Will Caroline Kennedy prevent Obama from establishing relations with Cuba?

[Onlooker]

One of JFK's many awful foreign policy moves was the way he handled Cuba. (A neighbor I had, who was a senior aide to JFK when he was Senator, insisted he was at heart a Republican.) Caroline Kennedy's primary legacy to date is the glorification of her family name (she is responsible for charities and at least 5 books that glorify her family name). Do you think she would try to persuade Obama from lifting the 1962 embargo for which her father is famous?

[billyoc]

1. With her clout on the Weights and Measures committee?

:rofl:

[customerserviceguy]

3. That is funny

because I'm not the biggest Caroline fan, but let's face it, Obama owes his election to Caroline. If she hadn't stepped into the political arena, and dragged Uncle Teddy along with her, Hillary might have won the nomination.

Barack owes her, and it will be interesting to see just how she cashes that chip. She won't settle for him coming to NY for speaking and fundraising tours, because she just doesn't need that in the area it would be most effective (NYC).

I don't think she's ideologically tied to the Cuban embargo, only a fool would say that nothing's changed since 1963, but there may be other aspects of her father's legacy that she'd be interested in.

[book_worm]

21. how does Obama owe Caroline "his election"? as I recall and many pro-hillary people

pointed out that Caroline and Uncle Ted generated a lot of headlines but not many votes. Did Obama win the Massachusetts primary? did her clout deliver NY to Obama? how about RI with it's sizable Catholic population which delivered big to JFK in '60 and Teddy in '80? Nope, went for Hillary. New Jersey, where Kennedy campaigned for Obama? Nope. Caroline and Teddy were helpful to Obama but not more helpful than many others. My governor, Jim Doyle, endorsed Obama and managed to help deliver WI--and he's not getting any cabinet post or special consideration.

[customerserviceguy]

23. Caroline and Teddy added another layer of legitimacy

to the Obama campaign. Not only to him as a candidate, but to the idea that now was his time, not four years or eight years from now.

I'll admit, it did not help on MA or NY's primaries, but the Kennedy name has appeal all across this country. If she hadn't climbed on to his bandwagon, and persuaded Sen. Kennedy with her, the end result could very well have been different. Was Jim Doyle's endorsement of Obama a national story when it happened? I didn't think so.

Like I said, should Caroline become NY's Senator, she's going to ask for something special from President Obama that a Jim Doyle just couldn't get.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. no

[sandnsea]

4. He admitted Bay of Pigs was a disaster

I don't get your point.

[bottomtheweaver]

6. He pulled the plug on it too.

Bay of Pigs was an Eisenhower-Nixon operation they tried to corral Kennedy into and he wisely stepped back. I don't know about Bobby, but I've read in several accounts that the Castro-JFK relationship was mutually cordial.

[BuyingThyme]

5. Wasn't' JFK trying to reestablish relations with Cuba?

[AZ Criminal JD]

17. No

During the Kennedy administration we dropped guerrillas into Cuba to sabotage Cuba infrastructure. This did not end until the Johnson administration. There is a museum in Cienfuegos, Cuba which I have visited which documents this "secret war".

[BuyingThyme]

19. ..

...

On 18 September 1963 Attwood sent Averell Harriman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, a memorandum arguing that the policy of isolating Cuba put the United States "in the unattractive posture of a big country trying to bully a small country," proposing "a discreet inquiry" into the possibility of normalizing relations and asking authority to make contact with Lechuga.

Harriman told Attwood that he was "adventuresome" enough to favor the idea, but, because of political implications on the eve of a presidential year, Attwood should discuss the plan with Robert Kennedy. The Attorney General thought the plan "worth pursuing" and told Attwood to present it to McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser. President Kennedy, Bundy reported back to Attwood, was in favor of "an opening toward Cuba" that would take Castro "out of the Soviet fold and perhaps wiping out the Bay of Pigs and maybe getting back to normal."

Thus authorized, Attwood conducted quiet talks with Lechuga (as Lechuga confirmed to me in Havana in January 1992). "The President gave the go-ahead," Robert Kennedy told John Bartlow Martin in an oral history interview in 1964, "and was to go to Havana, I don't know, December last year or January of this year, and perhaps see Castro and see what could be done normalization of relationship."

In the meantime, Kennedy opened up a second channel to Castro. On hearing that the French journalist Jean Daniel of L'Express (today the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur) was in Washington on his way to Havana, Kennedy called Daniel in on 24 October and gave him an oral message to Castro. The message, as recently summarized by Daniel (International Herald Tribune, 24 September 1994), was that nothing was possible with a Soviet vassal but everything was possible with an independent communist state (here Kennedy cited Tito's Yugoslavia and Sekou Toure's Guinea). Jean Daniel was lunching with Castro on 22 November when word came of Kennedy's assassination. Castro muttered again and again, "Es una mala noticia"; "this is bad news." To Daniel he said, "Voilà, there is the end to your mission of peace."

...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021

[firedupdem]

7. Yep. he's an empty suit. She's going to determine how he deals

with Cuba. He owes everything to her.

:sarcasm:

[hileeopnyn8d]

8. Yes

Yes, and while she's at it, she'll insist that Michelle wear only vintage Oleg Cassini.

:eyes:

[mitchum]

14. LMAO!!!

nicely done :)

[hileeopnyn8d]

16. Thanks

:)

I was going to elaborate, but I knew someone would get it.

[Lightning Jack]

9. you're really taking her appointment badly

you might want to avoid all news coverage in 2016, it won't be good for your blood pressure.

[H2O Man]

10. pathetic

[Peace Patriot]

11. I think you need to read James Douglas' "JFK and the Unspeakable," just published

by the Maryknoll fathers. It might open your eyes about JFK and Castro, what JFK was dealing with, and what he wanted to do, against the opposition of the entire "military-industrial complex" and its attendant national political establishment.

The commonly known facts about JFK and Cuba are clear enough. He scuttled the CIA invasion of Cuba. But the rest of the story is not well known. He opened back-channels to Castro, and initiated steps to meet with Castro, for a detente. He managed to hold off the "hawks" on pre-emptive nuking of Cuba and Russia, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His entire Cabinet was against him in his pursuit of a peaceful solution. He removed U.S. missiles from Turkey--the initial U.S. provocation that prompted the Soviet Union to place missiles in Cuba--and had to do it behind the backs of his own Cabinet--and saved us all from nuclear war (end of the planet, end of the human race) in 1962, over this issue. (Khrushchev then backed down and removed the missiles from Cuba.) The blockade--also opposed by the Cabinet--was in lieu of a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Russia and Cuba!

Get your facts straight, please. And, for godssakes, more than forty years have gone by since then. It is a different world. Where is this weird suggestion about Caroline Kennedy coming from? It is non-sensical. She is much more likely to approve a detente with Cuba--that her own father wanted and was trying to arrange, way back then--then to be a Bushite on Cuba.

As for Bobby, he and JFK both changed their view of the "Cold War" after they stared Armageddon in the face, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bobby (the A.G.) was really the only adviser that supported JFK in his change toward peaceful solutions. Bobby became very active on the issue of Latin American poverty, in his own campaign for president. Castro actually had positive things to say about their "Alliance for Progress."

JFK and RFK were both children of the "Cold War." Bobby was chief counsel to the red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s! Not until they entered the White House did they begin to understand the CIA and the secret government that was trying to instigate wars all over the world. They underwent a learning curve, and became more and more peace and disarmament oriented, more and more into social justice, and more and more opposed to the increasing U.S. military presence in Vietnam. It is easy to criticize them with hindsight. But we owe them the respect of at least knowing the efforts they made toward peace. And we should never forget that both died violently under highly suspicious circumstances, on our own soil, with the U.S. then descending into a spiral of genocide--in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, in Guatemala and throughout Latin America, and in other places--that they never would have supported, or would have stopped before it reached the levels that it did. Hindsight and FOIA also tell us this. They were trying to see the light at the end of the "Cold War" tunnel. Trying VERY HARD to see it. Aiming at it. And this may well be why they were both assassinated.

So please get better informed. And you might also ponder this: Caroline was, what?, five years old when all of that happened. Jeez. Give the woman some air.

[Jennicut]

12. My father is a Republican and yet I am a liberal, what does this have to do with how Caroline will

be as a Senator? She is her own person.

[DevonRex]

13. mainly because half the people I was with believed it until I explained it to them

or something like that.

[Irvinwalker]

15. Actually, Kennedy was in secret talks with the Cubans to lift the embargo

Before he was assassinated.

[rug]

18. I'll just be happy if she doesn't go to war over Berlin.

[book_worm]

20. "charities and five books to glorify the family name" didn't she write books on consitituional law?

isn't she her own person? and why is doing charitable work just to "glorify her family name"? Your hatred of the Kennedy's is transparent and clouds your thinking. And don't accuse me of being a JFK lover. I think he was vastly overrated.

[donheld]

22. idiotic