ASSASSINATION OF AN AMERICAN DREAM

Assassination Of An American Dream.
The poetic epitaph on the grave of Franz Schubert, one of the rarest musical geniuses of all time, who, alas, died too young to be counted as an equal of Mozart and Beethoven, reads: “Music has here entombed a rich treasure, but still fairer hopes.”
The same words, in a slight paraphrase, can be said of the thirty-fifth President of the United States John F. Kennedy. But, unlike Schubert, whose death did not stifle the musical genius of Germany, the assassination of JFK in 1963, followed by the killing of his brother Robert in 1968, altered the course of American history, by undermining the new generation’s nascent political consciousness, that carried a great promise of a better nation and a peaceful, better world. It can be legitimately said that it was the Kennedy assassination, and the bitter national disappointment in the viability of a dazzling American dream, that led to the current coarsening of the national consciousness and cynical disappointment in the romantic prospects for the American future resulting in a drastic retreat of American idealism, further exacerbated by President Nixon’s Watergate debacle, eventually surrendering the field to the worst elements of American imperialist mentality, effectively overwhelming this nation’s psyche in the last twenty years.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was not so much another American President, as he was a national symbol, and the perfectly convincing embodiment of the American nation-idea. The beautiful fairytale of Camelot was not a mere hallucination, an escape from the down-to-earth reality, or a too-good-to-be-true national dream. It was indeed a sincere perception of the nation, eagerly shared by the rest of the world which notably included the Russians; and, regardless of how much truth versus wishful thinking it carried, this perception was powerful enough to have the potential of becoming the reality.
Kennedy’s death was not a mere disappointment, but a brutal shattering of the American nation-idea, to the detriment of the rest of the world. The Russians, in particular, almost convinced by the Kennedy image that a new dawn was coming, the dawn of a wholesome world order of gens una sumus, had become so bitterly disillusioned, in the wake of his death, that the second best world order they were now prepared to embrace was the Nixonian pledge of pomp and circumstance, the poor, but steady Ersatz for the Kennedy dream, that almost succeeded in filling the void when, alas, came the Watergate scandal, and an era of manipulative opportunism was suddenly upon us, predictably degenerating into the chaos of a disintegrating USSR, and the ensuing Götterdämmerung of the post-WWII world order.
Only forty-five years after the Kennedy assassination, was another such shot at a perhaps similar American dream made possible, in the charismatic person of the unlikeliest national hero Barack Obama. Alas, he has apparently failed to live up to those great expectations of him, and, as a result, this time the American dream may have been put on hold for a much longer stretch of time…

Russia’s Greatest American Hero.
It may take another two hundred years for America to produce a President breaking into the upper handful of her greatest statesmen, or to elect (or, as they say, select) one whom history would place lower than George W. Bush. It is also quite feasible that, in retrospect, further removed from the nation’s past than where we are today, some major revisions as to who might go up and who might go down are to be made. However, in any further revision of the top half, it is virtually impossible to imagine the sad name of Richard Millhouse Nixon to break into that bulky better-than-average lot, on account of the inerasable stigma of his Watergate disgrace and his ensuing scandalous resignation from office.
Yet, had the Russians been persuaded to open their secret archives containing their own rankings of America’s greatest statesmen, President Nixon would have prominently been displayed in there, among the top ten easily, and no matter who comes next from number forty-five to one hundred, he would hardly lose his place among the best for many generations to come.
In fact, President Nixon can be called fairly accurately, even though slightly tongue-in-cheek, the Russians’ Greatest American Hero.
In the history of Russian-American relations, prior to the year 1933, there are no particularly happy pages. The name of Andrew Johnson calls forth very bitter memories, having nothing to do with his impeachment, nor his acquittal, but everything to do with Russia’s 1867 reluctant loss of Alaska to the United States (the deal was made only in the sad realization that Alaska would otherwise be lost for nothing to the aggressive American squatters, against whom the Russians had no adequate defense at the time), grieved up to this day, perhaps, into eternity. Subsequently to the tragedy of Alaska, and a certain sentimental Russian affection for Teddy Roosevelt notwithstanding, the fact that he brokered that odious Portsmouth Peace Treaty between Russia and Japan, in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, evokes no pleasant memories, since it was Russia who had lost that war. And then, finally and unsurprisingly, the most scandalous state of Russian-American relations from1917 into early 1933, including open military intervention by the Entente powers (with some American troops being among the intruders), shows a particularly inadequate level of superpower interaction, which, most probably, had the prophet Alexis de Tocqueville shaking violently in his grave.
Aside from ushering a new age in Russo-American relations, by recognizing the Soviet Union, FDR became a pioneer in superpower summitry epitomized in the previously mentioned Big Three meetings of the WWII era. Truman and Eisenhower were equally taking Russia’s superpower status for granted, their hot rhetoric of the Soviet threat only validating that important point. President Kennedy’s regular personal contacts with Nikita Khrushchev brought the superpower relationship to the verge of a positive breakthrough, tragically undermined by Kennedy’s assassination. An intense personal dislike of President Johnson by Khrushchev and his successors still managed to produce a single Johnson-Kosygin meeting in “neutral” Glassboro.
And then, suddenly, came Richard Nixon, the man who was the first American President to understand the symbolic value of a regular superpower summitry, with its intense pomp and circumstance, showing enough respect of the two parties for each other to allow them both to indulge in hardball politics without offending their mutual sensibilities with even the slightest shade of disrespect.
Thus, Richard Nixon, the champion of regular Soviet-American summitry, was the first American President to appreciate best the need for mutual respect in the superpower relations, and, as such, he has well earned the place, which I have jokingly described as that of Russia’s Greatest American Hero.
Becoming an active participant in the ensuing Nixon-Brezhnev framework of superpower interaction, I can testify to the incredible level of personal respect for the Nixon Administration among the Soviet political establishment. The unfortunate unraveling of the utterly unwanted Watergate crisis was followed with an intense concern and a growing apprehension in Moscow, and the Soviet Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin was continuously instructed to maintain an uninterrupted secret communication with Nixon and his closest aides, making numerous Kremlin-cooked suggestions (always made earnestly and in good faith!) on how to contain the crisis and deal with some of its sharpest and most unpleasant aspects. In retrospect, the Kremlin felt that Nixon and his people had not realized the seriousness of their situation until the very end, and was terribly disappointed that Nixon was not receptive to much of the Soviet advice, following which just might have saved the Nixon Presidency!
The 1974 fall of Nixon rang a death knell to the Russian hopes of further progress in the Soviet-American cooperative effort, and from then on, Moscow’s faith in such progress was to take a nosedive.

Tear Down That Curtain!
Now, what is the real legacy of America’s fortieth President and how come that the very same man who was a bumbling senior citizen, in the eyes of some, has become one of this nation’s greatest presidents, in the eyes of so many others? In the latter case, a less controversial way to put it would be to call Ronald Reagan one of America’s best beloved presidents. The difference in the wording speaks volumes about this case.
In my judgment, extreme incompetence and extreme popularity can safely coexist within one man, given the right set of circumstances. In fact, President George W. Bush, of very recent memory, had missed a golden opportunity to go the way of President Reagan, in the retrospective judgment of history, had he only stayed put and played the amiable chump, which, given his prodigious hillbillying skills, he might well have pulled off. In fact, America could well have afforded a whole string of such likable presidents, had they all been as devilishly lucky as Mr. Reagan was.
In seriousness, America was indeed ready for Mr. Reagan to come and fill the void left by the assassination of the Kennedy brothers, exacerbated by President Nixon’s Watergate. The national soul was drowning in disillusionment and cynicism of the 1960’s-1970’s, and, with Mr. Reagan, Hollywood had come to the rescue in almost the same vein as it delivered Shirley Temple to the masses several decades earlier, precisely when the masses needed her.
President Reagan was the ultimate actor playing the President. He was physically presentable and likable as a grandfather figure. It was exactly what the perfect doctor would have ordered, to soothe the ailing nation. The gaping void in the place where hope should have been, was filled with a make-believe hope, and the nation eagerly, even if not instantly, bought into this self-deception, just as millions of tired people of every nation buy theater tickets to watch a soothing fantasy on a screen, which is bigger than their television set at home.
As for the Reagan policies, I repeat, he was extremely lucky. The economy of the 1980’s was quite bumpy, but it would never reach a critical point on his watch. The foreign policy of his first term was questionable at best, but, as he put it himself, the Soviet leaders of the time were old, tired and feeble, and just kept dying all the time. In his second term, with Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin, Mr. Reagan rose to the occasion with a flair, resurrecting the theater of summitry, with all that it entailed. Remember that in those cold war decades the world stage was built around the two superpowers, and there was precious little else that mattered and none at all to overshadow the Washington-Moscow boxing matchup. It was at the height of the Reagan-style anti-Soviet hysteria, I must now remind the reader, that I was repeatedly questioned about the possibility of a nuclear war between America and Russia, to which I always answered in the negative, in good conscience.
The subsequent fall of the Soviet Union, and the general understanding that the cold war was over, and won by the United States, even though those events had nothing to do with the Reagan Presidency, or with any of his policies, seem to have sealed his luck in perpetuity, and I have little problem with this misconception, as there are far too many far more important historical ironies still misinterpreted and misconstrued. So let Mr. Reagan now rest in peace, with all his theatrical legacy intact. History needs good theater from time to time, and woe to the prude who jumps up in the middle of the play, shouting, in the late Mr. Reagan’s paraphrase, “Mr. Historian, tear down that curtain!!!”

Losing Russia.
(I have volumes to say on the subject of “losing Russia” in the 1990’s in several sections of this book, but this is not the place to go into detail, and so, in this sense, the subject’s treatment in this entry is necessarily declarative, while I am certainly referring the reader to the proper entries where my position is properly and at length explained.)
Perhaps the luckiest break for Mr. Reagan was that the dissolution of the USSR didn’t happen on his watch, and thus the mortal sin of “losing Russia” cannot pertain to him, like it pertains to his two successors. Had it happened on his watch, there would have been nothing done differently than what was actually done at that time, as it is not up to the post-Watergate Presidents to decide what needs to be done, but nevertheless, their “guilt by association” should stay with them in historical memory, as whatever happens is indeed associated not with those magicians who are pulling the policy strings, but with those public servants on whose watch it  happens.
Ergo, the dishonor of “losing Russia” goes to President George Herbert Walker Bush (#41), and particularly to President William Jefferson Clinton (#42). Whereas Mr. Bush, an otherwise decent man, was completely accidental, and even peripheral to the dramatic world events of the four years of his Presidency, Mr. Clinton seems to have taken an active personal interest in the aftermath of the USSR’s collapse and relished the new global role temporarily played by the United States, while visibly gloating over the perceived demise of the other superpower, and applauding the efforts to take maximum advantage of the fallen adversary, as though these efforts were personally devised by him.
I have a certain sympathy for Mr. Bush-41, in this duo, and a strong antipathy for Mr. Clinton, which happened to be the main reason why in the year 2000, I passionately rooted for Mr. Bush’s son, Bush-43, as he is now called. Needless to say, my hope for a better future invested in him had been sorely misplaced. (Honestly, I should have placed it in Patrick Buchanan’s isolationist dream, and buried it in the same coffin with Mr. Buchanan’s chances of becoming the next President of the United States!)
But in retrospect none of this really matters. Moscow, not Washington, was clearly calling the shots in those events, and the two men were simply taken along for the ride. Domestically, Mr. Bush-41 was extremely unlucky, whereas Mr. Clinton was spectacularly lucky, the economic bubble, and all. Otherwise, neither of them deserves further mention, at least on the world-historical scale.