A HYPOTHESIS ON WHAT HAPPENED TO BIDEN IN ATLANTA

Reading the news and commentary today, three separate items caught my eye. They are that George Clooney, Michael Douglas, and a member of former president Obama’s staff all said in the past few days that what led them to become concerned about President Biden’s mental state was that he seemed significantly different when they dealt with him at the Los Angeles fundraiser than he had been when they saw him at the New York City fundraiser a month earlier.

All three sources agree on that.

Well, what was different from the first fundraiser to the second one?

Could it be that the fact President Biden had just flown through 11 time zones to get to the Los Angeles event, on top of two other crossings of the Atlantic in the week before that flight? At the New York event, he just traveled up from Washington, which is in the same time zone.

In the ten days before the Los Angeles event, the president had made four trips through a total of 24 time zones, without spending any significant time at any point in that travel to deal with the fatigue that comes from jet lag. And he took no time to rest and recover before the Atlanta debate.

That would adversely affect the mental acuity of a 25 year old Olympian in perfect shape.

Nowadays, we mostly don’t worry about jet lag, because when we engage in east-west travel across multiple time zones we know to take things easy, to give ourselves the time to adjust as we do so.

It’s not a problem that people think about any more.

The mental fog created by jet lag adversely affected another U.S. president at a crucial point in history.

In April 1961, President Kennedy flew nonstop from Washington D.C. to Vienna Austria for his first (and as it turned out only) summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev. No other world leader had ever made such an unbroken flight across so many time zones. It was also the first time the president traveled by jet - in the Boeing 707 “Air Force One.” No one at the time knew that rapid travel across multiple time zones would negatively affect an individual’s circadian rhythm - previous long distance flights were done aboard slower piston-engine aircraft, which did not have the range for such a nonstop trip, meaning they made stops along the way that allowed a “natural” adjustment of the circadian system during the trip.

Kennedy’s “mental fog” that he didn’t know he was experiencing had a major effect on World History.

In their meetings, Krushchev took Kennedy’s confusion on various issues as evidence the American president was shallow, that he was not a serious opponent, regardless of his promise to “bear any burden” in the Cold War in his inauguration speech. Krushchev made the mistake of publicly belittling Kennedy in front of the world press, and the Vienna Summit fell apart with none of the issues on the meeting agenda dealt with.

Both men walked away with wrong views of the other, which led to decisions being made in subsequent months based on what each felt they “knew” about the other that came close to bringing on World War III.

Believing Kennedy was weak and ineffectual, Krushchev authorized the East German government to erect the Berlin Wall a month after Vienna, which plunged Western Europe into the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War with direct US-USSR military confrontation. The Soviet leader also agreed to position nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba to deter Kennedy from another attempt to overthrow the Castro government after the first try was defeated at the Bay of Pigs (which happened two weeks before the Vienna Summit). That decision in the late summer of 1961 led directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the closest point the world has come to all-out nuclear war.

Kennedy came away from Vienna determined to “stand up” to Kruschchev. When the Soviet leader gave a speech in the fall of 1961 at a conference of nonaligned nations in which he announced the Soviet Union would support anti-colonial “wars of national liberation,” Kennedy latched onto that and set US policy in opposition to such struggles. The first action he took after making that decision was to strengthen the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam by sending in U.S. military advisors in direct contravention of the 1954 Geneva Convention. Twelve years of a war that would drain the self-confidence of American governments over the next thirty years was the result.

Interestingly, Kennedy’s symptoms were exactly the same as what was exhibited at the Los Angeles fund raiser and the Atlanta debate by Joe Biden.

Misjudgements based on what people saw in Vienna in 1961 adversely affected both Kennedy and Krushchev, neither of whom survived the negative consequences of the decisions they made based on incorrect information.

Are we in 2024 about to make a similar mistake based on our lack of knowledge regarding the real reason for actions by an American president? Putting the future of the American Republic at risk as a result of decisions based on wrong information would be at least as threatening to world stability as was the possibility of nuclear war in 1962.

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