So Sanders was nauseated by JFK,
(like Santorum), did not trust Jesse Jackson and Walter Mondale, did not trust the Democratic party at all - so what is he doing now wanting Democrats to vote for him. even demanding the elected officials - who climbed the ranks, visited the districts, campaigned for other Democrats - yes, the Super Delegates - should now support him?
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Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders once said that he was “physically nauseated” by a speech made by President John F. Kennedy when Sanders was a young man, because Kennedy’s “hatred for the Cuban Revolution […] was so strong.”
“Kennedy was young and appealing and ostensibly liberal,” Sanders reminisced in a 1987 interview with The Gadfly, a student newspaper at the University of Vermont. “But I think at that point, seeing through Kennedy, and what liberalism was, was probably a significant step for me to understand that conventional politics or liberalism was not what was relevant.”
In the same interview, he also criticized Jesse Jackson’s decision to try and affect change by “working within the Democratic party” and offered some pointed remarks about Walter Mondale.
Sanders told The Gadfly that endorsing the Democratic ticket in 1984 and “campaigning for Mondale […] was a very difficult thing to do.” “When I’d go around talking about Walter Mondale I would say that if elected president, I felt, Walter Mondale was going to be a pretty bad president,” explained Sanders. “Now sometimes you may have to make painful decisions.”
“If you go around saying that Mondale would be a great president, you would be a liar and a hypocrite,” concluded Sanders. “That is not what I was saying.”
Sanders’s remarks about Kennedy, Jackson, and Mondale are in keeping with the Independent senator’s long history of criticizing the Democratic Party.
And so it goes
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ilanbenmeir/bernie-sanders-despised-democrats-in-1980s-said-a-jfk-speech#.av2rmDOZ3
= new reply since forum marked as read
It's involuntary though, isn't it? 
--imm
Oh, we can have a lot of fun with the "like Santorum" game, I think.
Hey-- Santorum thinks pot should be illegal, and so does Hillary! 
Also, IIRC Fritz Mondale was pathologically obsessed with ending the space program. Stupid, shortsighted, and certainly not honoring of the memory of JFK.
...during the '08 campaign. Nauseated--fearful of more U.S. interference and coup d'etats in that region. (Lo and behold, six months into his first term, the U.S. assisted a military coup in Honduras against an ELECTED leftist president. Though I'm 99% sure now that it was Sec of State Clinton, not Obama, who actively supported that coup, still it happened on his watch.)
Obama's "Monroe Doctrine" notions about Cuba and Latin America were extremely retrograde and insulting to Latin Americans, during the '08 campaign, and quite alarming to anyone, like myself, who had been closely following the democracy revolution that was occurring in South America.
I'm glad Obama has changed this policy, and has now visited Cuba, in a gesture of friendship. He is still a bit blustery but at least he's trying to see things the way most Latin Americans see them. I also approve of his and Kerry's support for the Colombia/FARC peace talks.
Back when Kennedy gave that speech about Cuba, I was too young and ignorant to know what any of it was about. But I've now read "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters," by James Douglass. This is a recent book ('07) with a near flawless case against the CIA for murdering JFK. And the "why" of the title is very important.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis (closest we've ever come to nuclear armageddon), Kennedy reached out to Krushchev and Castro, using backchannels to try to avoid CIA surveillance, and sought an agreement with them about world peace. He also told friends and contacts that he understood how bad the Batista regime was and why the Cubans had to rebel against it. (If I recall, there is a letter to this effect.) He also initiated the first effort to control nuclear weapons (the "Test Ban Treaty"
, helped Russia out during a Russian wheat crop failure, and spoke eloquently of world peace shortly before he died.
So, he changed, too. Once free of Allen Dulles, the CIA Director JFK fired for lying to him about the Bay of Pigs (the lie aimed at coercing JFK to invade Cuba with the U.S. military), and damn scared by how close we came to nuclear war (--with all of his Joint Chiefs & cabinet against him, wanting him to push the button)(all except Bobby), JFK began to see the world differently. Douglass documents this change, nails the CIA for the assassination and makes an excellent case that this was why--JFK's efforts toward world peace, of which more were to come.
Obama changed, once he was free of Hillary Clinton, who had soured any chance for Obama's stated goal of improving U.S./Latin American relations, with her support of the coup in Honduras. Obama and Kerry are now trying to UNDO the damage that Clinton did to Obama's goal, in my opinion.
The thing is that Bernie Sanders is almost always right about the issues, including foreign policy issues; he is almost always right about them before anyone else; and he sticks to positions once he has figured out what he feels is the best policy for the common good. He cannot be swayed by lobbyists, billionaire donors, war profiteers or anyone else with an interest in the wrong policy.
And if he was "nauseated" by JFK's early, "Cold Warrior" stance on Cuba, I respect that. He is four years older than me and was that much ahead of me in figuring the world out. I had a boyfriend at that time, a bit older than me, who supported Adlai Stevenson for president in 1960, not JFK--and that is why: JFK was too much the "Cold Warrior" early in his career. Truth is, I was more swayed by JFK's good looks than anything else. (I was 16.) I would guess that Sanders has read Douglass' book and knows that JFK changed--and was in a deep, transformative process of change when he was murdered.
From 50 years ago???? are you fucking serious??
Do you really want to drag Hillary Clinton,the registered Republican of 40+ years ago, into this?
Dragging comments someone made 50+ years ago is desperate and pathetic.
But I guess simple math has never been a strength of Sanders supporters. 
Just before his assassination, President Kennedy ordered secret peace talks with Castro. Others in government worked against him.
The National Security Archive at George Washington University has the story:
Kennedy Sought Dialogue with Cuba
INITIATIVE WITH CASTRO ABORTED BY ASSASSINATION,
DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS SHOW
Oval Office Tape Reveals Strategy to hold clandestine Meeting in Havana; Documents record role of ABC News correspondent Lisa Howard as secret intermediary in Rapprochement effort
Washington D.C. - On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the eve of the broadcast of a new documentary film on Kennedy and Castro, the National Security Archive today posted an audio tape of the President and his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, discussing the possibility of a secret meeting in Havana with Castro. The tape, dated only seventeen days before Kennedy was shot in Dallas, records a briefing from Bundy on Castro's invitation to a U.S. official at the United Nations, William Attwood, to come to Havana for secret talks on improving relations with Washington. The tape captures President Kennedy's approval if official U.S. involvement could be plausibly denied.
The possibility of a meeting in Havana evolved from a shift in the President's thinking on the possibility of what declassified White House records called "an accommodation with Castro" in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Proposals from Bundy's office in the spring of 1963 called for pursuing "the sweet approach…enticing Castro over to us," as a potentially more successful policy than CIA covert efforts to overthrow his regime. Top Secret White House memos record Kennedy's position that "we should start thinking along more flexible lines" and that "the president, himself, is very interested in (the prospect for negotiations)." Castro, too, appeared interested. In a May 1963 ABC News special on Cuba, Castro told correspondent Lisa Howard that he considered a rapprochement with Washington "possible if the United States government wishes it. In that case," he said, "we would be agreed to seek and find a basis" for improved relations.
The untold story of the Kennedy-Castro effort to seek an accommodation is the subject of a new documentary film, KENNEDY AND CASTRO: THE SECRET HISTORY, broadcast on the Discovery/Times cable channel on November 25 at 8pm. The documentary film, which focuses on Ms. Howard's role as a secret intermediary in the effort toward dialogue, was based on an article -- "JFK and Castro: The Secret Quest for Accommodation" -- written by Archive Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh in the magazine, Cigar Aficionado. Kornbluh served as consulting producer and provided key declassified documents that are highlighted in the film. "The documents show that JFK clearly wanted to change the framework of hostile U.S. relations with Cuba," according to Kornbluh. "His assassination, at the very moment this initiative was coming to fruition, leaves a major 'what if' in the ensuing history of the U.S. conflict with Cuba."
CONTINUED with links, resources...
This is a story I don't see mentioned very often online, rarely in print, and never on television. I believe it's a good thing for Democrats to know, as well as all people who are interested in making peace and building a better world, like Bernie Sanders.
White House Aide Dick Cheney Spearheaded Editing of Report to Dampen Impact
New Documents Cast Further Doubt on Commission’s Investigation, Independence
National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 543
Edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi
Posted - February 29, 2016
Washington, DC, February 29, 2016 – The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney.
Today’s posting includes the entire suppressed section on assassination attempts, Cheney’s handwritten marginal notes, staff memos warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial section, and White House strategies for presenting the edited report to the public. The documents show that the leadership of the presidentially-appointed commission deliberately curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence to White House political operatives.
This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for decades. Much of the work of securing release of the records was done by the John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Board in the 1990s, and the documents were located at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland; or at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Additional mandatory declassification review requests filed by Archive fellow John Prados returned identical versions of documents, indicating the CIA is not willing to permit the public to see any more of the assassinations story than we show here. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into standard accounts of the events of this period.
Among the highlights of today’s posting:
* White House officials of the Ford administration attempted to keep a presidential review panel—the Rockefeller Commission—from investigating reports of CIA planning for assassinations abroad.
* Ford administration officials suppressed the Rockefeller Commission’s actual report on CIA assassination plots.
* Richard Cheney, then the deputy assistant to the president, edited the report of the Rockefeller Commission from inside the Ford White House, stripping the report of its independent character.
* The Rockefeller Commission remained silent on this manipulation.
* Rockefeller Commission lawyers and public relations officials warned of the damage that would be done to the credibility of the entire investigation by avoiding the subject of assassinations.
* President Ford passed investigative materials concerning assassinations along to the Church Committee of the United States Senate and then attempted—but failed—to suppress the Church Committee’s report as well.
* The White House markup of the Rockefeller Commission report used the secrecy of the CIA budget as an example of excesses and recommended Congress consider making agency spending public to some degree.
CONTINUED...
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB543-Ford-White-House-Altered-Rockefeller-Commission-Report/
Jerry Ford, the then-congressman who altered the Warren Report to by saying President Kennedy was shot through the neck, and not the back, so the Lone Nut Magic Bullet nonsense would sound more plausible.
President Kennedy personally selected Abraham Bolden to integrate White House Secret Service detail. For some reason, this history and important story are gone down the Memory Hole.
Former U.S. Secret Service Agent Abraham BOLDEN was the first African American Secret Service agent to serve in the White House detail. He was literally hand-picked by President John F. Kennedy. Agent Abraham Bolden reported overt racism by his fellow agents and outright hostility toward the "n... loving president," quoting fellow Secret Service agents on the JFK detail.
In addition to enduring all manner of personal indignities, he was concerned at the lack of professionalism in those assigned to protect the president and reported his concerns. He was told, "OK. Thanks" by his superiors. When the problems weren't addressed, Bolden requested transfer back to the Secret Service office in Chicago.
Abraham Bolden speaks at JFK Lancer.
The story of a man who told the truth:
After 45 Years, a Civil Rights Hero Waits for Justice
Thom Hartmann
June 12, 2009 11:52 AM
A great miscarriage of justice has kept most Americas from learning about a Civil Rights pioneer who worked with President John F. Kennedy. But there is finally a way for citizens to not only right that wrong, but bring closure to the most tragic chapter of American presidential history.
After an outstanding career in law enforcement, Abraham Bolden was appointed by JFK to be the first African American presidential Secret Service agent, where he served with distinction. He was part of the Secret Service effort that prevented JFK's assassination in Chicago, three weeks before Dallas. But Bolden was framed by the Mafia and arrested on the very day he went to Washington to tell the Warren Commission staff about the Chicago attempt against JFK.
Bolden was sentenced to six years in prison, despite glaring problems with his prosecution. His arrest resulted from accusations by two criminals Bolden had sent to prison. In Bolden's first trial, an apparently biased judge told the jury that Bolden was guilty, even before they began their deliberations. Though granted a new trial because of that, the same problematic judge was assigned to oversee Bolden's second trial, which resulted in his conviction. Later, the main witness against Bolden admitted committing perjury against him. A key member of the prosecution even took the fifth when asked about the perjury. Yet Bolden's appeals were denied, and he had to serve hard time in prison, and today is considered a convicted felon.
After the release of four million pages of JFK assassination files in the 1990s, it became clear that Bolden -- and the official secrecy surrounding the Chicago attempt against JFK -- were due to National Security concerns about Cuba, that were unknown to Bolden, the press, Congress, and the public not just in 1963, but for the next four decades.
SNIP...
Abraham Bolden paid a heavy price for trying to tell the truth about events involving the man he was sworn to protect -- JFK -- that became mired in National Security concerns. Bolden still lives in Chicago, and has never given up trying to clear his name.
Will Abraham Bolden live to finally see the justice so long denied to him?
CONTINUED...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/after-45-years-a-civil-ri_b_213834.html
After the assassination, he went to Washington on his own dime and reported what he saw to the Warren Commission. For his trouble -- and despite an exemplary record as a Brinks detective, Illinois State Trooper, and Secret Service agent -- Bolden was framed by the government using a paid informant's admitted perjury and spent a long time in prison. The government also drugged him and put him into psychiatric hospitals.His real crime was telling the truth.
Americans know the Truth: the country hasn't been the same since Nov. 22, 1963. President Kennedy kept the nation out of Vietnam and started toward the moon. Imagine what the New Frontier could have become for us today? Certainly would not be a time where "money trumps peace."
He learned on the job what he wasn't hearing from his colleagues. Do you know Jim DiEugenio? The guy's a DUer and an expert on this lost history:
As a Democrat, a DUer and as a citizen of the United States, I was proud to attend the Passing the Torch: An International Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy at Duquesne University. One of the many important things discussed there was what author, historian and teacher, James DiEugenio reported on the important change in foreign policy JFK represented from his predecessor and his successors, immediate and otherwise.
DiEugenio said President John F. Kennedy did not undergo a change of heart from Cold War hawk to liberal dove Democrat only after the hair-raising nuclear crises he experienced in office. "John F. Kennedy was never a Cold Warrior," DiEugenio said. Throughout his 16-year career in the House and Senate, President Kennedy sided with the People, Justice and Democracy -- across the United States and around the world. This is a world view radically different from Eisenhower, and his foreign policy makers, principally the Dulles Brothers and their allies, including young Dick Nixon.
The JFK Administration may have represented a break in the action, H20 Man's Father explained to him and I agree. It was a special interlude, indeed. In only 1,037 days, we launched the nation toward the moon, creating a new type of economy; maintained the peace when several times the heads of the military and the secret organs of the national security state counseled all-out war; and started the nation on a path where all men are equal under the law, no matter race, color, or creed, and justice extended to economics and health, as under FDR and the New Deal.
DiEugenio’s research shows President Kennedy was working to defend the interests of democracy over those of colonialism, not only in Europe, as evinced in divided Berlin, but in Africa, Asia, South America and around the world. During less than three years in office, Kennedy turned official U.S. support from that of Eisenhower and the Dulles Brothers for supporting US commercial and colonial interests over democracy, such as in Guatemala and Iran, to respect for the nations and their democratically elected leaders, like Lumumba and Sukarno. In matters of war and peace, JFK always sided with peace, making overtures to North Vietnam. The Dulles Brothers and Nixon sided with France and the colonial powers, even drawing up plans to nuke the North Vietnamese Army at Dien Bien Phu, Operation VULTURE.
The record shows JFK's Foreign Policy of democracy over colonialism was immediately reversed by Lyndon B. Johnson, who reversed course in Vietnam and supported the pro-colonialist forces in Congo, Vietnam, Brazil, Dominican Republic and elsewhere around the world. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and most who followed continued the Business-As-Usual, advancing the interests of Big Money, Big Oil and Big Wars for Profit.
One of the things I am most proud of is how Democratic Underground covered many of these salient points on its boards, from DU1 through the present day. At the Duquesne conference, I was listening and nodding, knowing that many times we had discussed this on DU. In looking back to one particularly important post through GOOGLE, I found we sourced this information back to DiEugenio. That's what the Internet can do: Spread Truth.
Why it matters.
Democracy depends on Truth. The Republic depends on Justice. That is, the reality that ours is a nation under law.
Once a criminal is, or criminals are, allowed to go free, Justice has been denied. We find ourselves operating under a falsehood, we are living a Big Lie.
We as a Nation have been on the criminal path since November 22, 1963.
DUers know you don’t need to read a history book or watch a tee vee special to know: It shows. Since 1964 and the Gulf of Tonkin, it’s been a series of wars without end for profit. And in the process, the rich became super-rich -- the richest and most powerful people in history.
Thanks for reading. Keep spreading the Truth, DU! The next 53 years (now) can be different -- they can be decades of peace and prosperity for ALL: They can be Democratic.
Here's the OP from 2013, SheenaR: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023964436
Sorry to be so ridiculously pedantic. It's just that this matters for understanding how we got here and who and what We the People need to look at in order to go forward.
He was an Independent all his life, but became a Democrat out of self interest so that he could use the party's resources in his campaign for president. When he goes back to the Senate he'll revert to his former Independent status.
