Why JFK Still Matters

For all those who couldn't be there... my Saturday speech:

Why JFK Still Matters

Speech at Sonoma Community Center, June 4, 2022, sponsored by the Praxis Peace Institute

We live in dreary times. Joe Biden has become a war and oil president, just when we desperately need the Democrats to fight like hell for their failing domestic agenda – the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, the end of student aid bondage, criminal justice reform, reproductive rights, gun control.

We’re now facing the real prospect of a Republican resurgence in the midterm elections --- and a Trump restoration in two years. In other words, an American nightmare. My prediction? Phony GOP populism will trump failing corporate liberalism.

And if Trump and his Republican confederates steal the next presidential election, will we loyal Americans have the nerve to take back our democracy?

Our only hope – and it’s a slim one – is that the Democrats stop listening to Senators Manchin and Sinema and the party’s billionaire benefactors and follow the lead of the militant labor activists and political leaders who are breathing fire into American life.

Democrats need look no farther than their own past.

Once upon a time, we had a Democratic president who engaged directly with the most burning issues in America. That’s not how the presidency of John F. Kennedy gets taught in school rooms or on TV shows. But JFK was the type of brave, principled leader we desperately need today. I’ve written two books that examine the Kennedy presidency and its violent termination – “Brothers” and “The Devil’s Chessboard.” And I could talk all day about why JFK was a unique leader – and why he was killed.

But today I will just focus on the final months of his 1,000-day presidency. Perhaps someday the eternal flame that burns next to his Arlington resting place will light our way forward.

In early June 1963, while President Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and several of their aides closely monitored the crisis, Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of the admissions building on the University of Alabama campus and blocked Deputy Attorney General Nick Katzenbach and two African American students – Vivian Malone and James Hood – from desegregating the all-white university. Wallace finally stood aside, after President Kennedy federalized Alabama’s National Guard, with Wallace denouncing the federal government’s “military dictatorship.”

But it’s important to note that President Kennedy was willing to shed blood to integrate the university. People had died just months before during a segregationist riot at Ole Miss that JFK had quelled only when Army troops finally showed up on his orders. The night before Malone and Hood were to integrate the University of Alabama with federal support, there was a big Ku Klux Klan cross burning near the campus. Federal marshals were issued a shoot to kill order by President Kennedy if anybody attacked the black students.

Kennedy was also willing to split his own party -- shedding the Dixie Democrats, who had been a key part of the party coalition since the days of FDR, to advance the cause of civil rights. After losing the showdown with Kennedy at the university, Wallace told the press: “I say the South next year will decide who the new president’s gonna be. Because you can’t win without the white South. And you’re going to see the South is going to be against some folks.”

Wallace’s grim view of Kennedy was widely held throughout the white South, nearly all of which JFK expected to lose in the ’64 presidential election. That’s why Kennedy was leaning toward keeping Lyndon Johnson on his ticket, despite his growing political baggage – and that why’s he felt compelled to visit Texas in November of that year.

On the same sweltering day in Tuscaloosa, Alabama that President Kennedy and his men stood down Governor Wallace and his segregationist followers, JFK decided to go on TV and deliver the most powerful civil rights speech of his presidency. His top aides – including Ted Sorensen, Larry O‘Brien and Kenny O’Donnell – were all against him givng the speech, arguing that it would further isolate him politically. But JFK was for it – and the speech he gave in the White House that night, written by wordsmith Sorensen and partly ad-libbed by the president himself – should be viewed on YouTube by every citizen in our still racially divided nation.

Here is some of what President Kennedy said that night:

“This is not a partisan issue. We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.

“The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

Kennedy, “vowing that the time has come for the nation to fulfill its promise,” announced his intention of introducing in Congress what became the historic civil rights bill of 1964. LBJ get credit for it – but it was Kennedy who took the bold political step of introducing the bill and who gave it its most passionate endorsement.

In fact, after Kennedy’s White House address, Martin Luther King Jr, hailed it as “one of the most eloquent, profound and unequivocal pleas for justice and freedom for all people ever made by a president.”

What makes this even more of a milestone in the Kennedy presidency is that only the day before – on June 10, 1963 – JFK also delivered what became known as the Peace Speech at American University. These twin speeches – on the most controversial issues of the day, civil rights and the Cold War – demonstrate that Kennedy was willing to plunge into the burning house to lead the country in the right direction.

In this remarkable speech, which Kennedy’s defense secretary Robert McNamara told me years later should also be viewed by every American, JFK did something that no American president had done before or has done since. He called on his fellow Americans to change their consciousness about war and peace – and to empathize with the Communist enemy, the enemy we had been taught to fear and hate.

“In short, both the United States and the Soviet Union have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the nuclear arms race. 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.”

The Peace Speech paved the way for the limited nuclear test ban treaty, which banned the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons – the first nuclear treaty of the Cold War. President Kennedy was alarmed by reports that traces of radioactive poisoning were showing up in children’s bones and teeth and in the breast milk of nursing mothers. Ted Sorensen later told me that JFK decided to run for president in 1960 because as a student of history he feared a nuclear Armageddon could break out despite world leaders’ best intentions. Kennedy already prevented one such nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. And he was committed to deescalating Cold War tensions with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Khrushchev and JFK’s wily negotiator Averell Harriman had hammered out the test ban treaty over the summer months in Moscow. But Kennedy feared that he’d be unable to gather the 67 votes in the Senate he needed to ratify the treaty. Indeed, Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen and anti-Communist nuclear scientist Edward Teller were leading a successful resistance on Capitol Hill – aided by the Pentagon and CIA. (At one point during the anti-treaty campaign, as I revealed in “Brothers,” the Air Force under the belligerent leadership of Gen. Curtis LeMay -- pictured below -- even hid an Air Force officer who could prove if the Russians were abiding by the treaty.)

To win the critical battle over the test ban treaty, the Kennedy brothers decided to play Washington hardball – a tough game that today’s Democrats seem to have no skill at playing. Finding out that Dwight Eisenhower – the former president who ironically had warned the nation about the growing power of “the military-industrial complex” as he left the White House – was the power behind the opposition to the treaty, the Kennedys put the squeeze on him. Eisenhower had let it be known that if the Kennedy brothers’ Justice Department dropped its corruption case against his White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, they “would have a blank check with me.” The Kennedys let Ike know they wanted more than his gratitude – they wanted him to drop his opposition to the treaty. The old general reluctantly agreed. And with Senator Dirksen suddenly singing the treaty’s praises, it was easily ratified by the Senate on September 24, 1963.

These landmark political battles – over civil rights and national security – demonstrate the true courage of the Kennedy presidency. They also help explain why President Kennedy was a marked man when he flew to Dallas on November 22 of that year. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who was a passionate critic of the Cold War mass death cult, sagely remarked on the fragility of the Kennedy presidency while JFK still occupied the White House. Only by a “miracle,” he predicted, would Kennedy “break through” the nuclear hysteria of the era. “But such people,” Merton wrote, “are before long marked out for assassination.”

Allen Dulles, the deeply sinister CIA spymaster fired by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961, snarled to a journalist years after JFK’s assassination: “That little Kennedy… he thought he was a god.” In fact, Kennedy – who at 6’ 1” was not “little” by the way -- had no such divine delusions. He knew he was a deeply flawed man. But as president he had the courage of his convictions. And if he had been allowed to live – and if leaders like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been allowed to live – our country would have gone in a very different historical direction.

But John F. Kennedy and the others were killed for a reason. Their enemies triumphed. It’s our duty, our responsibility, as American citizens to grapple with this this fraught history. Because the past is never past. As Orwell taught us, he “who controls the past controls the future.”

Thank you. I’ll take your questions now.