Historical Framework – Nuke ’em or Die
Let’s pause and consider something here. It is 1961 – a decade and a half after the end of WWII. The Soviet Union had gone from being our ally in defeating Germany to becoming the Evil Empire that had stretched an Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe. It was the Mother of Communism and was giving birth to communist infiltrations around the world that were successfully gobbling up national governments. The world’s most populous country, China, had been taken over by Mao Zedong and his Communist henchmen. They were now infecting China’s neighbors. A decade before, at a cost of nearly 40 thousand American lives, we had had to go to war to stop Red China from conquering all of Korea and now they were moving into Vietnam and other parts of SE Asia. Cuba, a neighbor less than 90 miles from our shores had fallen prey to the Soviet’s mechanizations. Our ally, President Batista, had been overthrown with the help of the Soviets by the Communist rebel, Fidel Castro. The Soviets had even been infiltrating the United States with spies and Communist sympathizers. In the early 1950’s, Senator Joe McCarthy spent several years unveiling how extensive the Red Scare was. The Soviets had stolen the secrets to the atomic bomb and were developing a nuclear arsenal. In 1955, they exploded a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb – which was much more powerful than the fission weapons we used against Japan. They were hard at work building the ICBMs to deliver these horrific weapons to the United States. School children nationwide were practicing crawling under their desks in preparation for a nuclear attack by the Soviets. Bomb shelters were the number one new addition to American homes. The citizens of the United States, JFK’s constituents, were terrified of the Soviet Union.
According to James Douglas in “JFK and the Unspeakable”, in July 1961, JFK was presented with a first strike plan against the Soviets. The Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal was inferior to ours at that point in time, but they were rapidly catching up. The plan’s assessment was that if the US launched an all out first strike against the Soviets, we would kill over 100 million people in the USSR and not suffer more than 10 million casualties in the US. We would win the Cold War outright. The fear of Communism would be gone. But if we waited and the Soviets caught up, we would never again have this opportunity again. Now or never. According to Douglas, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff supported the Plan as did the Director of the CIA. These were all men who had served in WWII and been heroes. They wore the white hats. John Kennedy rejected the plan. Why? Because he had a moral compass. If you did not read his commencement speech to American University that I linked to in the Essay #2, do so.
What if the American people had elected someone as president who did not have a moral compass. Someone who saw the world in terms of “us versus them”; we are good, they are the evil enemy and deserve to be destroyed. Character really matters in a president.
One of the most touching stories Douglas tells was about an NSC meeting in 1963 when 5-year-old Caroline Kennedy walked into the meeting and came up to her father. “Daddy, I have something to tell you.” “Darling, I am in an important meeting – we can talk later.” “I want to tell you now, Daddy.” “Ok, what is it?” Caroline then recited from memory the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” in the presence of all the members of the NSC, including the Director of the CIA. Jacquiline had prepared Caroline to do this. She wanted those who were plotting to murder her husband to know that she knew what they were doing. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45077/i-have-a-rendezvous-with-death (note: I loaned out the JFK book, so I am writing those quotes from memory, and they are not exact.)
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