Scott Johnson of Power Line Blog fame has a review of John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and the dangers of “talking to our enemies”.

Kennedy was seen as week and inexperienced after meeting with Khrushchev with no preconditions. Not only did this weakness lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis, it also prompted Kennedy to the call for action.

Persuaded that he needed further to demonstrate “fearlessness and backbone,” in the words of William Manchester, Kennedy observed to Reston that the only place where the Communists were challenging the West in a shooting war was in Southeast Asia. Summarizing Kennedy’s own evaluation of the aftermath of the Vienna conference in his 2003 biography of Kennedy, Robert Dallek writes that Kennedy “now needed to convince Khrushchev that he could not be pushed around, and the best place currently to make U.S. power credible seemed to be in Vietnam.” (LINK)

Barack Obama does not see the harm in talking. He sights John Kennedy’s meeting with Khrushchev as a model for how he would engage our enemies. Maybe he needs to study history and run for President when he has grasped how the world works.

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