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I grew up as a Democrat in Laredo, Texas. I campaigned for John Kennedy when I was in the fifth grade. My dad took me to a political barbecue at the LBJ ranch, where I personally met Lyndon Johnson. As a local representative of Lady Bird Johnson’s beautify America campaign, I visited the White House.
In 1975, I returned to my hometown of Laredo, Texas, to practice law in partnership with my father. I was still a Democrat, a liberal one. Even though I had graduated from The Virginia Military Institute and had been commissioned as an infantry officer, I had turned against the Vietnam War in 1970 during my third year at VMI. Having grown up in one of the poorest cities in the United States, I believed in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. I believed that a principal role of government in society was to take care of people, especially the poor and downtrodden. ...
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John F. Kennedy came into the presidency in 1961 as a standard Cold Warrior. Like most Americans, he had bought into the entire rationale for the Cold War — that is, that communism and the Soviet Union posed a grave threat to the United States and, therefore, that it had been necessary for the U.S. government to become a national-security state and for the United States to stop the spread of communism all over the world.
Soon after he became president, the CIA presented Kennedy with a plan for a violent regime-change operation in Cuba, one that entailed an invasion by CIA-trained Cuban exiles. Following the CIA’s successful regime-change operations in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, the CIA assured Kennedy, who opposed overt U.S. involvement in the invasion, that the operation could succeed without overt U.S. support, including U.S. air support.
It was a ...
James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution, wrote that of all the enemies to liberty, war is the greatest. What he meant by that is that governments inevitably use wars and other crises and emergencies to centralize and expand their powers over the citizenry. Thus, in the process of claiming to keep the citizenry safe from external threats, the government often becomes a grave threat to their freedom and well-being.
The United States has been at war for more than 15 years, ever since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003. But it’s actually much worse than that. If we go back to 1941, we see that the United States has been embroiled in what has become perpetual war, including World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the violent regime-change operations in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, and other countries around the world.
Thus, it shouldn’t surprise ...
