He didn't trust the intel community, but its true wasn't a liberal. Here's what Gore Vidal wrote in his most recent book:
"In August 1961 I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup -- reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Casto's Cuba. It should be noted that Jack hated liberals more that he did conservatives. "No one can be liberal enough for the New York Post", he said. "Well, the Post should be happy now, Berlin's going to cost us at least three and a half billion dollars. So, with this military buildup, we're going to have a seven-billion-dollar deficit for the year. That's a lot of pump priming." He scowled. "God, I hate the way they throw money around over there at the Pentagon."
"It's not they," I said. "It's you. It's your administration." Briskly, he told me the facts of life, and I repeat them now as advice from the thirty-fifth to the forty-third. "The only way for a president to control the Pentagon would be if he spent the entire four years of his first term doing nothing else but investigating that mess, which means he really could do nothing else..."
"Like getting reelected?"
He grinned, "Something like that"
-- "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace", Vidal |
