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It must also be said: Mr. Trump is an imperfect candidate, and he would surely be an imperfect president. He is crude, often vulgar. He has areas of great ignorance. He insults people and inflicts unnecessary harm. He would be twice the candidate he is if he used half the words. He is often intemperate; though it is not Trump but his opponent who is so intemperate as to compare Putin's moves in Ukraine to what Hitler did—an insult that throughout all the Cold War and to this day, no American president has ever offered to any Soviet or Russian leader, not even the enormous butcher Josef Stalin, with whom in fact we joined to win the Second World War. And it is not Mr. Trump but Michael Morell, a former CIA director now high in the councils of the Democratic candidate, who has publicly suggested, without rebuke from anyone, that we should begin "killing Russians," a doubly illegal act of war.
Moreover Trump marks himself as a man of singular political courage, willing to defy the hysteria of the Washington war hawks, the establishment and the mainstream media who daily describe him as virtually anti-American for daring to voice ideas and opinions at variance with their one-note devotion to war.
John Kennedy admired political courage. He began his first campaign for Congress at the height of the Cold War by saying, "Above all, day and night, with every ounce of ingenuity and industry we possess, we must work for peace. We must not have another war." Years later, in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, he and his brother had to overcome great opposition from their own military commanders, government officials and other public leaders, to prevent a war with the Soviet Union: there were 13 men in the ExComm room, and Robert Kennedy said that had any 1 of 8 of them been president, the crisis would have exploded in nuclear war.
But within a year thereafter, deeply affected by the barely-averted catastrophe, President Kennedy had forged a close working relationship with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, spoke all over the country to promote peace policies, and delivered his historic American University speech of 1963. Our "strategy of peace," he said, was "not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war." Rather it must be founded on negotiation, cooperation in areas of mutual interest, and recognition that "our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." As to our great adversary the Soviet Union, he said, "we must reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs."
Six months later he was dead; and it was Robert Kennedy who must resume the effort. Robert Kennedy made ratification of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty the early centerpiece of his Senate career. But as President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam, it was that war which forced Robert Kennedy to make his doomed race for the presidency. Wherever he campaigned in 1968, to virtually every audience, he spoke of the loss, the horror, the infinite tragedy of that war, in words that could be and must be repeated today, after 15 consecutive years of wars all over the world.
"Our brave young men," he said, "are dying in the swamps of Southeast Asia. Which of them might have written a poem? Which of them might have cured cancer? Which of them might have played in a World Series or given us the gift of laughter from the stage or helped build a bridge or a university? Which of them would have taught a child to read? It is our responsibility to let these men live ... It is indecent if they die because of the empty vanity of their country."
He also urged that we consider the Vietnamese mother, desperately trying to shield her baby from the fire from the sky, sent by machines from a country she could barely understand. He demanded of his colleagues, on the Senate floor, to answer what gave us the right to destroy remote villages on the other side of the world, to arrogate to ourselves the power of God, the rule of life and death over others. "All this is our responsibility," he said, "not just a nation's responsibility but yours and mine."
John and Robert Kennedy were no pacifists, nor ignorant of the realities of power. But they required that great power be used with great precision and restraint, and with humility. Both knew that their own lives were hostage to the possibility of assassination, yet they kept trying to guide us toward peace up to the moments of their death.
The legacy of JFK & RFK is "being abandoned by today's Democratic Party."
Theirs is the legacy that is being abandoned by today's Democratic Party. We have broken one Middle Eastern nation after another. Hundreds of cities and villages lie in ruins, hundreds of thousands are dead, millions are refugees; and, for all the press and political thundering against the menace of ISIS, Al Qaeda, or Islamic terrorism generally, our military leaders offer no prospects of victory. They cannot tell us what victory would require or mean; though they are quick to assure us, as in Libya today, that this conflict will go on indefinitely. They cannot even explain how some of our current allies (example Turkey) are bombing and shelling others of our purported allies (example the Kurds). So a Democratic administration, carrying on the work of the Bush presidency, without thought and without question, year after year, has kept sending more young men and women into the grinder.
Scores of Democratic elected officials once spoke and worked tirelessly to end our disastrous war in Vietnam. Today there is only the voice of the marvelous Democratic member of Congress Tulsi Gabbard, a reservist who has twice deployed to Iraq and knows of what she speaks. And it is a Democratic president who sends an endless parade of drones to nations all over the world, flaunting for all to see America's unique military technology, coupled with our seeming complete carelessness in how that technological prowess destroys people and nations.
Most amazing of all, however, is that as we proclaim that the terrorists threaten Europe, threaten the United States, threaten Western civilization itself—as we face all this, we do not concentrate our military might against this unique threat.
