Remembering JFK

Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Texas.  I was in high school when we all heard the news.  By the time I got on the subway to go home that afternoon, the world knew that the shot had been fatal.  Just forty-six years old, he had been President for less than three years.  In that short time, he inspired a generation of young Americans to believe that the world could be better. 

His inaugural speech in 1961, given at the height of the Cold War, is his best known.  "The torch has been passed to a new generation" and "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country" are probably the most memorable and quoted lines. 

Here is a personal selection of some other JFK quotes from his speeches.

We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier...a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils — a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats...Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus...I believe the times demand new invention, innovation, imagination, decision. I am asking each of you to be pioneers on that New Frontier.

 The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.

If an American, because the color of his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public schools available, if he cannot vote for those public officials that 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? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

 

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win...

We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light a candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do.

We can help make the world safe for diversity. 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.

Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.

If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a better place to in which to live.
 

 

 

If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties - someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.” 

 

Yesterday, a shaft of light cut into the darkness. Negotiations were concluded in Moscow on a treaty to ban all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water…Now, for the first time in many years, the path to peace may be open.... Let us, if we can, step back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that journey is 1,000 miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step.

 

 Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. 

Images
James Meredith integrating the University of Mississippi in 1962 is from the Wikipedia entry on the United States Marshals Service

JFK and quote is from Prose Before Hos website
 
Kennedy signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is from the National Archives and Records Administration found at the britannica.com entry

Assassinations and History

November 22 is the fiftieth anniversary of President John Kennedy's assassination.  It is a time to reflect on how the world may have been different without the political assassinations that have marred human history - not just JFK's but others that might have made a difference.  

 

John Kennedy's assassination in 1963 was the fourth of a US president. It was the first of three assassinations in the 1960's that took the lives of charismatic liberal political leaders in the United States. The civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and JFK's brother and Democratic Presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy were both killed within a two-month span in 1968. How much different would the America and the world have been had these men lived? 

 

November 4 was the eighteenth anniversary of the assassination of Israeli prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli radical.  It now appears that the death of Rabin's fellow peace prize winner PLO leader Yasser Arafat  on November 11, 2004 was also an assassination - by polonium poisoning by person or persons unknown. As reported in Al Jazeera on November 6: "A 108-page report by the University Centre of Legal Medicine in Lausanne, which was obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera, found unnaturally high levels of polonium in Arafat’s ribs and pelvis, and in soil stained with his decaying organs."

 

Vietnam

A question long debated has been whether John Kennedy would have escalated the Vietnam War as did his successor Lyndon Johnson or whether Kennedy would have withdrawn American forces. An argument could be made either way. On the one hand, Kennedy subscribed to the failed domino theory used as justification for this tragic war and Johnson inherited Kennedy's "best and brightest" advisors. On the other hand, Kennedy was growing increasingly skeptical of the war and disenchanted with his advisors.

Robert Kennedy's assassination almost certainly delayed the end of the Vietnam War. If Robert Kennedy went on to win the Democratic nomination in 1968, he would have defeated Nixon. Certainly, Bobby Kennedy would have ended the Vietnam War long before 1975. Tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.

 

Domestic Programs and Politics

The assassinations of the Kennedy's and of Martin Luther King likely did not have much effect on the domestic programs of the 60's and early 70's. In 1964, the election of the most liberal Congress in decades with Johnson's landslide victory over conservative Barry Goldwater led to the enactment of the most progressive legislation since the New Deal. The Civil Rights Movement made significant progress with the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1968. Lyndon Johnson's other Great Society programs, some of which were stalled initiatives from John Kennedy's "New Frontier", were enacted by the liberal Congress and then expanded by Republican Presidents Nixon and Ford. The "War on Poverty" (e.g., the Economic Opportunities Act of 1964), medical care for the elderly and the poor (Medicare and Medicaid), Federal aid to education provided by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act, improvements to Social Security - all came about in this period.

Although the assassinations of the Kennedy's and of Martin Luther King may not have made a great difference in the domestic programs of the 60's, the deaths of these great leaders did effect the national political atmosphere. JFK's call for the new generation to step forward in leading the country to the beckoning New Frontier inspired many. MLK's message of unity, brotherhood, and social justice and RFK's idealistic vision may have counteracted or mitigated the mean-spiritedness and stigmatization of the poor, the greed and the hatred of government that has developed with such force in some quarters over the past three or four decades. There is no way of knowing how this would have played out in the long term but we surely would be looking at a better version of than America democracy than we are now.

 

 

Israel and Palestine

 

Probably no single event has had as great an impact on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli fanatic in 1995. The assassin was angered at Rabin's signing of the Oslo Accords which were to form the basis of the two-state solution. Rabin was succeeded by fellow Labor Party member Shimon Peres until 1996. A 17 year period of primarily right-wing Israeli governments began with the formation of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. The years since Rabin's death have been marked by little-to-no progress in the creation of a viable state for the Palestinian people. No Israeli since Rabin has been far-sighted enough to engage the Palestinians. No Israeli since Rabin has been able to bring Israelis back from, in Chris Hedges' words, "the psychosis of permanent war." Had the promises of the Oslo Accords been acted upon and a Palestinian state created, the Middle East would be a more stable, more secure region today. Israel would be at peace and unthreatened. Palestinians would have attained justice.
Images
JFK and quote is from Prose Before Hos website
Yitzhak Rabin is from Wikipedia entry.

Remembering the Fallen

Today, the last Monday in May, is Memorial Day here in the United States. It's a day set aside to remember those Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice. As we remember them, we should also pause to remember the devastating toll that war has taken on all the peoples of the world - military and civilian alike.

The numbers are staggering. In what is described as an "incomplete" list of the approximately 3000 wars in recorded human history, a Wikipedia article puts the minimum figure for deaths due to war at more than 340 million. The totals for each war in the list "usually include both the deaths of military personnel which are the direct results of battle or other military wartime actions, as well as the wartime/ war-related deaths of civilians, which are the results of war induced epidemics, diseases, famines, atrocities etc."

Besides the deaths from war, tens of millions of civilians have become refugees - either fleeing to another country or "internally displaced". Currently, according to the World Refugee Day website,  there are 43.7 million of them.  Were they a country, refugees would rank about 30th in population amongst the nations of the world.
UPDATE: A report released in June 2014 by the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, shows that the number of refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced people worldwide has, for the first time in the post-World War II era, exceeded 50 million people. [The Guardian, June 20]

Greed, hatred, nationalism, perceived wrongs, balance of power, economic systems, religious beliefs, quest for power, bloodlust - mankind has found many reasons to go to war. They are all wrong. They all basically stem from the perception of "the Other", someone you can dehumanize because he is different from you.

Will it ever change? One would hope so. John Kennedy once said "War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."   Fifty years after Kennedy's death, that day remains distant. 

Still we got to start somewhere. So I'll close with a few quotes and a few songs that look to that brighter distant day when men will no longer take up arms against their brothers and sisters.  Here's a link to blues guitarist Lead Belly singing "Ain't Gonna Study War No More".   (Apropos of nothing in particular: George Harrison has been quoted as saying "No Lead Belly, no Beatles.")

Albert Camus: "There are causes worth dying for but none worth killing for."  

Here's a link to Original Caste's "One Tin Soldier". 

"Peace on Earth" was all it said.

 

Joan Baez: "If people have to put labels on me, I'd prefer the first label to be human being, the second label to be pacifist, and the third to be folk singer."  Here's a link to Joan Baez singing Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind".    (In spite of the actual title Dylan gave his song, Joan Baez pronounces the "g" at the end of Blowin'.) The linked video also has some great shots of the young Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.  Dylan just turned 72 this past Friday and does that ever make me feel old!  Happy Birthday, Bobby. 

How many deaths will it take 'til he knows

that too many people have died? 

  

Mahatma Gandhi: "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"



 

Finally, here's a link to Pete Seeger's rendition of "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream"

Last night I had the strangest dream I never dreamed before.

I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.

Photos

Normandy Cemetery from American Battle Monuments Commission photo on britannica.com

Leadbelly from womex.com (adapted from Lead Belly Publicity Shot on Wikipedia Commons)

Albert Camus from wikispaces.com 

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan from Wikipedia Commons

Gandhi from myincrediblewebsite.com

Pete Seeger from The Guardian