KENNEDYS' IMAGE TARNISHED WITH PASSING YEARS

By Juan Montoya
Everyone alive back when remembers what they were doing when they heard that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas fifty years ago today on Nov. 22, 1963.
I was attending Garden Park School and we were just returning from a field trip to Harlingen where our class visited the Hygeia Dairy Company and the Holsum Bread Company. At Hygeia we had gotten ice-cream Popsicles and at the bread company pencils with the bakery logo.
We got back to the school on Military Highway at a little past 2 p.m. when one of our teachers (a young one named Miss Flores, I recall) addressed us and told us that the president had been killed in Dallas. She then burst out crying, an anomaly for an adult before second-graders.
School was suspended and the flag was lowered out in front of the principal's office (Nell Palmer).
This was back in the days when pictures of the Kennedys were displayed on woven tapestries in people's living rooms. The Kennedys, because they were Catholic, attractive and young, were idolized in the average Mexican-American homes in the barrio. I remember that my mother placed a candle before his picture on our mantle.

It was years later once I learned that the Kennedys, for all their charisma (I include Robert, who was later assassinated as well), were not really the champions of the downtrodden and the developing nations as we had been led to believe. They inherited the evils of a runaway military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned us about and were carried by the inertia of the Cold War that forced the Third-World nations to choose between one empire (the Soviet Union) or the other.
They were also reluctant late-comers to the Civil Rights struggle, hesitating to send protection to Freedom Riders, preaching for patience in the drafting of legislation on Voting Rights and the Civil Rights Act, and allowing Edgar Hoover's FBI to harass and discredit the movement's leaders. They stood by as civil rights marchers were beaten and gassed at the Selma bridge.
They also allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to subvert democracy (Guatemala, Vietnam, the Congo, etc) and waged a hidden war of aggression against Cuba by subsidizing sabotage and invasion against that island which forced Fidel Castro into the open arms of the Soviet Union.
The Bay of Pigs debacle where the hand of the United States became evident with its training of Cuban exiles in Honduras and ended up as an embarrassment when the exiles were defeated and imprisoned in Cuban jails only made Kennedy more strident in his anti-Cuban policies.
That :insult needed to be redressed rather quickly," Robert Kennedy commented once. Defeat did not chasten the Kennedys. It only made them more obdurate in destroying the Castro regime and the island's economy.
From there on it was a multi-tracked program of covert, economic, diplomatic and propaganda elements calculated to overthrow Castro. CIA-handled saboteurs burned sugar cane fields and blew up factories and oil storage tanks. The CIA devise numerous plots to kill Castro with poisonous cigars, pills, and needles to no avail. When Cuba protested to the United Nations, the matter was handed to the Organization of American States from which Cuba was expelled.
The Alliance For Progress became a vehicle for control of Latin American nations by U.S. banking and industrial interests which buttressed an entrenched status quo in these countries.
We, of course, knew little or nothing about these matters when we were growing up and were enthralled by the Kennedy mystique burnished by the Viva Kennedy clubs. Those were more innocent times. There is still a warm spot in the barrio for the memory of the Kennedy brothers. Perhaps in death they provided Lyndon B. Johnson with the sacrifice at the altar of the Deep South that allowed him to pass the civil right legislation that broke Jim Crow and protected minority rights. If that is so, that alone is enough for us to sing their praises.