This article is MASSIVE. My feed reader clocks it at an 80 minute read. Since my brain is fried from anxiety it takes me twice of the estimate.
I am trudging through it. TIL that the American president, Lyndon B. Johnson was a literal psychopath.
Having VP who is even worse than pres seem to be yet another of US “democratic” traditions.
Cowboys vs Yankees. The story of intra-agency intelligence power struggles in the 20th century
I’ll be real. As an outsider, JFK appears to be the one “good president” that the godforsaken country has had:
- wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces
- wanted to pull out of Vietnam
- was soft on Cuba
This seems like an intelligence agency vs. JFK situation. Please correct me if I am wrong.
He thought we could overcome problems by using capitalism. He was a true believer, not just a wealthy cynic. We would be the commies by introducing them to Coke-a-cola and blue jeans. We would solve imperialism by liberalizing previously occupied and having them join the world economy. He still wasn’t okay with having an alternative to capitalism. In a way he was a further abstraction of problems, not a counter to them. If he had continued we would continue to see imperialism, just by more abstract means. And eventually we’d still learn that you can’t have both, that the exploitation will be enforced by violence regardless of how it’s sold to the West.
Yeah we only look back at Kennedy with nostalgia because we never got to see how he would inevitably have taken slightly different roads as everyone else, just to get to where we are today.
Look, nearly all criticism of LBJ is valid and true. Corrupt, power hungry, egotistical, deranged, sure. But he did have a soft spot for the (rural, white) poor and did wander backwards into signing some progressive bills.
That said, the CIA killed Kennedy because not only did he tell them no, he told them he was taking their toys away and sending them home. It was at this point that the slow road to having every president have direct, first degree links to American intelligence operations culminating with a former director of the CIA and has only gotten more shameless since then. Although, Trump I haven’t looked into it much.
LBJ was just there, and I’m sure he immediately signaled he’d play whatever kind of ball they wanted to play.
AFAICT he wasn’t really soft on Cuba, he just didn’t want to risk nuclear war with the USSR; he may have been the least awful US president but he wasn’t a good one
I read somewhere else that he was kind of hawkish and had an obsession with taking Cuba down.
