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Not Kennedy

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FRANK CIANCI

Published: May 24, 2008

Editor:

In his May 21 op-ed page column on leadership, Charley Reese said President Kennedy got the United States into the Vietnam War, was responsible for the Bay of Pigs debacle and gave up defensive missiles in Turkey.

The first American soldier was killed in Vietnam in 1959, when President Eisenhower was in office. In an interview with Walter Cronkite, President Kennedy said the war in Vietnam was a civil war. Two months later Kennedy was assassinated. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian and Kennedy confidant, later said that JFK was going to take our people out of Vietnam.

Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA when Kennedy entered the White House, advised the president that the Cuban people would rise up against Castro when the Cuban exiles the CIA had trained invaded. That never happened. The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a debacle. Kennedy was irate and Dulles was "fired."

As for the Soviet missiles in Cuba, I don't know of any other way to have gotten them removed, other than inciting a devastating – and possibly nuclear – war but to negotiate. Russia gave up its Cuban missiles, and we gave up our missiles in Turkey.

Frank Cianci
Hudson

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