Hour,me in our and approaching the 50 anniversary of his assassination. In the studio, the editorin chief of the atlantic. Could you tell us what this is about, and why you decided to put out this edition . Thet were approaching 50th anniversary of the assassination of jfk and the john f. Kennedy. Kennedy remains with us today. His legacy is so contested. Views of him are still all over the map. Historians to rate him that high. The put them in the top 20. Americans rate him extremely high. He remains the most popular president of the 20th century besides of franklin roosevelt. Atlantic has been around for a long time. We covered the Kennedy Administration thoroughly. Our writers have struggled with the question of what impact his administration had, and what he was like as a man. Forommission new stories the insights and revelations of the 50 years since he was killed. Putting that together with great pieces by Walter Litman and other writers. Trying to produce a composite orchard of the man and his moment, it is president. And his presidency. Pas conversations, past editions, publications. New essayse are about kennedy struggles with joint chiefs. I think it is the most clear portrait of how he handled the human missile crisis. We have been on all sides of this. Condemning him in years since, but what relic but he was in a real battle not just that the soviets but with his own joint chiefs who were accusing him of appeasement and trying to rush him into war in cuba. He successfully fought them off internally, and eventually achieved a negotiated compromise. Host the piece is an excerpt from his new book. In this piece, he writes freedom a field commanders to launch without permission from the commanderinchief. Bundy, facedorge with military action, could start the thermal Nuclear Holocaust on its own initiative. We became increasingly horrified over how little positive control the president really had overuse arsenaler use of this of weapons. Guest field commanders had a wide degree of latitude in employing nuclear weapons. The joint chiefs believed we could fight and win a nuclear war. These are the early years of our defense apparatus coming to terms with the vast power in our nuclear arsenal, and how a change the way war be conducted, the way diplomacy should be conducted. Kennedy kennedy and then think again, this is one of the ways his administration had an enduring impact was the first president to really try to bring it under executive authority, full executive authority. Host how did he respond to the power . Guest by struggling to bring the power under civilian control. And lifting it up certainly from the level of field commanders. Again, in cuba, the joint chiefs thought a nuclear war should be an option after a fiveday bombing campaign. If necessary, they would have resorted to a full invasion and they believe nukes would have been deployed. It was much more of a live option at the time. Host and this piece and the special edition of the magazine is adapted from his new book. There is the commemorative edition on your screen, marking the upcoming 50th anniversary of jfks assassination. That is the topic or all of you. James bennet, editorinchief of atlanta is with us. John from north carolina. Democratic caller. Caller how many decades need to pass before journalists and employers feel it is safe to write about building 7, 105 feet of freefall on 9 11 and evidence moving preplanned explosions rock the building them. Host that is not our topic. We adjusted the phone calls from you and others that are part of the group that made an effort to call into this program. We are going to move on. Tony and austin, texas. Independent caller. Caller last year, i called into cspan on 9 11 him as i do every year, and as soon as i told the screener that i was wanting a new investigation of 9 11, she hung up on me. I am not sure why we cannot be taken seriously. I think you should get an expert on 9 11 on, someone from the alternative side, lets discuss this. Host tony, we have taken your phone calls. We appreciate you are exercising your right to call in and voice your opinion. And that is the format of this show. We have had members of congress who were on the program when you and others have called in to answer those questions. That is not our topic right now. So, i am going to move on and stick to the atlantic special commemorative edition, looking at jfk, the man and his leadership. You, mr. Bennett, talk about the piece that talked about how historians do not give him such a great grade, but americans do. Can you talk about a little bit more about why it is . Guest Alan Brinkley wrestles with this question, what is the explanation for president kennedys enduring grip on the national imagination. I think it is partly obviously the glamour, the memory of camelot as Jackie Kennedy recalled the years of the white house. And he makes the point that kennedy, we remember him properly anyway as this tremendously charismatic figure who called americans to a higher purpose and injected a new element of morality into Public Affairs. In fact, he was a deeply reserved and highly pragmatic man. In many ways, extremely cold and calculating. But that impression of him indoors. And the point that he and bill clinton make is that for all the turbulence of those years, with his Administration Cut Short by assassination, it did end up serving as a springboard to a tremendous amount of change on civil rights, the conduct of foreign affairs, medicare. The great society, lbj, premised by things he said, that john kennedy called for. So a Pivotal Moment in our history. Also obviously modern techniques of campaigning, the political tactics john kennedy put in place. He was the youngest president ever to serve. He came into office at 43, replacing then the oldest serving u. S. President , dwight eisenhower. So i think for many americans, and not just debuted boomers, he is recalled as marking an important pivot point in american history. Host he writes in the piece president kennedy spent less than three years in the white house and his first year was a disaster, as he himself acknowledged. Guest he basically cannot get anything done. He struggled all the way through. He got very little of his legislative agenda through, despite having huge democratic majorities in both houses. He obviously had this asterisk the disastrous day of pigs invasion. Something he intensely regret it. He felt like he had been essentially railroaded, i think, by the pentagon. He had his First Encounter with Nikita Khrushchev in which he came away looking callow and unprepared. So, the first year was a big learning experience from the president. Host you have in the special edition reporting from kennedys years and around those years as well. The headline from David Brinkley in february of 1965, originally entitled leading from strength lbj and action. Too cool for congress could be a headline for this administration and its relationship. Guest there are interesting echoes. There are some interesting comparisons to be drawn, i think, between that administration and this one. David brinkley, of course, was a very famous broadcaster and obviously a wonderful writer. Deeply knowledgeable about congress and washington. And he argues in this piece that part of the reason kennedy failed with congress was he simply couldnt connect. He vaulted to the white house after only briefly serving in the senate. He remained in all of the old awe of the lions in both of the senate and felt maybe insecure dealing with them. And then brinkley makes an argument that there was simply a cultural disconnect, the too cool point. Congressman serving from elsewhere in america were not as impressed by this extremely of sophisticated glamorous white house. Host what was his approach . Was it intellectual . Guest excessively intellectual. And he wasnt shaking hands and he wasnt going inside and having any kind of meetings with these guys and talking to them the way they liked to be talked to. He was a remote president. Host silver spring, maryland. Republican caller. Caller how are you doing . A relationship between kennedy and his brother bobby, how much influence did he have not just in domestic issues but also when it comes to Foreign Policy . I am just curious to see your opinion on this. Guest i am fascinated by the same question. I should say, i dont pretend to be a historian myself about the kennedys. I am an expert on our own work, so i can only answer the question within the within what we write. What our own coverage has shown is they were extremely close. And john kennedy relied hugely on bobby during his own administration. So, thats as far as i can take it. Sorry. Host talk a little bit more about the original reporting you have in this piece and how did you go about culling this, and your decision of what to put in . Yeah, from the atlantic archives, or from the era, i should say. Guest we were looking for pieces from great writers that advance a provocative point of view, but we were also looking very much to see how the tenor of the of our own coverage, how would change. How are own approach to the administration chains contemporaneously. And those years the atlantic publish something called the report on washington which was a monthly summary of what would later be called beltway inside which was an inside opinion of what the president is doing. Something that would not necessarily happen today with everything on twitter. And in those days a monthly magazine could update readers on with the beltway opinion was. What you see is a very familiar arc of coverage. We started out and these anonymous pieces that were written by very eminent journalists here, completely excited and in awe of this charismatic president and there is huge praise for assembling this great team of young advisers, this wonderful new breeze blowing in washington. Moves very quickly to kind of a jaded, cynical attitude about this guy. We have heard this before. The same act. There is a piece in july of 1963 saying, it opens with the observation that no words ever uttered by john f. Kennedy proved more embarrassing to him and fan his inaugural extrication that you should ask not what the country should do for you but what you should do for the country. Which, of course, those words are remembered as one of the most inspiring uttered by president. Host why was that embarrassing . Guest our view was that he had gotten so little done and he still failed to deliver on the promise of that extrication, to provide means for americans to get more involved. The piece says he did push for the peace corps, but beyond that, he basically did nothing. As the atlantic went to press, our issue of december of 1963 which went to the printer and would have reached newsstands when john f. Kennedy was killed some of the washington report said this administration has moved very quickly from the cry of what can be done to the lament of what cant be done, and there is this aura of pervasive gloom in washington. And it goes on to wonder how he will possibly recapture the dynamism of his First Campaign during his reelection. By the time kennedy was assassinated, the kind of inspirational message, the notion that he was charismatic and bringing something new to washington, had really worn thin. And there was criticism for failing to revive the economy. He had come in saying he would get the economy going, and that did not happen. And his overall legislative agenda, as we already discussed, had gone nowhere. Host bob, georgia, independent caller. Caller thank you for cspan and thank you for taking my call. The screener said it was ok to talk about the assassination it is hard to believe that oswald acted alone. Although he shot the president , he said he was a patsy. I believe he was a patsy. He had people helping him. A lot of people loved the president and a lot of people hated him. Im wondering, mr. Bennet, you said he had a problem with the military. Take the whole fiasco, the bay of pigs, from that day on people have plans to kill him. Some even called him a traitor. Guest again, i did not portend to be an expert on all the different theories of the kennedy assassination. In this issue, we found in our archives and it is just a very short, surprising little nugget of Lyndon Johnson quoted in a piece we ran, i believe, in 1973. In his view, some kind of cuban connection, not necessarily for the bay of pigs but other attempts to destabilize the regime or even kill castro. Beyond that, we also published in this issue a wonderful short story by a man who is an expert on the assassination and has written voluminously on it for us and for others, in which he imagines a counterfactual and tells a story in which oswald loses his nerve and does not she kennedy and what could have transpired. Host connecticut, democratic caller. You are on the air. Caller hello, how are you . I am a subscriber to your magazine. I love your magazine. You were talking about the joint chiefs of staff and the trouble kennedy had. It was not just with kennedy unknown, but eisenhower had trouble and nixon had later. Eisenhower had trouble, when the u2 biplane, a lot of historians thought it was done purposely to undercut the u2 spy plane, a lot of historians but it was done to purposely undercut the meeting with khrushchev. And nixon, being spied on. The joint chiefs of staff especially after the world war ii era for 20 years or so really ran amok and no one trained them in. The only guy who did anything was truman when he cut down macarthur he was not with the joint chiefs at the time, but those guys really thought they were entitled to run their own show without any input from civilian authority. I just want to get that out there. Thank you. Guest thank you. I think that is just an excellent point. It is a thread running through american history. And certainly the modern history of the presidency, this tension between this kind of Permanent Defense infrastructure and civilian control of the white house. Host a viewer tweets in they go on to question whether it was a bad idea or a good idea. Youre right about jfks civil rights problems, a report from washington in 1963 about what was going on. Guest this is, again, one of the things he was criticized for in our pages and elsewhere. The first couple of years his administration was basically avoiding talking about civil rights at all, at a time the issue was beginning really to explode in the south particularly, and across the country. And he basically ducked. Until june of 1963, and again, this is something bill clinton really seized on in his own assessment of kennedy when he gave this moving speech about the importance of advancing civil rights, something that lbj would obviously see is a porch he pick up and carry forward. Host passing the torch, that is the piece written by bill clinton. He assesses the civil rights accomplishments of the 35th. A viewer tweets in this do you think jfk would have gone is out of vietnam if he lived . Guest this is an endless question. I am sorry, i hate to do this, but i really dont feel qualified to answer the question. There is a very important piece i think in understanding how we got into vietnam. An argument about the bureaucratic imperatives that deepened our experience there, the unwillingness of people to speak up and oppose this issue a mission and the sidelining of experts at the time. It is possible that john kennedy you see it in the cuban missile crisis, as he gets stronger in the course of the presidency, more deeply skeptical about the ability of military force to advance diplomatic objectives. It seems conceivable he may have recognized the danger of deepening our involvement in vietnam, but it is impossible for me to say he would have gotten us out of there. It is quite interesting and this came up and we talked about this a lot in your last segment, the comparison to what is happening now in syria and how would john f. Kennedy have handled it. It came up in the last segment, understood as being a proxy war. It shows, taking kennedy out of it, how much the times have changed. Cuba then very much was a proxy struggle, with Nuclear Armageddon waiting in the wings. Syria was a client state of the soviet union, just as it is now a client state of russia. But the issue, as we struggle with the russians on the path forward, it is not seen as a proxy standoff with the risk of a deployment of nuclear weapons. Host there is a piece from gary wills in 1982 you put the headline, the kennedy called the crisis . Conventional wisdom tended to rank the cuban missile crisis as the kennedy presidencys highest drama and grandest success. But this provocative recounting of the administrations policy toward castros cuba suggests kennedy brought the crisis on himself. Guest the argument is quite persuasive. Castro had every reason to be scared and to want missiles in cuba for defensive purposes because the kennedys had made very clear their desire to see him brought down. So, gary wills argument is kennedy provoked the crisis in the first place. I think it is very important in a Historical Context of this. Host anyone seen a resemblance here between kennedy and mr. Obama . Brian, east sandwich, massachusetts. Republican caller. Caller thank you for letting me come on. I remember when president kennedy was assassinated, and all the teachers and the students in a high school were crying. I have a couple of questions am a real brief. Thank you for entertaining them. I understand douglas macarthur, the famous general of world war ii and the korean war, advised mr. Kennedy, president kennedy, not to get involved in vietnam. I wonder if you have comments. And what about the Lasting Legacy of nasa and the peace corps for president kennedy . I would take my answers off line. Guest sorry to say, i cant address the first question. I simply dont know the facts. The peace corps and nasa i think both were obviously incredibly important to explaining, i think, why people remember kennedy so fondly, for the most part. The moonshot obviously was an extraordinary example of a president summoning the country to a new National Mission and sense of purpose. That a lot of people thought was not achievable when he enunciated it. We did make it to the moon by the end of the decade, as he envisioned. And as Alan Brinkley writes in the introduction, in his views, this is one of the reasons kennedy and doors endures the way he does, the feeling of american possibility during his administration that we dont live with at least not in the same way today. In the peace corps, also, summoning americans to a higher purpose. To my mind, a really interesting piece and hereby eleano