Prior to running for President, John Kennedy sought the support of academics in part by opposing a McCarthyite requirement in the National Defense Education Act. The act imposed a loyalty oath and affidavit on recipients of NDEA funds. With his colleague Senator Clark, JFK introduced an amendment to remove the requirement. For my college newspaper, on which Kennedy had also worked as an undergraduate, I cobbled together a publication explaining why the requirement was both offensive and ineffective. Worse Than Futile, with a Foreword by JFK, was then published by the Crimson and widely distributed in U.S. higher education. The Kennedy-Clark amendment was passed by Congress.
It then came to my attention as a reporter that several private groups were facilitating youth service abroad in so-called under-developed countries. Could this initiative be broadened under Federal sponsorship? It was a no-brainer to suggest this as an element in JFK’s campaign. After hesitation, he had the courage to propose the idea in Ann Arbor when young people had waited through the evening for his late arrival.
On the strength of my suggestion, I was invited along near the end of the campaign in 1960. JFK was touring coal country in Pennsylvania. His right hand was bloody from handshakes with miners. Kennedy’s opponent, Vice President Nixon, had inexplicably vowed to visit all fifty states. During a rest stop JFK and many reporters were in a men’s room with large open windows. A jet roared by. “Dick,” said the Senator, pronouncing the name with his Boston accent. “Deek, the votahs are down heah.”
With a fellowship from my college to go abroad, I played no role in the founding of the Peace Corps, but witnessed the admiration of Europeans for President Kennedy’s initiative. Still, he was at that time a Cold Warrior, at least until the shock of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October1962.
I recall admiring his subsequent speech in June 1963 at American University. Entitled “Strategy of Peace,” the commencement address was still being talked about when, as a citizen diplomat, I visited Moscow in 1986. Kennedy made the effort of empathy, stepping into the shoes of the other, of his rival. As a statesman, he stopped to imagine the experience of the Soviets under attack by the Nazis:
“No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland -- a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago.”
With philanthropist Don Carlson, I included the text of this speech in Securing Our Planet: How to Succeed When Threats Are Too Risky and There’s Really No Defense. In another book also published in 1986, we invited Soviets writers to imagine elements of a positive future. The Soviets reciprocated by putting me on all-Soviet TV when I arrived at Sheremetyevo airport.
After making clear that I was not what Lenin had called a “useful idiot” but a patriot, I used this opportunity to suggest to millions across Euro-Asia that we could live not as enemies but as rivals and even, at times, as partners.