...J.F.K. was slow to define his global vision, but under withering attacks from an increasingly energized right, he finally began to do so toward the end of his first year in office. Taking to the road in the fall of 1961, he told the American people why his efforts to extricate the world from the cold war's death grip made more sense than the right's militaristic solutions. On Nov. 16, Kennedy delivered a landmark speech at the University of Washington campus in Seattle. There was nothing 'soft,' he declared that day, about averting nuclear war—America showed its true strength by refraining from military force until all other avenues were exhausted. And then Kennedy made a remarkable acknowledgment about the limits of U.S. power—one that seemed to reject his Inaugural commitment to 'oppose any foe' in the world. 'We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only 6% of the world's population, that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind, that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.'
Sorensen—the young progressive raised in a pacifist, Unitarian household who helped write the speech—calls it today "one of Kennedy's great speeches on foreign policy." If J.F.K. had lived, he adds, "there is no doubt in my mind [that] we would have laid the groundwork for détente. The cold war would have ended much sooner than it did."
Kennedy reached another visionary pinnacle on June 10, 1963, when—eager to break the diplomatic deadlock with the Soviet Union—he gave wing to the most poetic foreign policy speech of his life, a speech that would go down in history as the "Peace Speech." In this stirring address, J.F.K. would do something that no other President during the cold war—and no American leader today—would dare. He attempted to humanize our enemy. No matter how "profoundly repugnant" we might find our foes' ideology or system of government, he told the American public, they are still—like us—human beings. And then Kennedy launched into a passage of such sweeping eloquence and empathy for the Russian people—the enemy that a generation of Americans had been taught to fear and despise—that it still has the power to inspire. "We all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." The following month, the U.S. and the Soviet Union reached agreement on the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the first significant restraint put on the superpowers' doomsday arms race.
One view of the Cathedral.
I'm not sure I am persuaded.
I idolized JFK as a pre-teen and for years thereafter, then largely soured. He said and did a lot of things (and didn't do others--including leadership on civil rights, until forced), and was lighter on actual accomplishments (with perhaps the minor exception of keeping the world from being destroyed during the Cuban missile crisis) than I would have preferred. There is certainly abundant evidence in his rhetoric of Cold Warrior tendencies, which Talbot attempts to interpret as political rhetoric intended to clear the ground for peace initiatives, and for actions in a second term that was not to be.
So many of Kennedy's people played so large a role in the Viet Nam tragedy.
Can we ever really know?
Note (adjacent post) that folks are still arguing about how to interpret Plato, let alone JFK.
Ah, might have beens. The world has not been the same since November 22, 1963.
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