This article appears in the May 26, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The Kennedy Legacy—Sleepers Awake!
[Print version of this article]
May 21—In introducing President John F. Kennedy’s call 60 years ago to prevent nuclear war, and the reflections by writer Donald Phau on the unrealized significance of the assassinated 1968 Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, we supply—by way of reporting some of the replies of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now himself a 2024 Presidential candidate, to certain questions during recent interviews—an indispensable historical overview for readers and interventionists.
Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., during an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News May 8, 2023, said the following about the day his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963:
The day that my uncle was killed, I was picked up at Sidwell Friends School and brought home. The first phone call that my father made after J. Edgar Hoover told him that his brother had been shot, was to the CIA desk officer in Langley, which was only a mile from our house. And my father said to him, “Did your people do this?” His next call was to Harry Ruiz, one of the Cuban Bay of Pigs leaders who had remained very, very close to our family and to my father. My father asked him the same question.
Then my father called John McCone, the head of the CIA, and asked him to come to the house. And McCone came over, and when I came home from Sidwell Friends School, my father was walking in the yard with John McCone, and my father was posing the same question to him: “Was it our people who did this to my brother?” It was my father’s first instinct that the agency had killed his brother.
The current, real historical circumstance of 2023 could only be efficiently understood from the standpoint of the current history by which the present “events” are actually being shaped, including events that are about to occur, to which those bereft of this overview are irreparably blinded—for example, the absolutely unavoidable implosion of the trans-Atlantic monetary system, including its “new digital dictatorship” component.
Averting Nuclear War Now
Take, also, the disastrous, “Vietnam”-like policy of the United States now underway in the form of the Ukraine proxy war, which must end, not only in its defeat, but if pursued, in the dissolution of the United States itself [see interview following with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. regarding the current war in Ukraine].
As Helga Zepp-LaRouche asserts in her “Urgent Appeal to the (Next) President of the United States, by Citizens and Institutions from All Over the World”:
Today we are faced with a strategic situation far more dangerous than that at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. Offensive NATO weapon systems are much closer to the border of Russia than Cuba is to the United States. The destructive power of the NATO weapons is even greater, the warning time before their launch shorter, and the trust between the leaders of the big nuclear powers is virtually non-existent, compared to that between Kennedy and Khrushchev.
Therefore, we must awaken, we must bring ourselves, with the aid of principles of Classical drama, to confront the failures of our United States citizenry to even notice the historical tragedy in which they are participants—the “ship of fools” on which they are presently passengers.
With the specter of thermonuclear war now hovering over the global horizon, the unfinished business of the 1963–1983 era of United States foreign policy toward today’s Russia, China, and the “global majority” of the world’s nations, especially as regards questions of war and peace, has now come to center stage. The aborted policy-actions to prevent thermonuclear war, taken by two Presidents—John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, one assassinated, the other nearly so—in proposing a “higher peace” approach to the then extant Soviet Union, reveal the strategic mind-set that must inform our war-avoidance approach today, and without which the human race has no chance of surviving. Kennedy’s approach was announced in a speech at American University June 10, 1963 (excerpted more extensively in a following article):
Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.
The sentiments he expressed that day, are so different from the present foreign policy of this nation, that they might well be called “treason” in today’s reactionary political atmosphere. They were far from it. They were a change in Cold War axioms, one which the intelligence factions represented by the CIA’s Allen Dulles and London’s Bertrand Russell would not accept.
Eight months after the thermonuclear near-Armageddon of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, JFK would “reverse course” toward his, and America’s arch-enemy, the Soviet Union. He would emphasize that the two most powerful nations in the world were, precisely because of their power, therefore also the most vulnerable to complete annihilation. This meant that the two powers must quickly shift the world toward the direction of sanity.
Today, as in 1963, the survival of humanity demands a higher mode of conflict resolution than total war, or “little wars” that can turn into total war in a matter of hours, or even minutes. Since JFK’s time, ten presidents ago, no American leader, with the exception of the “unelected president” Martin Luther King, in his April 4, 1967 “nonviolence or nonexistence” Riverside Church speech against the war in Vietnam, has successfully challenged Americans to “walk the narrow path of peace” in the same way—with one exception. On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan ended a nationally televised speech with this formulation:
Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.
What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?
I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of the century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it’s reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of efforts on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.
The policy of defensive weapons, a policy that, had it been implemented, would have prevented today’s present situation that places the world on the brink of thermonuclear Armageddon from even arising, originated with economist and statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche—though that has never been generally reported to the American people in the corporate press, up to today. That “higher peace policy” was the reason for the persecution and incarceration of LaRouche and his associates, and is the great secret of the past four decades of thermonuclear strategic policy, and current history. It is not fashionable, nor considered acceptable, to discuss the relationship between the foreign policy “axiom shift” of JFK in 1963, and the proposal of Ronald Reagan to the Soviet Union in 1983. It “blows the circuitry” of contemporary historical myth-making, but it is nonetheless true.
It is also true, that unless and until the truths of contemporary history are revealed—from the 1963–68 assassination of four Americans, John and Robert Kennedy, Rev. Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X (and other murders conducted by the “International Assassination Bureau” in Germany, Italy, etc. in the 1960s and 1970s), to the 1983 true story of the Strategic Defense Initiative and the subsequent illegal persecution and incarceration of Lyndon LaRouche by the United States Department of Justice (the precedent for those actions now being conducted against a former American President and private citizens)—the danger of thermonuclear war, whether sought or unsought, will continue to mount by the day. It is possible to not be tragic, to not repeat the lessons of history. As Robert Kennedy’s favorite poet, Aeschylus, wrote:
He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Sleepers, awake!
