The Five Progressives

I know, the title says the five Progressives but the picture has four. If you go back a couple of posts you will see the fifth one, Woodrow Wilson. I do not know why Wilson was omitted from this picture.

The reason these five Progressives are here is due to statements by Senator Obama concerning meeting and negotiating with our enemies when he becomes president. To date he has not qualified this so I am presuming that he is really going to do a face to face with the bad guys. That is not good and there are four presidents who failed in that arena who come under the Progressive label.

Woodrow Wilson, author of the Fourteen Points, went down in flames when he ventured to Versailles to deal with those who had been our allies in World War I. Can our allies also be our enemy? Yes they can and Wilson discovered that early in the game. Telling the people in America that there were not going to be secret meetings and closed doors, point one of fourteen, Wilson quickly discovered that Clemenceau and Lloyd George had they had their own plan. Their first point was to go behind close doors. The Treaty of Versailles, often looked upon as a major cause of the rise of Hitler and World War II, was signed by all but the United States. Moral of the story: Wilson should have stayed home and sent his diplomatic team instead.

Franklin Roosevelt was president during World War II. It is oft said of FDR that he set up our Navy at Pearl Harbor knowing that Japan was going to attack. He did this because he wanted to get us into the war in Europe. I have never seen proof of that and do not believe it. FDR did as good a job as can be expected running that chaos known as war. However, when it came to the peace, Roosevelt has to be looked upon as a failure. His meeting with Stalin at Yalta was a disaster. Roosevelt wanted Stalin to assist in the invasion of Japan so he sold out Poland and Eastern Europe. This gave rise to Churchill's famous Iron Curtain speech here in America.

Harry Truman was FDR's vice president and took over the presidency when Roosevelt died. Truman attended the Potsdam conference where he told Stalin, he already knew it, that the United States would soon have an atomic bomb. It was at Potsdam that Europe was divided and the stage was set for the Cold War. Truman said he didn't think that Uncle Joe, Stalin, was really that bad of a guy.

Truman would change is mind on that when the North Koreans invaded South Korea. This police action, as it was called, would prove to be a disaster. Unwilling to let MacArthur fight, Truman and the Joint Chiefs meddled in this war to the point where over fifty-four thousand troops were killed and over one hundred and three thousands were wounded. No treaty ending this war has been signed.

John F. Kennedy, a young senator from Massachusetts with little foreign policy experience, had Nikita Khrushchev as his opponent. Kennedy offered hope and change. He was attractive to the young. At the age of sixteen, I was a big supporter of JFK. Kennedy was a good looking, young guy who reached out to a lot of people in this great land. But he did not know what he was doing when it came to Khrushchev. Khrushchev took Kennedy to task on Berlin and as Kennedy would state, "He just beat the hell out of me." Kennedy knew he had been tested and that Khrushchev thought him weak.

The real test between these two men came over Cuba and the missiles put there by the Soviets. Looked at as a victory for Kennedy, it is not for Kennedy, who had been warned about the missiles in Cuba as early as August 1962, paid little attention to those warnings. By October 1962, the crisis was serious and the world watched at John Kennedy took the world to the brink of nuclear war. Normally this is taught as a great victory for JFK but it wasn't. Kennedy's lack of interest and lack of experience in foreign affairs almost caused a catastrophe.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was not JFK's only mess. Looking for revenge for the beating he took from Khrushchev, Kennedy would send Special Forces Green Beret troops into a little place called Viet Nam.

What's the moral behind all of this? As president select strong, educated and experienced people to be in the diplomatic service. Let them do the leg work and handle the details. Once the agreement has been reached, read it, edit it, come up with the final version and show up to sign it. Do not meet with foreign leaders save for a friendly get together and chit chat.