As we approach the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination next month, we would do well to recall the extraordinary events of the last year of the president’s life. Doing this not only provides context for a tragedy that took place in a very different world than our own; more significantly, it is an opportunity to ponder what James W. Douglass — in his magisterial 2008 study JFK and the Unspeakable — persuasively argues are significant keys to understanding his death. Douglass’s 12 years of research led him to conclude that the president was killed because he was beginning to shed the protective armor of the Cold Warrior — at the height of the Cold War — and decided, instead, to become a peacemaker.
In the bipolar geopolitics of the day, Kennedy’s job description committed him to full-on conflict with the Soviet Union. The flash-points included Berlin, Vietnam and Cuba, and most dangerous of all was the accelerating nuclear arms race. How risky it was became clear with the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the world came perilously close to a nuclear exchange that could have left hundreds of millions dead.
The seeds of Kennedy’s unlikely move toward peace were sown during this potentially catastrophic incident. Successfully avoiding war in this situation not only meant making an accommodation with his counterpart, Premier Nikita Khrushchev; it meant staring down the forces within his own government, including the Joint Chiefs, that were clamoring for an all-out nuclear attack. This experience seems to have unleashed something in Kennedy. He felt his way toward challenging the ideological framework of his day, leading him to sometimes-secret efforts to make a dramatic shift in policy toward Cuba and the escalating war in Vietnam. Most of all, Kennedy launched a series of initiatives to end the nuclear threat, which, a few months before his death, resulted in the promulgation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, an historic agreement that prohibited signatories — including the Americans and the Russians — from conducting nuclear tests in the atmosphere and under the oceans.
Fifty years ago today the Partial Test Ban Treaty went into effect. It was the fruit of steps Kennedy took, including his groundbreaking speech at American University earlier that year, which called for a shift in nuclear policy, including a unilateral moratorium in nuclear testing, proffered as an olive branch to the Soviet Union. That summer the barriers to success came down, with the United States and USSR initiating the pact in July.
The challenge facing Kennedy was Senate ratification, where there was strong opposition. In August, polling showed 80 percent of the public opposed the treaty. Deciding that “a near miracle was needed,” Kennedy set out to change public opinion, initiating a public awareness campaign coordinated by peace activist Norman Cousins. In his book, Douglass writes, “The president told an August 7 meeting of key organizers that they were taking on a very tough job and had his total support.” Referred to as the Citizens Committee, the group — with representatives of many of the strongest peace organizations in the country as well as religious leaders, union representatives, some business executives, Nobel prize winners and scientists — succeeded in reversing the public’s attitude in a little over a month. Eighty percent of the country backed the plan, resulting in the Senate approving the treaty 80-19 — 14 more votes than necessary.
This historic accomplishment — which Kennedy, as Douglass details, hoped would be the beginning of the end of the Cold War — was underscored by the fact that on the day the treaty went into effect, the Nobel Committee announced that Linus Pauling would receive that year’s Peace Prize. In 1957, Pauling — who had already won a Nobel Prize in chemistry — drafted with two others the “Scientists’ Bomb-Test Appeal” that garnered the signatures of 11,000 scientists and played a role in building the anti-testing movement.
While much of the rest of the world acclaimed the movement and its organizers, including Pauling, the Nobel laureate’s activism was not warmly received by his own chemistry department at the California Institute of Technology, which refrained from formally congratulating him. (More significantly, Pauling’s earlier activism against the bomb prompted the U.S. State Department to deny him a passport. It was only restored shortly before traveling to Oslo to pick up his first Nobel Prize in 1954.) Pauling continued to be active for peace the rest of his life. I had the chance to see him at a U.S. Nuclear Freeze Campaign gathering in the early 1980s.
Although it would be another quarter of a century before the global Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would end below-ground nuclear tests, the partial test ban was an historic accomplishment, having far-reaching environmental and political consequences. There is also a treasure trove of lessons for us today, especially about the capacity we have to make headway on seemingly impossible challenges.
The “miracle” Kennedy was seeking was not so otherworldly after all. It began with his own risky steps toward a different world — for which, Douglass’s research convincingly suggests, he paid the ultimate price. Then there were the nitty-gritty mechanics of organizing below the surface of national policy. Even in the doldrums of August, organizers alerted, educated and mobilized the population to catalyze a shift in public opinion — and, in turn, to generate support for peace in the Senate, which was mired in the paralyzing ideology of the Cold War.
There are many times when we are tempted to conclude that we do not have the ability to clamber out of the political quicksand in which we are so often stuck, in a world where we have traded the Cold War for a war on terror. Regimes of worldwide surveillance. Widening gaps in income. The climate crisis. The “us vs. them” world of the early 1960s has splintered into many hemorrhaging challenges.
Yet there is nothing magical or metaphysical about our paralysis — or our liberation. It mostly requires a combination of gumption and plodding work from which the “miracle” of change can flow. This was true half a century ago, and it remains true today.
Hi Ken,
I agree that Kennedy’s American University speech is a remarkable one for a US President. Yet the idea that Kennedy had developed much of any real kind of commitment to peace is contradicted by even a cursory glance at Kennedy’s consistently militaristic geopolitics. Unfortunately, the canard of Kennedy the incipient peacemaker is the launching pad from which Douglass’ wildly speculative conspiracy-theories about the “unspeakable” military industrial complex killing Kennedy take fly.
I’ll cite a few examples.
Kennedy did not reverse his massive nuclear weapons buildup (and he won election partially based on lies about a non-existent missile gap).
Kennedy did not stop US-backed violent covert actions against Cuba. The Kennedy administration laid the ground work for the death squads in El Salvador (see Alan Nairn’s superb investigative reporting on this at http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/nairnelsalvadorbtds.html). Kennedy’s El Salvador policies were consistent with his support for ongoing colonialism, racism, and increasing militarism throughout the region, and continued throughout 1963, including a bellicose speech in November (see https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3175).
The Kennedy administration escalated US covert military intervention in the Congo (supporting the rise of the brutal dictatorship of Mobutu (see, for example, https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38450). And despite announcing a voluntary partial arms embargo on apartheid South Africa in 1963, the US voted against more wide-reaching sanctions at the UN, and supported the apartheid regime economically as well (see http://books.google.com/books?id=7aLFAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=kennedy+administration+and+apartheid&source=bl&ots=jiz8-YH0Ku&sig=EiSftt_2yRAdCh2tT86_ElRmecM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wJ9jUtzVHs-w4AO9jIHoBQ&ved=0CEoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=kennedy%20administration%20and%20apartheid&f=false).
It is true that the Kennedy administration slightly decreased the percentage of the overall budget going to the US military during its couple years in office (see the chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Defense_Spending_-_percent_to_Outlays.png), but this was no dramatic shift.
Finally, I know some, including John M. Newman and Galbraith, claim that Kennedy planned a phased two-year long US withdrawal from military involvement in Vietnam (after Kennedy had massively escalated US military involvement), but this claim too, is dubious. Chomsky points out that these same memos were based on the idea of escalating the war itself (through escalating the military actions of the puppet Government of South Vietnam, a process Nixon would later call “Vietnamization”), and that withdrawals were predicated on military victory over the NLF and Northern Vietnam (see http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/1963_Vietnam_Withdrawal_Plans for some of the documents, see Chomsky at http://www.chomsky.info/letters/200312–.htm, and a nuanced book review disputing the “LBJ is to blame but Kennedy is not” hypothesis from h-net at https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3786).
It’s sometimes tempting, but I believe dangerous to the cause of peace history based on evidence (and to the cause of peace), to romanticize the record of Democratic _or_ Republican presidents.