Requiem for a dream

Revisiting President Kennedy's most important speech on the 60th anniversary of his death

It was sixty years ago today that assassins’ bullets cut down America’s 35th President in the sunny streets of Dallas. That event seems to have marked a seismic shift in our country’s history. There was the America before the assassination and the America after. The former was essentially the America of the 1950s. It had major flaws, especially for Black people, but it was more innocent, more hopeful, and less jaded than the one we find ourselves in today. What came after was the orgy of violence associated with the 1960s: the full escalation of the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the murder of peace protestors on the campus of Kent State (actually in 1970).

But the 1960s are also associated with the peace movement that was a reaction to Vietnam, most fully embraced by the youth of that decade. Inspiration for that can be traced, at least in part, to the hopeful final months of the Kennedy presidency that was so tragically cut short.

A traditional Cold Warrior at the start of his Administration, by 1963 a series of global crises had changed JFK. One of at least two occasions during the Cold War in which the US and the USSR came perilously close to nuclear war, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was Kennedy’s turning point. He and his closest advisors had averted catastrophe by bypassing the military and establishing direct lines of communication with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The end result was a deal: Russia would remove missiles from Cuba and America would remove its own aging missiles from Turkey. We would also pledge not to invade Cuba. It was the first major de-escalatory development to that point in the almost 20-year-old Cold War, and it may have saved humanity.

It may also have contributed to Kennedy’s murder. With a few exceptions, the military and intelligence establishments at the time were made up of particularly hardline Cold Warriors. For many of them, Kennedy’s triumph in ending the missile crisis was the latest in a string of defeats for Kennedy’s America in its standoff with the Soviets. Agreeing to a quid pro quo to them was anathema. Some had actually advocated a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union during the 1961 Berlin Crisis that ended with the building of the Berlin Wall, so fearful were they of a Soviet takeover of West Berlin. Now they considered Kennedy a traitor to his country in a life-and-death struggle.

As for Kennedy, he seems to have had a sort of spiritual and political awakening as a result of it all. Political realities being what they were in the run-up to an election year in the middle of the Cold War, he had to tread carefully, but he had decided he should be the President to bring an end to that Cold War. In the end, though, he was eliminated. Lyndon Johnson took over, and while direct confrontation with the Soviets didn’t return to pre-Kennedy levels under him, the indirect conflict with them in the form of the Vietnam War soon exploded into the full-fledged tragedy it became known for in history.

The best insight into Kennedy’s transformation comes from reading arguably the most important speech of his presidency: a commencement address on world peace delivered at American University in Washington, D.C. on June 10, 1963, just five-and-a-half months before his death. What’s most remarkable about this speech is how direct and unguarded it was in laying out Kennedy’s vision for ending the Cold War, using typically eloquent Kennedy phraseology.

President John F. Kennedy delivers his commencement address on world peace at American University on June 10, 1963.

What’s also remarkable is the degree to which the speech is still relevant today as an indictment of how American foreign policy has developed, or, more accurately, devolved, since 9/11. Some example passages to highlight this:

“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

“World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor — it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.”

“For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.”

What has the US tried to build in the decades since if not a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war”? This has been most keenly felt in the Middle East, where America has propped up dictators, overthrown regimes, and generally bombed, invaded, and occupied multiple countries. And what has it gotten us? A new terror group virtually every decade to fret over, some of which were born in American prison camps from the radicalization that happened there (this is how ISIS was formed in Iraq). Millions killed, fueling hatreds that will create future generations of so-called terrorists. The collapse of American prestige and the coming end of our global dominance, which I wrote about here.

John Kennedy wasn’t perfect. He was human. Like so many men of power, his marital infidelities were legendary. But he was also arguably the most idealistic President America has had since World War II, and his sacrifice on the alter of peace marked the end of something that can never be fully reclaimed. That sacrifice alone, which he had known his powerful enemies could exact from him at any moment, is reason enough to remember and honor him on the anniversary of his death.

Full text of American University address available here: https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-university-19630610.

For the first installment in a planned series on why I think Kennedy’s murder was a conspiracy, see below and watch this space:

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.