Obama, Ted Sorensen and a Man Named Kennedy
02 January 2008 10:24 pm by Taylor Marsh
It was one of the big disappointments of this campaign to see Mr. Sorensen standing next to Mr. Obama. It was a sad day for many of us who actually know a thing or two about Mr. Obama, as well as J.F.K.
As regular readers and listeners know, I’m a life long student of J.F.K., having
also done a one woman show about him. Nobody knows more clearly his faults than
I do after the research I’ve done over many years. I also did a post on him
laying out why
he couldn’t get elected today. So when Mr. Obama started getting compared
to him, with people claiming he was “Kennedy-esque,” of all things,
I was stunned. Of course, Mr. Obama didn’t start with Kennedy. The first comparison
to Mr. Obama was everyone trying to equate him with Ronald Reagan. Kennedy came
later as sort of a deification hit parade that made sure Barack hit both sides
of the aisle. It’s now very clear why that campaign is being waged.
Ted Widmer has a web exclusive piece for the Washington Monthly that
lays out “Why
Obama is No JFK.” I thought you’d be interested.
… .. Kennedy, of course, was a decorated veteran of World War Two, which
he fought in the South Pacific. But before and after the conflict, he had
acquired travel experiences that most people take a lifetime to accumulate,
richly detailed in biographies like Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life.
His father was ambassador to the United Kingdom in the pivotal year 1938,
and young Kennedy was in the audience of the House of Commons as the Munich
deal was furiously debated (the experience shaped his first book, Why England
Slept). As a young man, he made American officials uneasy with his relentless
desire to see parts of Europe and the world that few Americans ever encountered.
In 1939 alone, he took in the Soviet Union, Romania, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon,
Syria, Greece, France, Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia. As the war was ending,
he attended the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations,
filing seventeen dispatches for the Chicago Herald American.He maintained this lively interest in world affairs as a young Congressman.
In 1951 he went on two extraordinary journeys, the first a five-week trip
to Europe, from England to Yugoslavia, to consider the military situation
on the continent. Then, a few months later, a seven-week, 25,000-mile trek
that included Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Thailand, French Indochina,
Korea and Japan. It was this trip, in particular, that awakened a sense in
him that the old colonial empires were doomed, and that the French effort
to keep Vietnam was especially futile. In the aftermath of his trip, he gave
speeches that ridiculed the French (and by extension, the American) position,
and proved that he was no simplistic Cold Warrior. In 1957, he continued to
chart a maverick’s course with a deeply-informed speech on Algeria that
criticized France and the U.S. for trying to sustain an unsustainable conflict
against an insurgent population. It infuriated both Democrats and Republicans,
and France, a NATO ally at the time, was enraged—but obviously he was
correct. … ..
