Donald Gibson
Sheridan Square Press, Inc., New York
1994
What was JFK’s economic policy? If you can give any kind of detailed answer, you are a better man than me, Gunga Din. Kennedy’s economic policy is an area of his administration which is rarely discussed in parapolitics. (Who cares about taxation policy when you’ve got the Bay of Pigs and executive action?)
This is a very interesting, potentially very important book. It contains three loosely linked sections. The first hundred pages, and especially the first seventy-six pages, are an attempt to represent the Kennedy administration as a kind of US version of Harold Wilson. Kennedy, says Gibson, was a progressive social democrat: he was pro: manufacturing, growth, demand management and investment in the US; he was anti: finance capital, non-productive investment and the crudest forms of imperialism. Most importantly, he was willing to use the tax system to try to push US capital in the direction he wanted. Gibson quotes widely from the hostile opinion of – not Wall St. per se; the title is a little misleading – but certain financial sectors. He shows that JFK was opposed by what would now be (misleadingly) called monetarist banking circles. Among his critics was one Milton Friedman.
The second section is a brief account of changes in economic policy, and, in particular, changes in the USA’s foreign policy, which followed LBJ’s take-over of the reins. The US military and intelligence helped install a bunch of dictators in Latin America, as well as stepping-up the war in S.E. Asia. (And, not mentioned by the author, closed the apertura a sinistra in Italy, and began the harassment of one Harold Wilson.) There is a chapter arguing that the US ecological and environmental movement is profoundly reactionary (Gibson’s enthusiasm for technology and lack of concern at resources and population issues reminds me nothing so much as of Lyndon LaRouche Jnr); and a quick skim across Clinton, from whence he came (Trilateral et al), and how he is going to fail.
These latter sections are really little more than sketches It is the first part which was the revelation to me. Gibson has made quite a good job of representing JFK as rather more of a radical (by comparison with the Eisenhower Republicans) than I would have thought possible. The way is now open for a full-scale revisionist biography of Kennedy – this is a sketch of one – showing him challenging finance capital and the cruder versions of US imperialism, not to mention the military, intelligence and foreign policy establishments.
Maybe old Wislon’s affection for the younger Kennedy was not simply one cynical politician trying to stand in the light being cast from the beacons of Camelot.