Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Speech: "Peace & Diplomacy", June 20, 2023

Robert F. Kennedy Jr: “Peace & Diplomacy”

RFJ Jr’s Peace & Diplomacy | JFK‘ Peace Speech | Eisenhower: Military Industrial Complex Speech

(The speech didn’t get started until 12:57 min)

“Peace & Diplomacy” Speech

Saint Anselm College

Tuesday, June 20, 2023 7 pm

100 Manchester NH 03102

Timestamps # | Transcript ↓

0:00 Introductory Speech, Eric Jackman, MC, New Hampshire Coordinator

1:26 National Anthem

6:28 Second Introduction, Rhonda Rohrabacher, New Hampshire Coordinator

7:54 Third Introduction, Dennis Kucinich, National Campaign Manager

12:54 RFK speech begins: Peace & Diplomacy

13:26 JFK learned that nuclear testing in the Pacific was raining down radioactive fallout around the globe.

15:03 60th anniversary: Peace Speech: JFK went behind the backs of the State Department and Pentagon to negotiate a nuclear atmospheric test ban.

16:36 JFK asked the American people to put themselves in the shoes of the Russians and the WWII experience of the Russians.

19:07 We are at a similar time of nuclear tensions and the opportunity to diffuse tensions and choose a peaceful path.

Americans used to identify themselves with peace: Founders believed that Democracy was incompatible with Empire.

19:37 Forever Wars… Ukraine War: abhors Russian invasion, but US government has provoked Russia going back to 1990s.

21:52 We have surrounded Russia and our goals are regime change, Biden has called for overthrowing Putin. There is a broader agenda of wanting to breakup Russian into multiple pieces.

23:40 JFK: All that we have built, all that we have worked for would be destroyed in the first 24 hours [of a nuclear war].” “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice between humiliating retreat and a nuclear war.” To adopt that course in the nuclear age would be evidence of the bankruptcy of our policy or a death wish for humanity.

Both Ukraine and Taiwan (like Iraq and Syria) are pawns in this geopolitical fantasy of world domination.

26:22 We’ve become addicted to comic book narratives, good vs evil, black and white narratives that erase complexity and institutionalize a way of thinking in which everything is a “war”.

27:46 We’ve created a vicious and dangerous cycle of suspicion and counter suspicion, fueling provocation and counter provocation an arms race that is incapable of stopping the violence at home.

32:19. Today America has broken off nearly all communication with Russia. Can’t Biden meet with Putin?

33:03 Conflict has become the cornerstone of US foreign policy. Two or three decades ago it was a “Clash of Civilizations” with Islam, Think Tanks funded by Military contractors call war with China as inevitable.

33:25 The War in Ukraine could have been avoided, even as late as spring of 2022, Boris [Johnson] [sic] was sent to scuttle peace talks that they had already signed.

35:29 JFK wanted to talk directly to Khrushchev. Both realized that they could not trust the intelligence apparatus around them [The deep state] that wanted war.

39:06 JFK told Ben Bradley that he wanted his gravestone to say: “He kept the peace.” The primary job of an American president is to keep the country out of war. Advisors wanted him to send troops to Laos, Berlin, and Vietnam. He ordered every troop out of Vietnam. (One month later he died and his order was reversed by Johnson.)

We then went down the path of military industrial complex, which Eisenhower said would devour democracy. It is time to reverse that.

Peace comes from a change in attitude.

43:30 We will reap forever the poisonous fruits of war that the Military Industrial Complex seeks.

Call on President, which has one and a half more years in office, to deescalate

Call upon the Military to exercise discipline and self-restraint.

Call upon the State Department to avoid unnecessary irritants and hostile rhetoric.

45:09 Join in a new Peace Movement. Celebrate no longer the “Wartime President” but a president who keeps the peace, a genuine peace.

49:30 End.

Transcript #

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60 years ago this month my uncle, John F Kennedy, made an historic as a speech at American University in Washington D.C and that speech was called The Peace Speech. I’ll give you some of the context for what was happening at that time the previous Autumn. He had been in the Oval Office with his science advisor, who I knew very well as a boy, and then growing up as well — Jerome Wiesner.

And at that time I’m 69 years old, and I remember at that time the the regular photographs on the cover of the New York Times and the other papers of atmospheric testing in the Pacific Atoll, so we were seeing the mushroom public clouds of the atom bombs a hydrogen bombs and hydrogen bombs that were going off regularly in that part of the world and that day my uncle was meeting with Jerome Wiesner and asking him what he asked him at that meeting what happens to the radioactive fallout and Wiesner said it circulates all around the globe very very quickly and then it drops back into the Earth on the rain and the rain and it it gets into our our fish, our animals, our ponds, our Rivers, our streams ,our drinking water

And it was raining at that time and my uncle spent a long time staring at the window and he said to Weisner — do you think it’s in the rain that’s falling right now — and Wiesner told him it was and Ted Sorenson who was in the room at that time and who had been with my uncles some of the through some of the most difficult times in his life mourning the death of his brother uh and and was with him when he almost died during his back surgeries said that all the years that he knew John Kennedy there was no time that he saw more trouble than that day and that launched a resolution where he decided he wanted to ban nuclear atmosphere nuclear testing.

He knew a State Department opposed it and he knew the Pentagon was going to oppose it so he did the whole thing secretly with Castro [sic Kruschchev] at that time they had to set up the hotline so they could talk directly with each other but he negotiated the entire treaty through it through a few trusted aids within the White House who were [shut] and diplomats were shuttling back and forth under the nose of the state department when he finally when they they’ve negotiated very very quickly and when he announced it to the United States his state department and the Pentagon were in Revolt open revolt in fact the Pentagon his Pentagon brass were lobbying Congress to kill this treaty by their boss the commander-in-chief and I think something like 80 percent of Americans initially oppose the treaty and he was determined to get it passed and this speech turned the country around.

It was the beginning of a process that turned the whole country around this speech and the whistle whistle tour that start that followed it where he went to places where he did not have political support he went to the South he went to the western states he went and left and gave speeches at the Mormon Tabernacle in in Salt Lake people who had not supported his presidency but he found tremendous support on the ground from all Americans for making this happen because as it turns out the intelligence apparatus and the military perhaps wanted the war but the American people did not and they wanted to end to it and this is the with the speech he did something extraordinary something that had never been done before to me it’s his most important speech

It’s one of the most important speeches in American history and the thing that he did that was so unusual in that speech is he talked to the American people and asked them to put themselves in the shoes of the Russians. Everybody else was doing the opposite at that time. They were demonizing and vilifying the Russians and he said no we have to put ourselves in their shoes in the shoes of our adversaries. If we want to have peace we need to do that it has to be a regular discipline and at that time most Americans that era I was born nine years after the end of World War II and the zeitgeists were here and the the governing assumption was that America had won the war and now we were going to now we were going to rightfully dominate the peace. And he said something very very different to Americans that challenged that patriotic assumption.

He said no it was actually the Russians who won the war they weakened Hitler and made it possible for us to March into Berlin and he talked about the suffering of the Russians during the war and to legitimize their security concerns which nobody was doing. Any show of military strength by the Russians at that time was portrayed as aggression and what he was saying to the Americans is no they have legitimate security concerns the same as we do and we need to understand those things and he reminded Americans the suffering that the Russians had had endured during the unimaginable suffering one in seven Russians had been killed during World War II.

He said that imagine he asked Americans to imagine that all of the the land all of the cities all of the towns from the east coast of Chicago had been leveled to rubble at the forests and fields had been burned. And he said that’s what happened to Russia during the war — that’s what they sacrificed for us. And they have legitimate security concerns to make sure that never happens again and that speech turned around the American people and they ended up supporting that it was one of the fastest ratified treaties in American history.

I’m speaking you today because the world is once again at a very similar crossroads as in my uncle’s time nuclear tensions are an extreme and dangerous level as in his time. We have a unique opportunity not only to defuse those tensions but to take a radically different path — a path towards peace. My uncle’s commitment to peace boure fruit in the limited Atmospheric Treaty of August 1963. but his assassination that November turn the nation down another path his successors have launched one war after another along with the ceaseless expansion of our military some call it the Forever War.

Americans used to identify herself as a peaceful nation, in fact our founding the framers of our constitution said that America believed that America that democracy was inconsistent with an Imperium abroad — that if we try to make ourselves an imperial Nation abroad that we would turn into a surveillance state of Garrison State a Security State at home and that we would also destroy our economy we would drain it as well as it happens with every empire. Every empire ends itself through the expansion of the military over expansion of its military abroad and the founders knew that John Quincy Adams spoke for all of them when he said America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy today.

I want to recall that memory because this Forever War, which has so drained our nation’s vitality, now threatens to plunge the world into the unspeakable horror of nuclear armageddon and I speak of course of this situation in Ukraine. I abhor Russia’s brutal and bloody invasion of that nation but we must understand that our government has also contributed to its circumstances through repeated deliberate provocations of Russia going back to the 1990s.

Democratic and Republican administrations have pushed NATO to Russian boarders violating our own solemn promise from the early 90s when we pledged that if Russia made this terrible concession of moving 400,000 troops out of East Germany and allowing the unification of Germany under a NATO Army, a hostile Army, that we would commit that after that we would not move Nato one inch to the East.

And James Baker gave that Assurance as did the British government officials and many many others, and yet today we have surrounded Russia we’ve moved it, not one inch to the east, but A thousand miles and 14 Nations . We have surrounded Russia with missiles and military bases something that we would never tolerate if the Russians did that to us and statements from our government officials and think tanks lay out the goals for the Ukraine war — regime change in Russia the overthrow of Vladimir Putin.

This is what President Biden has said is there our purpose in the Ukraine the disabling and exhaustion of the Russian military and the dismembering of the Russian Federation. None of these objectives have anything to do with helping the Ukraine which of course was the pre-text for our involvement in the war. That’s when our leaders told us that we were there for a humanitarian mission, but they since acknowledged that there is a broader geopolitical agenda and that Ukraine is simply a pawn in a in a proxy war between the United States and Russia. Like teenagers playing World of Warcraft these warmongers inside U.S leadership drop war games and scenarios and and pretend that a nuclear war is winnable. That is a dangerous lie.

It’s an illusion that my uncle’s defense secretary Robert McNamara called mass psychosis. These individuals do not appreciate what John F Kennedy understood when he said of nuclear war — “all that we have built all that we have worked for would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.” Even one nuclear explosion spreads rate of radioactivity around the world. Can you imagine the consequence of a full nuclear exchange? President Kennedy did. That’s why he said “above all while defending our own vital interests nuclear Powers must have hurt those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either humiliating humiliating retreat of a nuclear war and nuclear war.” To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence of the bankruptcy of our policy or a collective Death Wish For Humanity.

Let me say that again. Nuclear Powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. The same the shameful fact is that for the last 20 years The advocates of a militaristic foreign policy within the U.S leadership have done exactly the opposite. Their belligerent strategy of maximum confrontation extends Beyond Russia to China. With the same group within our government hopes to use Taiwan as a geopolitical bond the same way they used Iraq and Syria and now Ukraine to further a vain fantasy of world domination through violent confrontation.

Let’s leave off geopolitical geopolitics for a moment and take the matter of War and Peace a little deeper. President Kennedy understood that peace begins with our basic attitudes and beliefs. He spoke of the futility of passively waiting for the other side to become enlightened. “We must examine our own attitudes” he said “as individuals and as a nation for our attitude is as essential to theirs.” “We should” he said “begin by looking inward” yes back in 1963 a politician really said that a political leader a political leader voice what would be considered today a spiritual maximum or a spiritual principle let’s take up that call from 60 years ago and ask Americans all of us to re-examine our attitude we have been immersed in a foreign policy discourse that is all about adversaries and threats and allies and enemies in domination. We’ve become addicted to comic book good versus evil narratives that erase complexity and blind us to the legitimate motives and the legitimate cultural and economic concerns and the legitimate security concerns of other peoples and other nations.

We have internalized and institutionalized a reflex of violence as the response for any and all crises. Everything becomes a war — a War on Drugs, the war on terror, or on cancer, or on climate change. This way of thinking predisposes us to wage endless wars abroad. Wars and coups and bombs and drones and regime change operations and support for paramilitaries and huntas and dictators.

None of this has made us safer and none of it has burnished our leadership or our moral authority. But more importantly, we must ask ourselves is this really who we are? Is this what we want to be? Is that what Americans Founders envision.

Here’s another spiritual principle one that my uncles also referred to when he said “we are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other and new weapons beginning counter weapons.”

When we hold others in the belief that they are implacable enemies they tend to mold themselves accordingly to our view of them is a self-fulfilling prophecy or prediction that launches all players into a cycle of suspicion that that my uncle warned against inhabiting the role of an enemy. We empower hardliners in places like Russia, China, Cuba, and Iran. We invite them into the drama of conflict the drama of provocation and counter provocation of weapon and counter weapon.

Is it any wonder that as America has wage violence throughout the world violence has overtaken us in our own nation. It has not come as an invasion it has come from within our bombs our drones our armies are incapable of stopping the gun violence on our streets and schools or domestic violence in our homes I see the same link here as my father and Martin Luther King saw about the Vietnam War. They saw the own war. They believed that we could not have warfare abroad without bringing that violence home to our streets, to our attitudes to our communities foreign violence is inseparable from domestic violence both are aspects of a basic orientation at a basic set of priorities waging endless wars. Waging endless wars abroad we have neglected the foundation of our own well-being. We have a decaying economic infrastructure we have a demoralized people, a despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health. These are the wages of war.

What will be what will be the wages of Peace? It will be healing of all the symptoms of America’s decline none of these are beyond our capacity to heal. We can restore America to the awesome vitality of the original Kennedy era. My uncle said it well. He said that no problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. He warned us that “too many of us think that peace is impossible. Too many of us think it is unreal, but that is the dangerous and defeatist belief it leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces that are that we cannot control.

We need not accept that view our problems are man-made and therefore they can be solved by man. How do we actually do that ? We started by replacing the vicious cycle of suspicion with a virtuous cycle of trust building. We reverse escalation. It takes courage to make the first move toward peace. Let’s see what happens when we stop the provocation and the escalation and offer instead an olive branch.

Each step we take invites those who call those who we call our adversaries to take a step further. Maybe Russia won’t respond maybe they won’t respond in kind or in any way but at least we will know that we tried and the whole world will know it too that step comes from a changed attitude and from courage speaking in the midst of the Cold War.

John Kennedy asked us “not only to see the distorted and desperate view of the other side” not to “see conflict as inevitable accommodation as impossible and communication is nothing more than exchange of threats.”

Let’s take a moment and allow that to sink in today America has broken off practically all diplomatic contact with Russia so that communication has indeed become little more than an exchange of threats and insults. FDR met with Stalin. JFK came out with Khrushchev. Nixon met with Brezhnev. Reagan met with Gorbachev. Can’t Biden meet with Putin. Do we have we or can’t we at least can we at least begin a conversation. Do we now have such a distorted and desperate view of the other side and we won’t even speak to them?

To see conflict as inevitable has become the Cornerstone of U.S foreign policy. Two or three decades ago it was “The Clash of Civilizations” between Islam and the West. Today those Legions of think tanks that are funded by the defense industry exhort us to prepare for the inevitable war with China -a war is inevitable only if we make it inevitable. The war in Ukraine could have been avoided even as late now we now know as spring of 2022 when U.S officials sent Boris Yeltsin [sic]] [Johnson] to Kiev to scuttle peace talks between Ukraine and Russia– peace agreement they had already signed and not only that — Russia had already begun removing its troops from the Kiev area.

We now know this war was this war was not inevitable it was the creation of a relentless mentality of war and domination. At the height of the Cold War JFK was willing to see beyond the prevailing stereotypes of Russia and its leader Khrushchev as the epitome of evil. The two men at that time exchanged 26 highly personal and private emails among each other.

We had a a Russia KGB had GRU spy who used to come to my home as when I was a little boy and we knew he was his spy. And this was the time that the James Bond films were all coming out and we considered it you know very sort of romantic and and dangerous to have a real spot Russian spying around. He was a very charming guy. He was kind of assured and um extremely strong and he would do he would do rope climbing contests with my father and push-up contests and he could do the Cossack dancing which was really impressive to all of us and he taught us to do it and he was very he had a great sense of humor and he was filled with laughter and my father and mother enjoyed his company a lot.

They met him originally at the Russian Embassy at a party um but the state department was horrified that we were lighting at KGB Scotland spy into our home um but he during this period my uncle wanted to talk directly to Khrushchev. The CIA didn’t know anything about what was happening in the Kremlin and they always thought the worst. They always told him the worst was happening and he he knew enough about politics didn’t know that it couldn’t be that bad and ultimately Khrushchev sent him the first of these letters hidden in the New York Times through Bolshikoi and these letters and ran the state department.

Both my uncle and Khrushchev realized during this correspondence that they were both surrounded an intelligence apparatus and by military brass who considered War both inevitable and desirable and that if they were going to maintain peace they needed to talk to each other because they could not they could not trust the people around them to give them strong disciplined advice. And at the same time my uncle and Khrushchev installed a hotline which had never existed before. So when I was a boy there was a red phone in the in at Hyannis Port and another one in the White House where we knew that if we picked up that phone we were supposed to stay away from it. If we did because that was the one thing they said “don’t ever touch that phone.”

But we knew if we touched that if we picked up that phone Khrushchev was going to answer and the wires from that phone are still sticking out of the of all of my brother’s house which was at that time was the summer White House. But they knew they had to talk to each other if they were going to save the world. They said — you know that first letter from Khrushchev he said we’re all on an ark. We can’t build another one the Earth is an ark and we need to we need to preserve it and and the question now is are we willing to do anything like that today or are we going to remain stuck in a self-righteous story in which America is categorically good and our opponents are irredeemably evil?

If we remain stuck there so will every other nation. It is not only America that’s falling and falling into this simplistic good guy bad guy thinking. That’s the example we’ve set for everybody in the world. No wonder it’s been replicated everywhere between Israel and Iran between India and Pakistan between Shia and Sunni between Jew and Arab between Hindu and Muslim left and right between pro-life and pro-choice between vax and anti-vax. That’s tribalistic “us versus them” thinking is tearing us apart and it’s and it’s tearing apart our country and it’s tearing apart the world so this these are the wages of war but when we take the first step toward peace we will become once again a true world leader, a moral leader, a moral authority.

In our example it doesn’t take much it’s just the first step and people will start looking at America differently — the way they did when my uncle was President. My uncle, I pointed this out in my announcements speech, my uncle was so determined he told his one of his best friends — Ben Bradley — said to him um what do you want on your as your epithet on your gravestone and he said “he kept the peace” he said and Bradley asked him to explain that and he said the primary job of an American president is to keep the country out of War. That’s what he said entering during his time in the White House he was surrounded by military hawks and his intelligence apparatus ,his military brass, who wanted it, who who were constantly exhorting him to go to war in Laos in Berlin in Cuba in Vietnam and he’d never set a single combat troop abroad during his term in office.

He ultimately they wanted him to send 250,000 combat troops to Vietnam, He ended up sending 16,000 advisors who were not under the rules of engagement allowed to participate in combat. That’s fewer people, fewer men than he sent to get James Meredith with one black man into Ole Miss in the University of Mississippi in Jackson and a month before he died in October of 1963.

He heard that a uh that a Green Beret had died in Vietnam and he asked one of his aides to give him a total casualty list and the aid came back and the casualty list had 75 Americans on it who had died in Vietnam and he said that’s too much we’re not going to have a single more American died. That day he signed National Security order 263 that ordered every troop, every U.S service person home from Vietnam with the first thousand leaving the next month and uh beginning in November and uh and that he died a month later and a week after his dad that order was remanded and President Johnson ended up spending sending 250,000 troops by President Johnson.

President Johnson ended up sending 250,000 troops. Ultimately 560,000. 56 ,00 never came home, including my cousin George Skakel died in the Tet Offensive and we killed a million Vietnamese and um and uh you know we had a we we’ve we’ve then going off on this path with a military industrial complex which President Eisenhower warned about a week before or three days before my uncle took office in the best speech that he ever gave and one of the most important in history where he warned America that if we did not take great pains to avoid it the emerging military industrial complex would devour our democracy.

It would destroy American values from within and my uncle knew that he knew that speech and he spent the three years his thousand days in office fighting against the rise to the military industrial complex. After his death we went down that path that Eisenhower predicted and that’s where we are today and it’s time now to reverse that. It’s time. Thank you [Applause] As I said before, peace comes from a changed attitude. At the bottom of the war mentality at the bottom of the war meant to tell you that draws the world into a drama of enemies and threats and lies lies.

At the base view of human nature when you see humans as fundamentally selfish and a whole nation says fundamentally evil then all you have available to change their behavior it’s threats and bribes. Peace comes from a different place he starts by seeing within others and within ourselves that which is not selfish. But it’s Brave and generous and idealistic and has good intentions and I’m not saying that we should ignore the base elements of human nature or the dangers of the world, but if that’s all that we see and we’re going to be stuck forever in the mentality of war; and that’s where the military-industrial complex wants to keep us, and we will reap forever it’s poisonous fruits.

The chart of course for the future of our nation’s military and foreign policy all return once again to the words of John F Kennedy. He said quote America’s weapons are not provocative they are carefully controlled they are designed to deter and capable of selective use our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility end “the current administration is going to be in power for another year and a half but the danger of reckless escalation and nuclear brinksmanship is real and present.

I therefore call on our present leadership to adopt President Kennedy’s maxims and to start de-escalating right now. I call on them I call on them to fulfill John F Kennedy’s declaration. I call on the military establishment to exercise discipline self-restraint. I call upon the state department to avoid unnecessary irritants and hostile rhetoric and here’s the most important thing of all I call on every American to join in a new peace movement to make your voices heard to reject the insanity of escalation and to celebrate no longer the wartime president and a president who keeps the peace. And what kind of peace do I refer? I’ll end with one more piece of wisdom from my uncle I quote what kind of Peace do we seek not a Pax Americana enforced On The World by American weapons of war, not a piece of the grave, or the security of a slave.

I’m talking about a genuine peace the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living — the kind that enables people and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely appease for all men and women not merely at peace for a hard time but at peace for all time thank you all very much. [Applause] [Applause]