The Grade on JFK's Testing

"It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

-- Joe Biden in Seattle, Washington, on Sunday 10/19/2008

The Bay of Pigs crisis was not "generated" by some outside actor. It was an American initiative, an "invasion" of Cuba by Cuban partisans recruited, trained and funded by the CIA. The project was doomed in concept, poorly planned and executed, and belatedly undercut by JFK's cancellation of the American air support promised in the original plan.

The effort was launched under Kennedy's go-ahead. He lacked the experience to properly review the plan, and the confidence to overrule the career national security experts who recommended it.

JFK did better as he went on. His Berlin speech is famous, and the Cuban Missile Crisis is regarded as a triumph. But careful analysis of the missile crisis suggests that the rewards weren't worth the risks, and that our success was due in part to luck and Russian prudence. In Viet Nam his policy was a muddle of contradictory goals and beliefs that the stage for a disaster.

This mixed record came at a moment of national consensus on the strategy and tactics of containing Soviet Russia. Kennedy was largely an implementer of a Cold War architecture established by a bipartisan collection of "wise men" led by Truman and Eisenhower. We don't currently have such a consensus response to Islamist terror, and the development of that consensus is among our chief foreign policy problems.

Biden invokes Kennedy to suggest that Obama's brilliance will provide foreign policy successes similar to Kennedy's. We ought to consider whether it will provide similar risks, and ask how lucky we're feeling.