JFK could have taught our lot how to accept political responsibility

THIS week marked the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy.

It was a day that anyone who was old enough knows where they were when the heard the news.

President Kennedy was not really as popular that day as he would be a week later when it no longer mattered. One report that went around the world was that schoolchildren in Dallas cheered when they heard of Kennedy’s death. That was true, but the story was distorted.

The children who cheered were a class of five-year-olds. They were told the president had been shot and they were getting the rest of the day off school. They were cheering for the half-day.

For people who have not yet reached their mid-50s, 42 years may seem like an eternity, but most other people probably have a clear memory of the events of that day.

How much more fresh must the memory of subsequent events be in the minds of people in Vietnam and Cambodia, whose right to independence was trampled on by the United States during the following decade?

The Americans deliberately prevented free elections in Vietnam because they realised that the Communists would win at least 80% of the vote.

Comparatively few American soldiers were involved in the Vietnam War in 1963.

There were less than 20,000 so-called “military advisors” in Vietnam.

Just before his assassination Kennedy announced that 1,000 of them would be withdrawn the following month. Kennedy’s aides maintained forever after that he was intent on withdrawing from Vietnam, but his successor sent over half a million men there within the next couple of years.

Kennedy’s biggest political disaster as president was the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, in 1961, when the Americans financed and secretly supported an invasion by Cuban émigrés in the hope of ousting Fidel Castro.

The CIA led the president to believe the Cuban people were ripe for counter-revolution and the invading forces would be welcomed, but it quickly became apparent that the people resented the American-backed invasion. Kennedy could have committed American troops at that point and probably over-run Cuba without too much difficulty, just as Soviet forces had over-run Hungary less than five years earlier, but he would have had problems convincing the rest of the world that this was appropriate.

He recognised that he was in a hole, and he got out of it by refusing any further support to the invaders whom he abandoned, at least for the time being. It was a military debacle that had the makings of a political disaster.

“In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man,” German chancellor Konrad Adenauer lamented, “it seems unfair that he did not also limit his stupidity.”

Kennedy was barely three months in office at the time, so he could have blamed the CIA or his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration was primarily responsible for the planning of the Bay of Pigs operation, but he did not try to put the blame on anyone else. Kennedy accepted full responsibility for the disaster. He sent a salutary warning to his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson.

“Lyndon, you’ve got to remember we’re all in this and that, when I accepted responsibility for this operation, I took the entire responsibility on myself, and I think we should have no sort of passing of the buck or backbiting, however justified.”

Kennedy was braced for a backlash, but there was none. His acceptance of responsibility for the debacle and his refusal to blame anybody else seemed refreshing. If he had been prime minister of Britain, he said that he would probably have been thrown out of office, but his direct election to the White House - even by one of the smallest margins in history - put him in a much stronger position than any prime minister.

His acceptance of responsibility for the Bay of Pigs seemed to increase his charm. The next Gallup Poll showed that his administration had a then unprecedented 82% support.

Kennedy tossed his advance copy of the poll aside. “It’s just like Eisenhower,” he said. “The worse I do, the more popular I get.”

He had been badly advised and quietly moved to get rid of those who had been so wrong about the Bay of Pigs, but he never blamed anybody publicly.

IN this country in recent years we have had one disaster after another, without anyone being held responsible, despite over €250m being spent on various tribunals. At the Beef Tribunal it came out clearly that Albert Reynolds was primarily responsible for ignoring the advice of civil servants in ordering the reintroduction of State insurance cover on around IR£200m worth of beef exports to Iraq.

Was Albert held responsible? Not likely. He was made Taoiseach instead without even waiting for him to testify. When he did testify in November 1992, he turned the spotlight on Des O’Malley by essentially accusing him of giving perjured testimony, which brought down the government. Since then we have had a rash of other tribunals. They clearly disclosed an amount of financial abuse. Charlie Haughey used the party leader’s fund to line his own pockets and then pay for designer shirts and expensive dinners. There was supposed to be a control on the fund in the form of a second signature on every cheque, but Bertie Ahern kindly facilitated things by signing blank cheques.

Bertie was not held responsible for that either. Nor did he accept any responsibility for the unfounded claim that he attended the London School of Economics. In recent days we have been learning that a veritable fortune in government money is being paid to at least four ‘graduates’ of Pacific Western University with the phoney degrees that they bought.

We had the debacle of around €60m being squandered on the electronic voting machines, but that is only peanuts compared to the money being wasted on the health service.

And what are we getting for that? Our health service is not just in crisis; it is in a shambles. In 1999 the Department of Health introduced, at a cost of €8m, Payroll, Personnel and Related Service (PPARS), a computerised system that was supposed to save money, but has already cost over €150m.

Of course, nobody is going to accept responsibility for it. Mary Harney inherited that mess, so it looks like Micheál Martin’s legacy. The way things have been going, that should ensure he will be Taoiseach.

Our hospitals are incubating the MRSA bug, which could be the key to this Government’s promise to end the waiting lists once people realise that by going into hospital they are risking their lives. Maybe they will not get the needed expert medical care at home, but it is probably a lot safer. Are the Government going to accept responsibility? Forget it. That constitutional concept has essentially been annulled. What we have now is collective cabinet irresponsibility. What’s even worse - people seem to be accepting it.