Part of what Kennedy hoped to achieve with the speech was a jump-start in negotiations with the Soviets over a limited nuclear test ban treaty. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.” It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. Kennedy said: “Should total war ever break out again – no matter how – our two countries will be the primary targets. The stakes, after all, were simply too great. Kennedy told the assembled AU graduates that demonizing the Soviets and doubling down on a militarized version of containment, which had been enshrined as official US policy since the Harry Truman administration’s adoption of National Security Directive 68, was not the solution. (Kennedy famously described his desire to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”) “One of his two or three serious weaknesses as a public leader,” he continued, “is that he does not want to be unpopular anywhere – anywhere – with anyone and I think that a public leader, at times, has to get into struggles where somebody gets a bloody nose, and Kennedy doesn’t want that ever.”īut the speech indicates (and too late, perhaps, given the events of tha November, that the days of go-along, get-along Jack Kennedy were over, and that instead the president was gearing up for a fight with elements of his own national-security bureaucracy, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon brass, of which he had come to think so little.
“He’s one of the boys,” Lippmann observed. It is worth noting then, in this context, that in the month prior to Kennedy’s address the dean of Washington columnists, Walter Lippmann, criticized the president in a televised interview for being too timid, too cautious. The October 1962 nuclear-war scare gave rise, some eight months later, by way of a June 1963 commencement address at American University, to the most profound expression of human solidarity ever given by an American chief executive. There are twin main points to UnHerd, which launched last week. If part of the legacy and legend of John Fitzgerald Kennedy includes a touch of playboy recklessness, what cannot be ignored is that, faced with the most serious national-security crisis since the Second World War, Kennedy – in the face of potentially catastrophic advice from a number of his political and military advisers – rose to the occasion. The Conservative Christian Fellowship, Renewing One Nation, ConservativeHome all made an impact and two are still going.
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