ABSTRACT
In 1940 John F. Kennedy graduated with his thesis, Appeasement in Munich; this was then published as a book entitled Why England slept?. The ideas expressed in that occasion seem diametrically opposing as regards to the ideas later demonstrated during his short stay at the White House.
In spite of the interventionist climate commissioned by F. D. Roosevelt, it would be limiting to consider his work as a mere propagandistic instrument; it represents the errors of British policy in regards to Adolf Hitler, which was considered a “great dream” that pushed the English to abandon half of the free world to the Nazis, not to rearm and thus face the 1939 crisis unprepared and this analysis created the starting point for a more general dissertation of the meaning of the terms democracy and totalitarian regime and their strengths and weaknesses.
One should ask how it is possible that the fighting spirit of the 1940 Kennedy, who considered the détente as a lack of firmness and conceived a sort of armed democracy for the safeguard of its own preservation, became, in 1960, a pacifist president who was very prudent in his foreign policy, a convinced supporter of the détente and advocate of a new “peace strategy”.
The most critical studies in this matter accuse Kennedy to have simply renounced his ideas expressed in 1940, and blamed him of facing the problems of his era with the same appeasement attitude of Chamberlain and Baldwin. Particularly they saw the United States as asleep to reach the point of tolerating Fidel Castro in Cuba, to agree with the USSR at the expense of half of Europe, drawing up military and commercial treatises with it and enduring without reacting to communism in Africa, in addition to a great part of Asia. The same critics consider Kennedy’s 1960-1963 foreign policy through the same concepts and arguments of the young Kennedy, pointing out in this transaction obvious contradictions.
A more detailed approach, though, goes beyond this superficial approach, and puts the main points of the question in the right light. One must not forget that this work was written by an immature Kennedy, who was conditioned by the events of his time (the spreading in all of Europe of the terrifying Teutonic war machine), and by the strong personality of F. D. Roosevelt, who wanted at all costs his war even though one can find detailed reasoning of genuine sincerity in the book.
Vice versa, the world conditions in which the mature Kennedy had to voice his decisions as president were completely different. He already knew the worst end of the conventionalist war, first in the South Pacific with his crew and then during his trip in the summer of 1945 as a journalist through the ruins of the war devastated Europe, and one can also venture that in this context the warlike ideas of the young Kennedy were already evolving into a more well pondered orientation.
What was very different was the threat of an atomic hecatomb. The weight of a nuclear war could not be calculated with the same unit of measurement and could not have created a solution for international controversies, as it had been for conventional wars.
One of the most continuous worries of Kennedy was knowing about his overwhelming responsibility, the acme of the long period characterized by the cold war, to govern in a world in which the United States and its main rival could destroy each other in a few minutes. Since a total solution was not possible, he wished to simply suffocate the cold war, seeing it extinguishing itself, and reacting in a natural and pacific way to the old forces of liberty and truth.
Now, one can fully interpret the new meaning of a mature Kennedy’s political theory compared to his unripe ideas expressed in his book and it represents a natural evolution that, from being an unknown recent graduate saw him becoming president of the richest and powerful country in the world.
Only then, in his full maturity, Kennedy highlighted what were his instruments for a stable and lasting peace in the world. For example, he took the presidential coat of arms that decorated the carpet of his office, where the eagle’s head faced an olive branch. He used an olive branch to dedicate his own efforts to disarmament, to the United Nations, to space research and to help less fortunate populations.
On the older coat of arms on the ceiling, on the other hand, the eagle faced the arrows, a symbol of war, and Kennedy, though have peace as his objective, did not think twice to supply himself with such weapons, believing that arming the United States was necessary to give it a bargaining tool and a support in view of the disarmament summits and of diplomatic initiatives. On this trail, he adopted fundamental changes on questions regarding rocketry differences and of nuclear deterrent, on the resumption of nuclear testing, on the field of civil control and on the strengthening of conventional and non conventional forces.
From a wise combination of these two elements descends the gist of Kennedy’s politics, mould by a new wave of basic premises: the extinction of the cold war, rather than its victory and its inadmissibility, not the inevitability, of a nuclear war.
These rooted beliefs, together with solid programs regarding racial integration, reduction of taxes in periods of deficit and the war against poverty in periods of prosperity, constituted a new peace strategy, an authentic heritage that Kennedy left to the nation and to the entire world.