Robert C. Koehler: JFK and ‘peace for all time’
Was he kidding? Are these words for real?
“I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived — yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.”
This was 60 years ago: June 10, 1963. John F. Kennedy — less than six months before his assassination — delivered a at American University. He spoke like a renegade, defying the certainties of state, the old Cross of Iron, that war is inevitable and always (when we wage it) necessary. At. He was also in with Nikita Khruschev; the two, working in sync, had averted a nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis less than a year earlier, and were in the process of establishing a nuclear disarmament treaty.
