November 22, 1963: Changing History with a Bullet

By Alan Caruba

On November 22, 1963 I was in the office of a human rights organization in downtown Miami, Florida, fresh from service in the U.S. Army.

I was happy that President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev had not gone to war in October 1962 over Soviet missiles in Cuba. My battalion, part of the Second Infantry Division, had been put on alert to invade. A U.S. naval blockade had stopped any new missiles from being delivered and those that had been were withdrawn.

The Cold War had been going on since 1945 and tensions between the U.S. and Russia had briefly and dangerously reached a tipping point. Fortunately, the leaders of both nations pulled back. Elsewhere a relatively small, backwater conflict was going on in Vietnam, but few were paying it any attention.

John F. Kennedy was incredibly popular. He said that the torch of freedom had passed to a new generation and, at age 26, I was convinced his generation and mine were going to solve all of the world’s problems. I was unaware that JFK had so failed to impress Krushchev when they had met in Vienna in 1961 that the Soviet leader had felt emboldened to put missiles in Castro's Cuba.

On November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, Lee Oswald, a leftist malcontent who had spent some time in Russia, shot and killed the President. Within days I had packed and returned home where I would take up a career in journalism.

Anyone who was alive on that day can probably tell you where they were when they got the news. For later generations, it is just a date in the history books.

After Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn into office to serve out JFK’s term and won election on his own, history took a turn for the worse when he escalated the Vietnam War. Some 58,000 young men died in that conflict and President Johnson, after a huge election victory in 1964, announced on March 21, 1968 that he would not run for a second full term. He had served from 1963 to 1969.

Johnson had unleashed a tidal wave of liberal programs such as “the Great Society” and “the war on poverty”, signed the Civil Rights Act into law, initiated Public Broadcasting, instituted Medicare and Medicaid, and increased aid to education.

The nation turned away from liberalism and elected Richard M. Nixon who would serve from 1969 until forced to resign from the presidency in 1974 as the result of the Watergate scandal. The nation swung back toward liberalism and elected a little known governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter. He lasted one term and the nation swung back toward conservatism and elected Ronald Reagan. Twelve years later, after Bush 41, it would swing back again and elect Bill Clinton.

For nearly fifty years, America has been seesawing back and forth between conservatism and liberalism without seeming to learn the lessons of the experience.

Liberalism and its many entitlement programs, the expansion of the federal government, the debasement of our educational system, congressional raids on the Social Security fund, and the failure to rein in the “government sponsored entities”, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have brought us to a point of economic collapse not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s..

After November 22, 1963 everything that followed began with a single bullet. It sent the nation careening off on a spending spree that by 2008 took an infusion of billions of public dollars to avoid a banking industry catastrophe. It would be followed by an increase of two trillion in the national debt under a new, young, and briefly popular president.

Did we learn anything from those previous decades? Apparently not.

In 2008, the voters elected a virtually unknown U.S. Senator from Illinois who had barely spent a few months in the Senate before setting out to become the 44th president. Like JFK he was young, charismatic, and eloquent so long as Teleprompters fed him the words to say.

President Barack Obama did not bring a “brain trust” into office with him like FDR or “the best and the brightest” as Kennedy did. Instead, he installed a large group of “czars”, men and women, dedicated socialists and loony environmentalists who mostly bypassed the Congressional vetting process, but who have wielded great power behind the scenes.

Obama’s popularity, like Carter’s, disappeared in less than two years. The recent midterm elections were historic. The Republicans will control of the House and Democrats will have a narrow control of the Senate when a new Congress returns in January. Until then, the political chess game is astonishing as the nation races toward deadlines that include extending the Bush tax cuts and the continued funding of the government.

A remarkable movement, the Tea Party, emerged; leaderless, but composed of millions of Americans determined to take back the power that had been taken from them by a Congress indifferent to their wishes. The damage of the first two years of Obama’s term will take time to repair, but it will be repaired.

History might have been very different had it not been for November 22, 1963, but we shall never know how different.

What we do know is that liberalism, socialism, does not work. It debases fiscal prudence, spreads poverty, and subverts the Founder’s intention of a small central government while shackling the States with unfunded mandates.

For an older generation of Americans, we have lived through a lot of history and, 47 years ago, a single bullet set it in motion.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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The Party's Over

By Alan Caruba

Gray skies are gonna clear up,
Put on a happy face;
Brush off the clouds and cheer up,
Put on a happy face.
Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy,
It's not your style;
You'll look so good that you'll be glad
Ya' decide to smile!

What, may I ask, is there to smile about in an America whose economy is in decline along with many other aspects of life in our nation?

I have been thinking lately about some of the nasty history I have lived through. The difference was that from the end of World War Two until the dawn of the 21st century, the nation was a superpower backed up by a super economy. That was then, this is now.

The party is over.

Americans need to understand what the problems are and what must be done to turn around an economy that is rapidly losing momentum to nations like China and India. We must have new jobs and lots of them. Instead, we are bleeding jobs and government at the federal and state level must take much of the blame.

We have been through bad times before. Many of my readers are too young to remember President Nixon’s Watergate scandal that began with a break-in at the Democratic headquarters on June 17, 1972 and ended with Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. You had to have been there to know what it was like to live through two years of slow revelations regarding the role of the president and many of those around him. It was a national agony.

That wasn’t the worst of it. Watergate transpired against the background of the Vietnam War that had escalated under Lyndon B. Johnson who, in turn, had become president when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Anyone who has ever lived through a assassination never wants to live through another. So the war raged on with no end in sight and Americans marched, and marched, and marched against it. I was one of them.

Those were not happy times, but then, in response to the Nixon debacle, we elected the biggest dufus to ever hold the office until the 2008 elections and that was Jimmy Carter. As president, he was utterly clueless. The Iranian Islamic revolution occurred on his watch along with an energy crisis. As just one example, it was Jimmy who was the first to put solar panels on the roof of the White House and guess who is re-installing them again? The latest dufus.

Economists cite 47 recessions since 1790 and all were driven by bad governmental regulatory policies. And, no, we have learned nothing from this because the latest one repeats all the errors of the Great Depression; mindless government spending, even more regulation of Wall Street, and the failure to phase out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

After World War II ended in 1945, the U.S. had recessions in 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960-61, 1969-70, 1973-75, 1980, et cetera. In short, there hasn’t been a decade since the 40s without a recession, but most lasted on average about eleven months.

Some mysterious group of gnomes recently announced that the present recession “ended” in 2009. I think they were all smoking from the same hookah when they came up with that whopper. A look at unemployment and “under-employment” (same thing) figures give no real-world indication it’s over, nor does a growing population on food stamps.

President Obama, a man who never ran a business in his entire life and whose economic advisors fit the same description, has dealt with the present economic crisis by blaming it on George W. Bush. No longer able to do that, he now simply refers to “the last eight years.”

The Blame George excuse ignored several essential facts. The housing mortgage crisis is entirely the result of the “social justice” agenda of progressives, i.e., Democrats, who created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and defended both (are you listening Barney Frank and Frank Dodd) even as this house of cards was collapsing.

Americans must share the blame for buying homes they could not afford from banks who frequently had no choice but to make the loans. The government’s housing policy dates back to 1934, at which time the nation was already into the Great Depression.

The taxpayers ended up owning nearly fifty percent of all mortgages. Banks and investment houses that bought the “bundled securities” took a bath. Where in the Constitution does it say the federal government should be in the mortgage business? It doesn’t!

Then, too, you may remember that George W. Bush got real busy on 9/11 having to make some very tough decisions about a bunch of stateless enemies calling themselves al Qaeda and the Taliban. Okay, he also helped balloon the deficit by signing some very bad ideas such as the expansion of Medicare with a pharmaceuticals benefit. It’s not like he came up with Obamacare; a wholesale disaster.

Once we all get passed the midterm elections, likely to reflect a sweeping rejection of everything Obama and the Democrats represent, we should expect the Republicans to do what they were supposed to do in 1994. There will be a lot of new faces in Congress who, in theory, are beholden only to the people who put them there. In reality, however, they are beholden to the large campaign donors who put them there. That said, much depends on the quality of the GOP leadership expected to take over Congress.

There’s a lot to do, not the least of which is to clear away mountains of regulations that have driven American industry everywhere other than America. We don’t make things here any more and no economy can last very long without a manufacturing base.

Obamacare must simply be repealed. Whole government agencies need to be scaled back or eliminated. We not only can’t afford them, they are counter-productive in vital areas such as education, energy, and of course the environment.

Recently, in my home State of New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie lowered the boom on a multi-billion dollar railroad tunnel linking the State to New York City. He said that the State simply could not afford it. When was the last time you heard a politician say that?

The Secretary of Transportation paid him a personal visit to get him to change his mind about the tunnel. If he does, I’m thinking a lot of federal funds will start flowing to the Garden State. It’s called politics.

Still, it was refreshing to hear a governor, any governor, say “We can’t afford that.”

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Wonderful, Awful 1960s

By Alan Caruba

In the wake of the enthusiasm swirling around Sarah Palin, Barack Obama is likely to turn out to be for conservatives what the later years of the 1960s and early 1970s were for the beginning of conservative political ascendancy.

The early years of the 1960s are remembered now as the wonderful years when a young, handsome, and charismatic President, John F. Kennedy, took the nation into outer space and, along with his beautiful wife, Jackie, brought grace and style to the White House.

“You can tell if you were a liberal or a conservative if you thought the sixties were a good or bad decade,” said former Senator Rick Santorum in 2007.

I was raised a liberal, but I recall the 1960s as a mostly terrible decade, filled with assassinations, the growing involvement in Vietnam, and the strife that accompanied the Civil Rights movement. I remember it for the “hippies”, the drug culture that emerged, so-called “free love”, and the beginnings of the feminist movement. The 1960s turned me into a conservative.

In a book only a political junky could love, “Framing the Sixties”, historian Bernard von Bothmer writes that conservatives see the 1960s “as the beginning of the decline of beloved American values: self-reliance, self-discipline, personal responsibility, strong local communities, and love of country.” For liberals, it was “the peak of the quest for social justice.”

Guess what? Social justice in the form of government programs to spur home ownership, even if one could not afford it, led to the recent financial crisis.

The final years of the 1960s were quite awful, filled with anti-war marches and rioting. The 1968 Democrat convention is still etched into political memory for the turmoil it engendered, ironically in the streets of Chicago. His decisions regarding the war forced Lyndon Johnson to forego a run for reelection.

In 1971, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, revealed how the government had deceived Americans about Vietnam for decades, confirming voter’s suspicions and fears. In combination with the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal further discredited government, forcing the resignation of Richard Nixon. It swung the nation into the embrace of a toothy unknown Georgia Governor, Jimmy Carter, who replaced Nixon’s successor, Jerry Ford.

Carter’s failed presidency yielded the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan whose political ascendancy, along with the conservative movement, had begun in the 1960s. In 1966, he was elected Governor of California. In 1968 he took his first crack at running for President.

Sound familiar? War-weary from Afghanistan after 9/11 and the decision to invade Iraq, the first decade of the new century led voters to first turn Congress over to the Democrats in 2006 and then, in 2008, to embrace a totally unknown politician from Chicago. Young and a gifted orator, he evoked “change” and married it to “hope.”

One year into Barack Obama’s presidency, even his fellow Democrat politicians are fleeing his far Left program of “transformation”, seeing the embodiment of every socialist aspiration for an all-powerful, huge, centralized government. Every candidate Obama endorsed lost and the Democrat lock on Congress was broken when one of the most liberal states elected a conservative candidate to replace JFK’s younger brother, Teddy.

For the conservative movement and its candidates Barack Obama is the gift that keeps on giving.

As someone for whom the 1960s began with service in the U.S. Army, followed by several years as a journalist, I had a first-hand look at the events of that decade and the one that followed. From LBJ to Nixon to Carter, it is hard to describe how disappointed and angry Americans became. The Vietnam War was bad enough, but LBJ’s Great Society was a classic redistribution of wealth sold as a way to end poverty in America. It didn’t. Only jobs end poverty.

By contrast, Barack Obama’s tripling of the national debt will make debtors of everyone including a generation or more to come if government borrowing and spending is not dramatically reduced. Voters understand this, resent this, and will elect candidates who promise to fix it.

There is a factor that is unique to the present administration. Previous administrations were more or less responsive to public opinion. This one is tone deaf and/or indifferent. As Obama put it recently, “I won’t quit”, and he means it.

He is the liberal’s last chance to impose its extreme socialist agenda on America and, if that means lying to everyone every day, he and his fellow conspirators intend to do it.

The Massachusetts election must have come as a shock. The election of Ronald Reagan surely had the same effect as the 1980s dawned.

A combination of factors presage a significant conservative return to power in the months and years to come.

There is significant distrust of the presidency and the Congress. The effort to expand the federal government is being resisted in the voting booth and in state capitols around the nation.

There is anger at the way huge, 1,000-page bills have been either voted upon unread and in haste or kept from public review and voted through the House and Senate using bribery and pressure tactics.

The mood of the electorate is an amazingly swift reversal from 2008. It bodes ill for Democrats and progressives, and that’s good for America.