“Three days before [JFK] took office, President Eisenhower gave what I
think we should today regard as the most important speech in American
history.
He warned Americans against the domination of this emerging
military-industrial complex that would turn us into an imperium abroad
and a security state at home.
[JFK] takes office three days later, and then his 1,000 days in
office are just a constant fistfight with the military-industrial
complex to keep the country out of war.
They tried to get him to go into Laos, he refused.
They tried to get him to go into Cuba in ‘61 and again in ‘62 during
the missile crisis, and he wouldn’t. They tried to get him to go into
Berlin in ‘62, and he wouldn’t. They tried to get him to go into
Vietnam… and he said it can’t be our fight.
In October 1963 … [JFK] signed National Security Order 263 ordering all military personnel out of Vietnam.
Thirty days after he signed that order, he was murdered. And a week
after that, President Johnson remanded the order and then sent 250,000
troops in.
My father ran against the war in ‘68. He wins the California primary,
meaning he’s on his way to the White House, and he’s shot that night.
Martin Luther King had become a peace activist two months before he was
shot.
These traumas—my uncle’s death, my father, King’s death, the Vietnam
War itself, 9/11, and Covid—pushed us a little farther down that road
that Eisenhower warned us against.
Part of unraveling that and going back to our original idealism …
means going back and looking at the original trauma and exposing what
actually happened to my uncle.”
