The fact that the vast majority of the American press is left wing is a given in our political life.
Most major media outlets lie, cheat, and skew their coverage for the hard left and have done so for decades. But was there a time when the press was generally fair? When they strove to report facts and perhaps were even patriotic? Yes. However, an event in the early 1960s changed all that. Since then the American media has been an active operational arm of the Democratic National Committee.
The event was the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a major strategic loss for the United States, but was spun by the press into a brilliant victory. The press knew they were lying. They did it anyway.
The DC press corps had a crush on John F. Kennedy. He and his brother Bobby knew that and played them like a violin. Kennedy hired many of them, thus fulfilling media fantasies of being part of the game not merely spectators. The meretricious Camelot atmosphere made the press feel they were part of a grand experiment in power and grace. In reality, the sordid Kennedy White House was full of hookers, drugs, and mob connections. The press knew but turned a blind eye and reported the myth of Camelot.
When the US discovered intermediate range missiles in Cuba in October of 1962 the world took several steps towards a general nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union. The globe trembled with fear and trepidation.
Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev gambled the weak president he had met in Vienna the previous year would fold on Cuba, especially after the disastrous Bay of Pigs adventure and the Berlin Wall debacle. Khrushchev was right. But he didn’t understand the PR facet of the situation.
Looking for a way out, the Kennedy brothers decided to accept a press victory, knowing it would be trumpeted out of bias and worldwide relief, and a strategic loss.
So they made a great show out of a naval quarantine that stopped further missile shipments to Cuba. Khrushchev also agreed to remove missiles already present on the imprisoned island. Sounds like a win, right?
What the Kennedys and the press did not divulge, though everyone in the press and the Intelligence world knew, was that 40,000 highly trained Soviet military personnel remained in Cuba to continue to support and train the Cuban military. Once more, after the land based missiles left the Soviets just replaced them with submarines carrying nukes. Those subs paid regular visits to Cuba, as the plot of The Hunt for Red October recalls, thus making the missile removal of the deal irrelevant. The Soviet status quo was preserved.
The deal also required the US to remove our missiles from Turkey and we promised not to invade Cuba, thus voiding the Monroe Doctrine, the Rio Pact of 1947, and permitting a hostile regime and Soviet base 90 miles from our shores. And those Soviet trained Cuban troops? They were then used as a Soviet proxy expeditionary force, enforcing communist subversion and Soviet geopolitical aims all over the world.
What the press billed as world saving win was in reality a strategic climb down by the Kennedys and, as the Tet Offensive and Watergate were to soon show, the first instance of leftist media make believe replacing objective reality. It would not be the last.