Fifty years after his assassination, John F. Kennedy, a leading instigator of U.S. genocide in Vietnam, still proves useful to war-making U.S. imperialists.  As they mobilize for wider wars with their imperialist rivals, U.S. rulers are using the anniversary to revive JFK’s militaristic appeals for “sacrifice” and “service.”
For the working class, this “sacrifice” means mass racist unemployment and cuts in health care, food stamps and other social services. It means more racist police attacks on black and Latino youth, mass racist incarceration, widespread poverty, the intensified oppression of working-class women, and the mass jailing and deportation of immigrant workers. This is the state of rising fascism in the United States of the 21st century.
The bosses’ idea of “service” is to push jobless youth into the military to fight and die in imperialist wars. To groom the officers to help lead this bloody charge, the bosses are resurrecting ROTC on college campuses. Barack Obama’s Dream Act would use the promise of citizenship to recruit tens of thousands of immigrant Latino youth into the military. (As Pentagon generals have noted, the capitalists are facing an acute personnel shortage in their military.)
But Obama’s ruling-class masters also recognize that oppressing the working class won’t solve all their problems. For U.S. capitalism to survive, they know they must discipline their own ranks as well. Witness the recent deal made between the U.S. Justice Department and JPMorgan Chase. The largest bank in the U.S., Chase has $2.46 trillion in assets. It agreed to fork over $13 billion (roughly half its annual profits) as an example to the other main finance capitalists. By accepting the government’s penalty, Chase was sending a message: The rulers’ short-term greed must be subordinated to the long-range greater good of their class.
Capitalists’ Splits, Then and Now
The renewed focus on Kennedy’s killing sheds light on today’s divisions within the U.S. capitalist class and how they weaken its fighting capacity. The current split involves the billionaire Koch brothers and the Tea Party group, which makes most of its profits domestically, versus the internationally oriented finance capitalist wing on Wall Street. The finance wing needs a broader war to protect its control over energy and cheap labor abroad, and to repel challenges to the dominance of U.S. imperialism.
In the 1960s, the rulers were facing a similar split. Domestic oil interests were up in arms against JFK’s reported plans to revoke the oil depletion allowance. According to one theory, Kennedy was killed by domestic oil interests who were unwilling to cut their profits for the imperialist cause.
Kennedy’s Racist War in Vietnam
In his commemorative November 22 proclamation, Obama said of JFK, “He called a generation to service and summoned a Nation to greatness.” He was echoing Kennedy’s inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
What Obama left unsaid was how Kennedy’s “call” led to the deaths of tens of thousands of GIs for the glory of the U.S. global empire: “The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.” U.S. capitalists today have a renewed interest in a compulsory draft, like the one under Kennedy that forced more than 300,000 working-class youth into the U.S. war machine. The recruits were needed for the run-up to the Vietnam War, a racist, imperialist atrocity against workers who were slandered as sub-human.
The imperialist Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs offered a clearer picture of Kennedy by reprinting a 1957 piece by the future president. JFK praised the U.S. takeover of military operations in Vietnam from the defeated French bosses. He also discussed the tightrope the U.S. needed to walk between a manageable ground war and an unpredictable nuclear clash with the Soviet Union, or “the need to face the prospect of having to wage a limited war while holding the levers of unlimited destruction.”
Once in office, JFK approved the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and increased the number of U.S. military “advisers” in Vietnam, notably Green Beret assassins. His war council included arch-imperialists like Robert McNamara and McGeorge and William Bundy, who remained in office after the Dallas shooting. Under Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, these officials directed a failed campaign that slaughtered more than three million Vietnamese workers and 58,000 GIs.
Like Kennedy, Obama Needs $$$ from the Ruling Class
Along with working-class “service,” Kennedy demanded wartime “sacrifice” from the entire capitalist class in the form of higher taxes and tighter government control. On April 11, 1962, JFK lashed out at Big Steel after it rejected his war-minded demand to freeze prices:
“It [will] make it more difficult for American goods to compete in foreign markets, more difficult to withstand competition from foreign imports, and thus more difficult to improve our balance of payments position, and stem the flow of gold [which French capitalists demanded at the time]. And it is necessary to stem it for our national security, if we’re going to pay for our security commitments abroad.” JFK explicitly challenged U.S. Steel’s patriotism: “Some time ago I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country and I asked the steel companies. In the last 24 hours we had their answer.”
Kennedy had similar problems reining in the domestic oil bosses. He ran into bitter opposition when he threatened to end their oil depletion allowance, a tax break worth hundreds of millions a year to Texas oilmen. (The first 27.5 per cent of oil revenues were tax exempt.) But for the main financial capitalists, the tax break was a problem because it depleted the Pentagon’s war chest.
Given the stakes, there was any number of domestic-oriented capitalists who wished Kennedy dead. But the dominant wing of U.S. bosses desperately wants to portray JFK’s murder as something other than a fight within the ruling class. Leading Wall Street banker and Warren Commission member John J. McCloy argued that it was beneficial for domestic tranquility to conclude that Oswald acted alone (New York Times, 8/20/97).
Imperialists vs. Isolationists
For Obama and the U.S. imperialists he serves, isolationist Tea Partiers and small-government advocates like David and Charles Koch constitute major obstacles to their war aims. Where the Rockefeller-ExxonMobil-JPMorgan Chase-run Foreign Affairs extolled Kennedy’s war planning, the Koch-funded Cato Foundation marked his passing with scorn. It wrote,
JFK and LBJ set out to prove how much the U.S. government could accomplish at home and abroad, a mission that endeared them to those who believe in the promiscuous use of power. They ended up proving how much it could not accomplish, and how little extravagance can buy (11/21/13).
Differences among U.S. capitalists over the need for imperialist war are as sharp now as they were in the 1960s. We can’t predict how or when that war will begin, or who the main combatants will be. But as the main wing of U.S. finance capitalism moves to discipline the internal opposition, it may only be a matter of time before the two sides resume killing one another.