Paris Tells Palestinians to Remove Arafat

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

November 7, 2004, 12:42 AM (GMT+02:00)

	Suha Arafat. In no hurry for widowhood.

French president Jacques Chirac’s patience with the Palestinians’ desperate maneuvers to cover up Yasser Arafat’s demise has run out. DEBKAfile’s Paris and Washington sources reveal exclusively that Friday, November 5, exactly a week after Arafat was admitted to the Percy military hospital near Paris, the French president put in a call to the White House and informed President George W. Bush that it was all over.

Paris and Washington both then swung into action.

An American delegation, organized at top speed by US Middle East diplomats, called on Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qureia in Ramallah on Saturday, November 6,

and asked him how Washington could help expedite a fitting end to the episode. The visit was more a token of support than a practical offer of help.

In Paris meanwhile, Suhah Arafat sacked the PLO ambassador Leila Shahid, the Palestinian spokesperson who issued almost daily bulletins after Arafat arrived in Paris.

What happened next was that Christian Estripeau, spokesman of the French military health services, informed Mrs. Arafat that he would issue no more bulletins on Arafat’s condition; neither would Percy hospital. She was given to understand that the hospital had kept her husband artificially alive as long as it intended to. The conversation followed a decision by a top-level conference of French officials, attended also by the president, to disengage from the pretence that Arafat was still alive. They realized it was no longer tenable without compromising the military hospital’s ethical position and medical credibility.

They also decided to settle the Arafat problem before November 12, because that is when Ramadan ends with “Orphan’s Friday” and moves into the three-day Eid al Fitr festival, during which no business of any kind can be contracted with Muslim authorities. If the Palestinian leader can be buried by Wednesday or Thursday, the French government reckons, the days of mourning can be wound up in time for Muslims to celebrate the festival and get started on the post-Arafat era.

Howwever, French efforts to unload Arafat by mid-week have been stymied by the lack of any accredited authority willing and able to organize the funeral or even determine the Palestinian leader’s final burial place. No Arab or Muslim leader will attend a funeral in Gaza or Jerusalem because it would entail transiting through an Israeli international port as well as risking his life in a Palestinian terrorist battle zone such as the Gaza Strip.

An earlier suggestion to overcome this difficulty, by Arab and European leaders attending a lying-in-state ceremony in Paris before the coffin’s transfer to Cairo, fell through. According to DEBKAfile’s Middle East sources, three governments - France, Egypt and Jordan – refused to allow any part of the final ceremonies on their soil. Paris then asked the Tunisian president Zeit bin Ali for permission to hold the central ceremony in his capital, so that European, Arab and Muslim leaders could pay their last respects in safety. The coffin would then be flown to Cairo and on to the Gaza Strip for burial.

The Tunisian president agreed. The Egyptian government firmly declined, as did Jordan.

In Ramallah, the power vacuum is widening.

Prime minister Ahmed Qureia and his predecessor Mahmoud Abbas are losing ground in their attempts to assume the interim reins of government.

1. Saturday, Qureia went to Gaza City to try and negotiate a temporary halt in terrorist attacks with the heads of 13 Palestinian factions – at least until after the funeral. They turned him down. Hamas demanded that first a unified Palestinian leadership be established with a place for itself.

2. The Gaza-based Palestinian Authority secretary Tayeb Abu Rahim Qureia humiliated Qureia at Saturday’s session of the Palestinian national security council by declaring angrily that nothing in the Palestinian constitution provided for the prime minister to step in as acting PA Chairman in Arafat’s absence. That prerogative, he said, belongs to another Gazan, the Palestinian legislature’s speaker, Fathi Rouh.

3. Then, the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s politburo chief, Farouk Kaddumi, who turned up in Paris Thursday, questioned Abbas’s constitutional credentials to stand in for Arafat as chairman of the PLO central committee. Kaddumi claimed that he was the rightful chairman and Abbas, who is listed as one of two deputies, must report on his every action to Kaddumi as his subordinate.

http://www.debka.com/article_print.php?aid=932

The historic, and fixed, 1960 election

This astonishing website threw even me for a loop. The article pretty much devastates JFK. Or at least the carefully crafted image. I did a google search on some of the claims however, damn if they all didn't come up right. Here is an amazing story.

QUOTE:

On Election night 1960, nobody knew at midnight if Kennedy or Nixon won, and when Kennedy remarked that he had it made, his father, Joe Kennedy, told him he still had time to change his mind -- not all the votes were counted yet in Cook County, Illinois. Gangster Sam Giancana was telling Judith Campbell, also referring to Cook County, that he had elected her boyfriend. Chicago's Mayor Daley also claimed credit for electing Kennedy.

Kennedy's close win over Nixon in 1960 has long been a bone of contention, and books have been written proving that Kennedy stole the election, or had the election stolen for him by his and his father's mob connections plus Lyndon Johnson's connections. Other prominent historians have ridiculed the idea and disputed the evidence of fraud.

When those on either side make impassioned arguments, make sure they provide legitimate figures on the relevant states involved in the fraud. (It is hard to get straight figures in partisan articles, even on how many people voted, and various articles give different figures.)

Here I use government archive figures that Kennedy won 303 electoral votes from 23 states and a popular vote of 34, 221, 344, or 49.72%, and Nixon won 219 electorial votes from 26 states and a popular vote of 34, 106, 671, or 49.55%. The charges of fraud have most often been raised against Cook County, Illinois, and Duval County, Texas, but also West Virginia.

Often you hear someone in authority say, "Even if the vote was crooked as charged in a couple of places, Kennedy still would have won on the electorial vote." During C-Span's 1999 Presidential Series, Historian Melvin Small apeared on C-Span's Nixon day with John Taylor of the Nixon Library on November 19, and his remarks will enter history because of the power of C-Span, which is usually authoritative and is relatively unbiased in an otherwise poisoned media.

Small told the new generations of Americans that Kennedy would have won even if the disputed votes had been crooked, but look at the figures. Subtract Texas electoral votes (32) and Illinois electoral votes (27) from Kennedy's 303 electoral votes and you get 244. Add those votes to Nixon's 219 and you get 278. In an honest election in 1960, Nixon would have won 278 to 244. Repeat, Nixon would have won.

Joshua Leinsdorf of the Institute of Electoral Analysis, widely quoted on the Internet (see Ask Jeeves), also insists in large type that Kennedy won fair and square, and supplies a large range of irrelevant figures dealing with comparisons of which presidential candidate led or trailed the rest of their parties in various states, and historic voting patterns, utterly beside the point and resulting in obfuscation. He pretended that the issue of fraud was focused on Illinois and -- hold tight -- Hawaii! He notes the difference was a handful of votes in Hawaii. (He does not mention Texas.) Leinsdorf confidently asserts, "Even if you take Illinois' 27 electoral votes and Hawaii's three votes away from Kennedy and give them to Nixon, Kennedy still would have won with 273 electoral votes, four more than needed."

Hawaii was not an issue. Texas, where Lyndon Johnson is supposed to have started his career in Congress by winning the cemetery vote in that very same Duval County, was an issue.

Historian Melvin Small is not the most aggressive of Nixon detractors, and he remarked on C-Span that most historians are Democrats (like most newsmen). One of his egregious mistakes was to declare that it was not Nixon who called the Defcon 3 nuclear alert in Black September 1973, but Henry Kissinger, because Nixon was out of commission due to the news media's Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, when Israel's fate was up for grabs. That false story had been trumpeted by The New York Times, all alone. According to Small, then, Kissinger saved Israel's existence, not Nixon. Small conceded that Alexander Haig disagreed with him in an interview.

See Nixon and the Jews for a more complete story, but here I must remark that Secretaries of State do not have the authority to order nuclear alerts. Joint Chiefs of Staff do not obey orders from Secretaries of State, they like to hear the president's voice on orders of that nature.

The Great Kennedy Disaster
A Con Game with Media Cooperation

"...handsomest, best-dressed, most articulate, graceful as a gazelle ...omniscient, omnipotent."

The martyred John F. Kennedy may have been the most beloved of American presidents, and affection for him in the 1960s and 1970s was close to total. Even detractors had to admire him for his grace under pressure, his cool ease in public, his quick wit and flashing smile, also when stoically enduring pain. If someone less attractive had been the rival of Richard Nixon, Nixon might not have had to resign; occasional surliness was not the best act to follow Kennedy.

The media's infatuation with and national devotion to Kennedy is both a blessing and a curse; the "value of his inspiration" made historians as weak in the knees as it did journalists, while perverting history. Meanwhile, his practical scorecard as president is surely the worst since the republic was founded. When he was president we had military superiority, and had it been otherwise, the catastrophes he flirted with might have struck harder than they did.

The main outline of his presidency has been covered in an outpouring of books, starting with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s A Thousand Days. Theodore Sorensen's Kennedy, and Roger Hilsman's To Move a Nation -- all by authors tied to Kennedy's career.

Many episodes in these books are landmarks in American history and folklore: (1) the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961; (2) the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic in May; (3) the bug-out from Laos, and (4) get-acquainted summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June and (5) the subsequent Berlin Wall August 13, which lasted 28 years; (6) the retreat to Vietnam of the former Laos defense line against communism's Asian expansion; (7) the aversion of President Charles de Gaulle to Kennedy and to his Undersecretary of State George Ball, which took France halfway out of NATO and U.S. troops out of the vital Com Z (the Communication Zone to Germany); (9) the Cuban missile crisis (a lone victory, but at the cost of alienating Turkey, which lost status along with its Jupiter missiles, and guaranteeing Fidel Castro's lifelong control of Cuba); (10) the partial nuclear test-ban treaty (a dubious partial victory), and finally (11) Kennedy's orders to dispose of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, America's shameful betrayal and summary execution of an ally.

His legacy was, he both got us into Vietnam and ham-strung our war effort there.

Everyone in my generation remembers where he or she was when the news struck that Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. I was watching German television in Bad Godesberg, and to my surprise I cried out, "They've killed him!" and burst into tears. My wife came out of the kitchen and said, "But you didn't even like him." "Now he'll never have a chance to make it good." I blubbered. My wife draped her black lace Spanish mantilla around his portrait at the Embassy Club, and it stayed there until Lyndon Johnson's portrait replaced it. We were not Kennedy-haters.

Brave he was, with the reckless courage of those who have nothing to lose and will bluff with a deuce in the hole, and he won over the crew of the lost motor torpedo boat PT 109. Yet when faced with alternative solutions to heavy-risk decisions, he always delayed past the last minute, then chose the most moderate move, not necessarily the best. In the choice of invading Cuba, obliterating its offensive weapons by bombing, or blockading it, he chose a hesitant blockade, finally selecting a ship that could not be carrying contraband arms, and so late that the crisis had reached nuclear-war stage.

Richard Reeves recalls that James MacGregor Burns, an early Kennedy biographer, wrote a spoofing article in New Republic on the theme, "He is not only the handsomest, the best-dressed, the most articulate, and graceful as a gazelle. He is omniscient; he swallows whole books in minutes, he confounds experts with superior knowledge of their fields. He is omnipotent."

Thirty years after Kennedy's death, Reeves published President Kennedy, Portrait of Power, (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1993), this time with time-released documents and the first peeks into archives of the defunct Soviet Union. The new material enabled Reeves to get into direct quotations, which, combined with his many interviews, present a closer look at Kennedy. What he found did not dampen Reeves's affection for Kennedy, nor end his belief that Kennedy was a great, if unusually profane president, but it left him shaken by Kennedy's aggressive recklessness like a James Bond dry martini, not just stirred.

A mild example: At the 1960 nominating convention Adlai Stevenson withheld his support, and JFK told him,

"Look, I have the votes for the nomination. If you don't give me your support, I will have to shit all over you. I don't want to do that, but I can, and I will if I have to."

Under observation by an army of doctors for most of his life, three physicians competed, not always amicably, to keep him alive during his presidency: his official doctor, a Navy officer; Dr. Janet Travell, who injected novocain into his back muscles to deaden pain for two hours at a time, sometimes several times a day, and Dr. Max Jacobson, who gave him amphetamines, so he could be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for public display. On his own, Kennedy took Demerol, a controlled pain killer that Jackie got from a Secret Service guard. Reeves also mentions that Kennedy had a persistent, unspecified venereal disease.

Constantly drugged or not, Kennedy was able to control the press like no other president. He was boosted into Congress by an article in Life by John Hersey, republished in Readers Digest, describing his wartime heroics. Arthur Krock of The New York Times helped JFK write his first book from his Harvard thesis, While England Slept (just as Krock earlier wrote a book for his dad, I'm for Roosevelt), but Krock later cooled on JFK because Kennedy treated him with contempt.

Once elected President, Warner Brothers in 1963 released PT-109, with Cliff Robertson playing the hero. Kennedy okayed the wildly false script, and wanted Warren Beatty to play him, but Beatty declined. The film was a smash hit, and the History Channel replayed it in October 2000. At half-time host Sander Vanocur asked Oxford historian Steve Gillon if it was the historical truth. The professor said there was little resemblance to real life, and the furious firefights greeting Kennedy's arrival in the South Pacific never happened. (Try to imagine Hollywood creating a movie that made Navy Lt. Cmdr Nixon a hero in the South Pacific.)

Someone at The New York Times called him to warn that a Tad Szulc story was ready to go on the impending Bay of Pigs infiltration (which was the talk of Miami, where Szulc got the story -- and no doubt of Havana). Kennedy yelled treason and called Orville Dryfoos, then publisher. The story was not killed, but it was modified, softened, and played down with a small headline. (Try to imagine Nixon calling a publisher to try to kill a story, on the grounds that it was treason. Absurd.)

Eisenhower had not signed off on the CIA's Cuba invasion in training when he left office. Kennedy, who was planning to replace Allan Dulles as CIA director with Richard Bissell, insisted that Bissell change the planned landing site from Trinidad beach, and Bissell fatefully chose the Bay of Pigs, where Castro had a following. Kennedy told Bissell to choose a date, but then cut off air support, including from the Cuban invaders planes, after James Reston bawled him out at lunch. When the botched plans failed, Kennedy angrily fired Dulles and Bissell.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., from the Harvard faculty that Kennedy brought to Washington, wrote a memo offering the bureaucracy cover to lie under the title, Protecting the President: "When lies have to be told, they should be told by subordinate officials."

Kennedy threw out Dwight Eisenhower's systematic, organizational-chart operation, and instead had everyone refer to him. His chart was a wheel, with all spokes to himself. His brother Robert Kennedy played a role like a chief of staff, fielding everyone's calls until the president appointed him Attorney General. Bobby continued to interfere with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and others, diluting responsibility.

The president believed that Berlin was the most dangerous place in the world, and that nuclear war could start there. (I was reporting from Berlin then, and that never occurred to me or any other reporters there.) When Kennedy shook West Berliners' confidence, first by his behavior in Vienna, then by going sailing on August 13 and appearing to abandon them -- the mass-circulation Bild headlined, Die Westen Tut Nichts! (The West Does Nothing!) -- he sent General Lucius Clay, of Berlin airlift fame a dozen years earlier, to boost their morale. Clay did, for example by visiting the exclave Steinstuecken by helicopter and by engineering a tank confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie at the Wall, forcing the Soviets to bring out their hidden tanks for fear that East German Vopos might make a fatal misstep. Kennedy ordered Clay to stop confrontations.

Above all, what Reeves found in his 30-year retrospective, although he does not present it wrapped up neatly, is that Kennedy brought presidential lying to an art form. (As noted earlier, his close friend Ben Bradlee was eventually offended by the constant deception necessary to hide his heavy consumption of women, including at least two White House secretaries).

In running for office, Kennedy adopted from Roger Hilsman and others the "missile gap," the theory that Soviet space achievements meant that they had a lead in ICMBs to deliver nuclear warheads. After he became president, Defense Secretary Robert McNamera announced that there was no missile gap, and Kennedy contradicted McNamera, insisting that the phoney issue he had run on still existed. Kennedy knew he was lying, and Eisenhower, who had told Kennedy his 32 Polaris submarine missiles were invulnerable to the Soviets at that epoch, could have exposed that particular lie, but did not undercut the new president. The press didn't mind Kennedy lying.

In Vienna, Khrushchev would beat him over the head with his missile gap, getting Kennedy to agree the two superpowers were equal, which Khrushchev then used to boast to his Warsaw Pact allies. Some harmless campaign lies have consequences.

One of his greatest lies was his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in West Berlin when, by contrast, he had secretly welcomed the Soviets permitting Walter Ulbricht to build the Wall. The roar of West Berliners cheering the speech must have been heard as far as Warsaw and Prague, but those cheering were thoroughly duped. Kennedy, believing that Berlin was the flashpoint of nuclear war, had told intimates that the Wall was a good solution, and access to Berlin was not worth a war. Kennedy sent James P. O'Donnell to Berlin with General Clay, and O'Donnell became a lifelong friend; by then we agreed on Kennedy.

Kennedy's private remarks giving up on Berlin could have started a rush to cooperate the Communists by holdouts in nations like Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but the news media, including many who knew how damaging his statements were, as they demonstrated by knowing which remarks to hide, protected him, as did those who knew of his womanizing.

Kennedy went to Berlin partly to show that he still could, after a warm welcome in West Germany (except from Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who bawled him out publicly), but mostly to signal Khrushchev that the crisis there was over. On the plane to Berlin he still was working on his speech, built around the repeated punchline, "Let them come to Berlin!" When he delivered it, he got carried away and added, "There are those who believe, or say they do, that you can do business with the Soviets. (Switching into German) Lassen sie nach Berlin kommen!" Roars and applause. Dean Rusk, on the City Hall platform, held his head in his hands. It was the opposite of what Kennedy had come to say; he was there to try to do business with the Soviets. Alarmed, Khrushchev answered Walter Ulbricht's call to come to East Berlin quickly, but by the time he got there the furor had died down, and Khrushchev's speech was a tame offer to negotiate the partial nuclear test ban tready.

Few had expected war during the Wall crisis; people did not flee the city, and a "Berliner" is a kind of donut, as a Frankfurter is a weenie. "Ich bin ein Frankfurter" would have been more accurate, yet he got away with it.

Kennedy induced his United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson to tell unwitting lies, some risky, as when he held up photos of B-26 bombers "of Cuba's air force" defected to Miami (actually CIA planes from Nicaragua, complete with bullet holes from 45. pistols fired by CIA men). Exposure of that particular lie could have been fateful for the United States at that moment.

Vienna in June; the Wall in August

When Kennedy met Khrushchev in Vienna, I was there, flabbergasted that my partner from the Daily News who covered the White House was planning to rely on his Soviet Russian contact from Washington. Unreported at the time, Khrushchev told Kennedy at their first meeting that he had elected him. "How?" Kennedy wanted to know.

Khrushchev:

"We cast the deciding vote when you beat that son-of-a-bitch Nixon. We waited to release the spy pilots until after the election, so Nixon couldn't claim that he knew how to deal with the Russians."

Reeves' book has quotes from the records that we reporters could not dig out at the time, since James Reston of The New York Times was the only reporter the chastened Kennedy would see. Khrushchev: "The United States has delusions of grandeur. Megalomania... The USSR will sign a peace treaty unilaterally, and all rights of access to Berlin will expire because the state of war will cease to exist." We reporters got nothing specific from U.S. spokesmen in Vienna, who lied blatantly to us, generally reassuring us that Kennedy stood fast and all went well. Kennedy was nervous and apparently in pain at their last handshake. At the final joint news conference, we assumed that Pierre Salinger was lying because Soviet spokesman Mikhail Kharlamov rose at the end clasping his hands over his head in a boxer's victory salute, which I featured in the story I sent. I believe the rewrite desk edited it out.

Three decades later, Reeves reported that among his team, Kennedy was saying, "He treated me like a little boy." Charles (Chip) Bohlen: "A little bit out of his depth." Averell Harriman: "Shattered." George Kennan: "Unsure of himself." Paul Nitze: "He's dancing. All he's doing is dancing."

The sorry truth was that Kennedy had no understand of who Khrushchev was (he had arranged the sudden execution of his rival Lavrenty Beria, and in 1958 I heard him tell Hungarians in Tatabanya, "You counter-revolutionaries, stick up your heads, and we'll knock em off" -- translation from the Russian courtesy of AFP's Vincent Lateve, born Russian). Kennedy did not know what he was doing in one foreign policy disaster after another, full of drugs, forever playing to the crowds, ordering his spokesmen to alter official transcripts. His vulnerable behavior -- the Soviets read rightly the blatant lies he planted in our press -- wound up by practically inviting Khrushchev to put medium-range nuclear missiles on Cuba to even the nuclear delivery odds. .

When Kennedy proposed to Khrushchev dropping his separate peace treaty and doing a moon shot together, Khrushchev replied no, not until we have agreed on disarmament. He planned on signing a treaty with East Germany in December.

Kennedy:

"Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be war. It will be a cold winter."

The version given the press omitted the key words, "there will be war," which must have amused the Soviets. It was one of the breathtaking lies in his administration's press dealings, and he got away with it.

Reston of the Times, the only newsman to see Kennedy in Vienna after the summit, covered for him and held the cover for years, even while repeatedly writing anniversary columns about it. Reston asked, "How was it?" and Kennedy replied,

"Worst thing in my life. He savaged me....So we have a problem. I'll have to increase the defense budget. And we have to confront them. The only place we can do that is Vietnam. We have to send some more people there."

Reston knew we were going into Vietnam before any other newsman, and kept the secret.

Kennedy already was the godfather of the Army's Special Forces, or Green Berets, and the Air Force, realizing it, quickly created a rival force, Jungle Jims. (When people tell you that Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam before it got so bad if he had lived, remind them of his romantic fixation on his Green Berets.)

In March, before Kennedy's Cuba debacle, Ulbricht had warned Khrushchev at a Warasaw Pact meeting that he might face revolt in East Germany unless West Berlin could be closed off, or better, seized. Khrushchev forbid any aggression until he could take the new president's measure. Ulbricht earlier had nagged Khrushchev into delivering his Berlin ultimatum to Eisenhower in November 1958, but Khrushchev had not dared to do more than harrass West Berlin's access routes. After the Vienna summit, Khrushchev gave Ulbricht the go-ahead to build the Wall.

On August 3 an extraordinary meeting of the Warsaw Pact chiefs met in Moscow to plan Berlin's demise. Transcripts of the meeting found by archivist Zoia Vodopianova and translated for the Cold War International History Project at Georgetown University show that Khrushchev expressed contempt for Kennedy's knuckling under at Vienna.

"As for me and my colleagues...we think that the adversary proved to be less staunch than we had estimated...We expected there would be more blustering and so far the worst spurt of intimidation was in Kennedy's speech (of July 25, 1961)... Kennedy spoke to frighten us, and then got scared himself!"

Khrushchev told the summit he invited Kennedy's emissary John J. McCloy to his vacation home on on the Black Sea, where he raked McCloy over the coals.

"I told him to let Kennedy know...that if he starts a war, then he would probably become the last president of the United States of America. I know he reported it accurately. In America they are showing off vehemently, yet people close to Kennedy are beginning to pour cold water like a fire bridade."

Khrushchev said he felt empathy for Kennedy in his situation, "because he is too much of a lightweight both for the Republicans as well as for the Democrats." (See http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/khrush.htm Khrushchev's Berlin speech.)

Nikita Khrushchev was not an oracle, but he could diminish respect for the United States throughout East Europe when his audience included Ulbricht, Janos Kadar, Antonin Novotny, Wladislaw Gomulka, Georgi Georgu-Dej and Todor Zukov.

Disposing of Diem

In the matter of South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem, Kennedy entered office as president already toying with the idea of dumping our ally. Teddy White visited Vietnam after finishing, The Making of the President 1960, and wrote Kennedy that the situation looked hopeless to him. White has the distinction of being the first newsman to suggest, "Should we incubate a coup against Diem?"

Planning to take out Diem, Kennedy prepared for it by appointing Henry Cabot Lodge -- whom he had defeated to win his Senate seat and who was no help to Nixon's ticket in 1960 -- ambassador to South Vietnam. He was sending a Republican in to be the hit man, just as he sent Republican Lucius Clay to Berlin in case the city should fall. Kennedy saw Republicans as patsies, and Clay later made a bitter remark that Kennedy didn't bother to thank him for giving up his high-paying corporate CEO job to go to Berlin.

Kennedy chose a moment when the Secretaries of State and Defense and the CIA director were all out of Washington to launch his coup against Diem with the famous Cable of August 24 (the key document in the Pentagon Papers) to Lodge, and the responsible Cabinet officials all had subordinates sign off on the cable for them, so the coup in popular media lore came to be blamed on George Ball, Michael Forrestal, Averell Harriman, and Roger Hilsman, not on Kennedy.

Of all of the Kennedy deceptions the most dangerous was his proposal to Khrushchev, secret for thirty years, that the United States and the Soviet Union join forces to atom bomb China's nuclear facilities before they achieved the bomb.

Reeves reported that Kennedy secretly exchanged about 30 letters with Khrushchev, some hand-carried by GRU Colonel Georgi Bolshakov and Pierre Salinger, and solicited Khrushchev through W. Averell Harriman to join the United States in taking out China's incipient nuclear facilities before China had an A-bomb. On December 12, 1993, Reeves told Brian Lamb on C-Span,

"Kennedy tried to get Khrushchev to consider a joint American-Soviet air strike at China to destroy their nuclear capability. It literally was lined up. It was going to be done like a firing squad, that is, neither the Russian crew nor the American crew would know that they had the real weapon. One weapon would be a dud, one weapon would be real, as they do on a firing squad so every man can think he didn't fire the fatal shot if he wanted to. Khrushchev turned him down."

The astonishing revelation made no waves, and I read no follow-up to the startling report or the cockamamie scheme, and it is not prominent in President Kennedy, Portrait of Power. It might have been catastrophic, and bred enmity forever between the United States and China. (It was exactly the opposite to the China policy Nixon later adopted.)

Kennedy's policy aimed at waiting for the Soviets to mellow, and he welcomed the Berlin Wall no matter what it did to Germans (from which many in the East still can't shake loose.) Kennedy's dad preceded him as a famous double-crosser, as FDR's ambassador recommending that we abandon the British to what Joseph Kennedy saw as the inevitable Nazi victors.

Reeves' book is full of information, but it's a strange one, intended as praise of Kennedy, whom the author ranks in the top quarter of all American presidents, for his inspirational value, not for his uncertain policies. Reeves never spoke with Kennedy, but is a Friend of Bill and a promoter of our feckless president. He worked on Profile more than six years, produced an 800-page tome, and tucked away almost as an aside in the brief Chapter 48 -- which deals with Kennedy's triumph in negotiating a limited nuclear test ban treaty with Khrushchev -- Kennedy's plan thirty years earlier to atom-bomb China and turn a billion Chinese against the United States permanently.

On Page 510, Reeves writes: "Again and again, in private, Kennedy said that his greatest fear was Chinese nuclear weapons, and he had an almost romantic attachment to the idea that somehow, the Americans and the Russians could combine to block China's nuclear programs."

Reeves also wrote an odd column in 1999 opining that, with Kennedy, we should have celebrated the building of the Berlin Wall, rather than celebrating its destruction. So much for Germans in the East, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Ukrainians and others whose fates depended on Germany's achieving unity.

Life Before the Prsidency

The best book for understanding Kennedy is The Search for JFK, by Joan and Clay Blair, Jr. (he was chief editor of The Saturday Evening Post during Kennedy's presidency), and it does not even include his presidency and its disasters. A dozen years after his assassination, the Blairs still admired the inspirational Kennedy and accepted John Hersey's account of his wartime heroism, but they doubted that he won the Pacific war all by himself. They studied his life from his graduation from Choate to Harvard in 1936 until his victorious run for Congress, a total time span of only 12 years, yet they did much to illuminate the unknown Kennedy.

At the end of prodigious research, including finding and interviewing all survivors of PT 109, they concluded that Kennedy should not have been president, largely because he had Addison's disease, which Kennedy denied. His denial was false, but no one pressed the issue while he was alive. Sir Daniel Davis, the physician who saved the new Congressman's life at a London clinic in 1947, told Pamela Churchill (a traveling companion at the time) that he would not survive one more year. His New York operation on October 21, 1954, involving two spinal fusions, was described in the November 1955 issue of the American Medical Association Archives of Surgery with his identity protected. The male patient, 37, had Addison's, managed with a program of DOCA pellets (desoxycorticosterone acetate) of 150 mg implanted every three months plus oral cortisone of 25 mg daily. His adrenal glands were gone by the time he was president six years later, and with them emotional stimulation, accounting for that cool detachment.

Kennedy was deathly ill in 1935-36, with recurring ulcers, jaundice and hepititis, delaying his entry to Harvard after a brief false start at Princeton. He did not want to marry, and finally married Jacqueline Bouvier when he was 36. Contrary to myth, he was not Boston Irish through his youth, but reached manhood living in his father's mansion in Bronxville, where his dad left Rose and seven kids to move alone to Hollywood, and have a famous affair with Gloria Swanson. Jack in his New Yorker phase was a society swinger and Stork Club regular dating Powers models, who got laid at 17 with a white girl in a Harlem whorehouse.

His dad, a big donor to FDR and friend of Navy Secretary James Forrestal, got him into the Navy without a physicial examination, which he could not pass, going directly into Naval intelligence in Washington D.C. as an ensign after having been drafted and rejected for the Army.

Joe Kennedy, who made a fortune in the roaring 20s in the stock market and got out before 1929 to go to Hollywood. When Roosevelt repealed Prohibition, Joe already had sewed up the Haig and Haig concession, and was the man to see for Scotch. His friend Arthur Krock conceded that he was amoral, and Harry Truman said he was the biggest crook in the country, even though he was a Democrat.

The Blairs did not set out to map the trajectory of Jack's consumption of women, but they found women or their remains wherever they looked, all of them beauties, starting with Olive Cawley when Jack was at Choate. At Harvard he was serious with Frances Ann Cannon, who dropped him to marry John Hersey. He spent Mardi Gras in New Orleans with Jane Suydam, and might have married Charlotte McDonnell, but her family disapproved. Harriet Price was a steady, and for a time Nancy Burkell. Angela Greene, actress and Powers model, was a regular during and after the war. Florence Pritchett, fashion editor of the New York Journal-American married Earl E.T. Smith, who became Eisenhower's ambassador to Cuba and wrote The Fourth Floor. Barbara Cox, Babs Beckwith (another Powers model), Elizabeth Drake, known as Cis, was close to Kennedy, as was Phyllis Brooks. In Hollywood he chased hard Olivia de Haviland, Peggy Cummins, and Marilyn Monroe, who was introduced by agent Charles Kenneth Feldman. When he covered the founding of the United Nations for Hearst newspapers, reporter Kennedy also found Anita Marcus. Bootsie Cassini was the ex of Igor Cassini before she married William Randolph Hearst Jr. In London Jack formed a lasting friendship with tennis star Katherine Stammers. In Boston campaigning for Congress, a companion was Dodo Potter, and there were reports he married Durie Desloge, which the Blairs believed to be untrue.

When Joe Kennedy got Jack accepted into the Office of Naval Intelligence as an ensign, assigned to Washington, he quickly took up with Inga Arvad, a Danish pastry who was working at the Washington Times-Herald, run by Cissy Paterson and a fiefdom of the Chicago Tribune, the two newspapers FDR disliked most. Kennedy's favorite sister Kathleen (Kick) worked at the Times-Herald, as did Arthur Krock's wife.

Inga-Binga, as he called her, was not a bimbo. Krock, a director of the Columbia School of Journalism, had recommended the student to the Washington newspaper because of her colorful past. She already had been Berlin correspondent of the Copenhagen newspaper Berlingski Tidinger. She had won two beauty contests, in Paris (hosted by Maurice Chevalier), and Berlin (hosted by Hermann Goering). Hitler invited her to his box at the 1936 Olympics, and pronounced her the perfect Nordic beauty.

Inga had acted in Berlin movies and married Hungarian director Paul Fejos, who took her to the Far East to make a documentary on the Komoro dragon. In Singapore she met the world's richest Swede, Axel Wenner-gren, who sold munitions to Germany and was asked to help influence the Soviets into a nonaggression pact. At one point the U.S. intelligence community believed her loyalty was suspect.

Ten days before Pearl Harbor, Inga, who already wrote a gossip column, made the subject of her column Jack Kennedy, "a boy with a future." Navy intelligence officers are supposed to keep out of gossip columns. Jack did not know that her apartment was bugged by the FBI, and that he and she were on tape.

With Pearl Harbor, Navy intelligence brass went slightly cuckoo. They were guilty of the worst intelligence failure in the nation's history. Heads had to roll, and one was Ensign Kennedy's. He was banished to ONI Siberia, a base at Charleston, S.C. where he lectured industry security officials on preventing espionage at war plants. Jack kept seeing Inga, however, and then found himself transferred to sea duty. He did not eagerly volunteer for the Pacific, as legend has it. Ronald McCoy told the Blairs that Jack told Inga he was going to get the SOB who transferred him.

Inga fled Washington for Hollywood, where she took over Shelia Graham's gossip column for a time. Jack continued to correspond with her, also from the Pacific, and when he returned he went to see her first. Inga wrote to a friend at the time that he was an inadequate suitor. She married the cowboy actor Tim McCoy, then 55, and their son Ronald was a key source for the Blairs. When he was in college, Inga told him she honestly didn't know if his father was Tim McCoy or Jack Kennedy.

Inga was only the most spectacular of Kennedy's women, who became legion. When Jack was a Congressman in Georgetown, women were in and out of his place at all hours. He would host one girl for dinner, and a different girl would come down to breakfast the next morning. As President, he had two girls in the stenos' pool that he could always fall back on. He famously told Harold MacMillan that if he didn't have a woman every two or three days, he got terrible headaches.

Oh yes, was Inga a spy? Jack marched with her in to see J. Edgar Hoover, who conceded that he had no evidence against her. Could he put that in writing? No, said Hoover, because you never knew what might happen if you cleared people.

The Blairs' bottom line was that JFK was nothing like the media imagined him to be. He was not a robust young man, but victim of an unstable back from birth, and readily repeated stories he hurt his back playing football at Harvard and again in the PT boat were false. He was not a dedicated scholar, as befits a best-selling author, and did not attend the London School of Economics as his resume claimed. His brief episodes at Princeton and Stanford were only fooling around. He was not really a war hero, although he rescued from drowning Machinist Mate Patrick Henry McMahon. He was almost court martialed for losing PT 109 to a Japanese destroyer through negligence.

"The Washington press corps deserves a failing grade," they concluded. I would add, just as they did again in the 1970s during the drive to destroy Nixon.

NEWSWEEK ELECTION ISSUE: 'How He Did It'
Thursday November 4, 2:37 pm ET Kerry Laments: 'I Can't Believe I'm Losing to This Idiot' Carville Leads Clintonistas' Coups, Implores Cahill to Step Aside or He'll 'Tell The Truth' About Campaign Woes On NBC's 'Meet The Press' Daughter Alexandra Pleads to Kerry After Locking in Nomination: 'Will You Please Appreciate This Moment for 10 Seconds?'

                          Read the Special Report at
             http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6407226/site/newsweek /

With Mr Bush holding a clear edge in the popular vote - about 3.8 million - even though the electoral college result was set to be closer, the markets' worst fears of an indecisive result did not materialise.

Continued Republican control of Congress also meant that Mr Bush could claim a clear mandate for his next term.

The prospect of a decisive outcome to the US presidential election helped drive London's biggest shares towards the two-year high.

In mid-morning trading, the FTSE 100 was up 25.2 points at 4,718.4, close to the two-year high of 4732.9 set last month.

Analysts said the rise reflected the increased prospect of a clear result, as well as the view of Mr Bush as a more "business-friendly" candidate than John Kerry, his Democratic challenger.

AS the US reeled from the death of nine marines in Iraq at the weekend, insurgents in Fallujah claimed to have obtained chemical weapons and threatened to use them in any battle for control of the rebel stronghold.

Rebel commanders said chemicals such as cyanide had been added to mortar rounds and missiles that would be deployed against coalition troops reported to be preparing for a major assault on the town west of Baghdad.

A military committee made up of former officers in Saddam Hussein's army, including experts on chemicals and guerrilla warfare, is said to have been organising forces in Fallujah and planning tactics.

The committee is understood to include members of all the main insurgent groups, including that of Iraq's most wanted man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader behind the beheading of several foreign hostages and a string of car-bomb attacks.

The US suffered its worst day in Iraq since May when the marines were killed as violence flared across Iraq's rebel heartland.

About 30 Iraqis were killed as the US troops hit back.

A marine spokesman said eight of the soldiers died in a suicide car-bomb attack near Fallujah and the other was killed in Ramadi.

Nine marines were also wounded, he said, but the US military refused to provide further details.

The deaths take the US casualty toll since the war started in March last year to at least 1120. Aid groups say up to 10,000 Iraqis have been killed.

Seven Iraqis died and 19 were wounded on Saturday when a car bomb was detonated outside the Baghdad offices of Arabic broadcaster al-Arabiya.

A group calling itself Thawrat al-Ishrin (Revolution of the 1920s Brigades) claimed responsibility for the attack on "the infidels' television".

"The building was destroyed on (the heads of) the spies, the Americanised journalists ... the mouthpieces of the US occupation in Iraq," it said in a statement.

The majority Saudi-owned satellite channel has often been attacked on Islamist websites for its perceived pro-Western stance in the Arab world.

Sheikh Mahdi al-Sumaidi, a Sunni cleric in Baghdad, warned the US and interim Iraqi Government against attacking Fallujah.

He said they risked incurring a fatwa, or binding religious decree, that would command Muslims to launch street protests and a campaign of civil disobedience.

But US forces continued preparations for the widely expected offensive, with jets and artillery pounding targets in the city. US military officials have claimed there are up to 5000 Islamic militants, Saddam loyalists and criminals barricaded in the town.

"We're gearing up to do an operation and when we're told to go, we'll go," said Brigadier General Dennis Hejlik, deputy commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

"When we do go, we'll whack them."

The US military emphasised that the final order to attack should come from Iraq's interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who has told the people of Fallujah to hand over Zarqawi's followers.

Peace talks to avert an assault on Fallujah, believed to have started last Wednesday, are being held by a Government-backed delegation and leaders from the rebel-held Sunni city of 200,000 people.

Dr Allawi has demanded foreign militants be expelled from Fallujah and Iraqi forces, backed by American troops, be allowed into its centre.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair will call a general election in February rather than May or later next year as had been expected, London's Sunday Telegraph reported yesterday.

Mr Blair, who will be seeking a third term, hoped to benefit from a "Baghdad bounce", if Iraq staged successful elections in January as scheduled, the newspaper said.

The Sunday Times

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11247879%5E2703,00.html