution to fighting the communists. I think that Khrushchev’s take on armament is really accurate, and that both sides of the cold war should have limited their arms production immediately when he said, “only a madman can believe that armaments are the principal means in the life of society.”
An interesting point that Ambrose mentioned at the beginning was that the more nuclear weapon America make, the less secure it was. This is a great point because as we can see, JFK got into more trouble as he built more missiles. Unlike Ike, who appeared unaffected by the Soviet Union’s bluffs from the beginning, JFK suffered from taking the “muscle man” mask. His failure in the Bay of Pigs upset the poor president even more and he felt like he needed to do more to make it up, which added to the already-great pressure. Clearly, JFK had had many conflicts in and out because of his own view of the world, as Ambrose mentioned.