There are people who see everything in terms of black and white. For example, in the Russian context, there are those who declare that everything in Russia was perfect before 1917 and everything was bad after it. Of course, a little logic such as: ‘If everything was so perfect, why did everything turn so bad?’ would help such people. Alternatively, read a Russian novel from before 1917, or a newspaper from the period, or else, as was still just possible only a generation ago, you could have talked to someone who had been adult in Russia before 1917. The fact is that black and white do not exist outside hell and heaven. This world is unremittingly grey – though, admittedly, there is a huge difference between light grey and dark grey.
The same is true in the American context of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. There are those who say that his 1963 murder (let us call it what it was) was a turning-point, that all was white before it and all was black after it, that he was basically a kind of martyr. I suspect that childhood nostalgia plays a part here in the views of now elderly people. Nostalgia is a funny thing, the sun always shone in childhood. It is called selective memory. We will briefly consider some of the issues below. As for the conspiracy theories as to who murdered Kennedy and why, there are hundreds of them. Of course, that does not mean that one of them is not true. God knows the Truth.
I am surely far from being the only person in the world who has met people who as adults had met both Tsar Nicholas II and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. (Though certainly, I am the only person from the small town where I was born to have done so. Which is not saying very much). Still, it is a curious fact that JFK was born in 1917, the year that Tsar Nicholas was deposed by Russian traitors. But much more significantly, their deaths have fascinated generations and spawned a mass of conspiracy theories and black and white ideologies. Most notably, many books of suppositional history have been written about them both, about ‘what might have been’. Could what might have been find its fulfilment? That is our question.
It was in Paris in 1996 that I met an American woman from a well-connected family in Massachusetts. She was then in her fifties. She told me that when she was eighteen, she had met JFK. ‘He took one look at me’, she said, ‘and undressed me with his eyes. I felt humiliated’. It is a story that only confirms the stories about Kennedy’s ‘strong libido’. Let us recall at least a few facts from the life of this man who promised so much, who was so charismatic and such a brilliant speaker, and was so cruelly murdered on 22 November 1963 at the age of 46.
Probably the most famous event in Kennedy’s Presidency is the so-called ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ of 1962, which should have been called the Turkish Missile Crisis. For once the U.S. had publicly promised never to invade Cuba again and secretly agreed to remove its Jupiter missiles from near Soviet borders in Turkey, placed there as a provocation by US hawks, the Ukrainian peasant-leader Khrushchov agreed to dismantle Soviet missile sites in Cuba, subject to UN inspections. Thanks in part to Kennedy’s humanity, the US had backed down, though the Soviet side, with no less humanity, had agreed not to make it public. The US had not lost face publicly and indeed there are still some naïve people who think that the ‘Cuban Crisis’ was an ‘American victory’!!! In any case, World War III had been averted and Kennedy was in part responsible for that.
As regards Latin America, in 1962, Kennedy had also had the wisdom to declare that: ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable’. He sought to contain Communism in Latin America by establishing the ‘Alliance for Progress’, which sent aid to some countries and sought greater human rights standards in the region.
Regarding Vietnam, in April 1963 Kennedy said prophetically: ‘We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point’. Though Kennedy’s Vietnam policies seem inconsistent, nevertheless the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stated that Kennedy was strongly considering pulling the United States out of Vietnam after the 1964 election. (McNamara also much too late declared that Vietnam had been a mistake and that he had known it all along and should have gotten out in 1963, when fewer than 100 Americans had been killed). Certainly, Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263, dated 11 October, which ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 US military personnel by the end of 1964 and the bulk of them by 1965. Indeed, Kennedy had been moving in this peaceful direction since his speech on world peace on 10 June 1963.
Israeli interests were also countered by Kennedy’s endorsement of the United Nation’s Johnson Plan, which wanted to return a number of expelled Palestinians from the war of 1948 into what was by then Israel. This continuation of the justice plan of the assassinated UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold for Palestinian repatriation disturbed those who had a negative view of Arab resettlement in their own country, let alone full repatriation.
In general, it seems to us that Kennedy unconsciously expressed the more collective values of Catholicism over the individualism of Protestantism. This sense of solidarity with the rest of the world and collective responsibility for it, which comes from the Catholicity of the Church, was at his time still present in Roman Catholicism, part of its legacy from Orthodoxy. It is sad that after him the US elite lapsed into an individualistic, not to say thoroughly sectarian, view of the world. It started in Vietnam and has since gone through Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, and today has reached the Ukraine.
Regardless of the many academic and conspiratorial debates around Kennedy and regardless of whether the great hopes placed in him were realistic, there is no doubt that he was the great hope of a great many in the Western world. It may not be the real Kennedy who is admirable, but rather his spirit and the hope inspired by his spirit. Under Kennedy there could have been Another America and so quite another course of world history over the last sixty years. The fact is that after his murder, the nightmare of the 1960s began and the Western world has not yet woken up from that nightmare. Indeed, though the Western world now proclaims that it is ‘woke’, in reality it is still fast asleep in its delusions. True or false is not the point here. The fact is that it is the youthful and energetic Kennedy, whether his myth or his reality, who represented hope. As the elderly English poet laureate of the time wrote after Kennedy’s murder:
All generous hearts lament the leader killed
The young chief with the smile, the radiant face,
The winning way that turned a wondrous race
Into sublimest pathways, leading on.
Grant to us Life that though the man be gone
The promise of his spirit be fulfilled.
November 2023 will mark the 60th anniversary of JFK’s murder. How fine it would be if we felt that the promise of his spirit might be fulfilled by then. However, is that realistic?