Unresistance

Unresistance

A book review of "Berlin 1961" (Frederick Kempe) in the Wall Street Journal describes the long-term damage that can result from callow young presidents who get in over their heads:

"Berlin 1961" revolves around the question of whether Kennedy's decision to countenance the erection of the Berlin Wall was, in Mr. Kempe's words, "a successful means of avoiding war, or . . . the unhappy result of his missing backbone." On those terms, the book is a scholarly history of the crisis that culminated on Aug. 13, 1961, when East Germany, convinced that its economic and political survival depended on stopping the hemorrhage of refugees to the West, cut the city in two with the Berlin Wall, thereby imprisoning its people for the next 26 years. Since 1945, 2.8 million, or one in every six East Germans, had fled their benighted country. . . . Mr. Kempe's point is that Kennedy's indecisiveness in the early stages of the crisis produced the wall itself, an exponential increase in East-West tension, and, in the half-century that followed, other fateful consequences that included the Cuban missile crisis — and, though Mr. Kempe doesn't say so, the Vietnam War, along with social and strategic spores that lodged in the American psyche and darkened world opinion with results yet to be revealed. It also provided, as Mr. Kempe puts it in the final sentence of this mind-shaking work of investigative history, an example "of what unfree systems can impose when free leaders fail to resist."

H/t Maggie's Farm