He saved humanity: The better way to remember JFK

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, a current political campaign reminded me that giving and receiving thanks can occasionally depend upon world-altering acts of courage, defiance and instinct.

That political campaign is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s now-independent run for president. Kennedy currently has the highest favorability rating among the field of 2024 presidential candidates in a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll.

Around the Thanksgiving holiday and for people of a certain age, such as myself, a Kennedy running for president will always evoke memories of President John F. Kennedy and the day he was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. That day was especially memorable — and traumatizing — for eight-year-old me because, after being let out of school early with the news of the assassination, I walked home to find my mother sitting crying in a chair on the sidewalk, among all our meager belongings, after our family had been evicted from our apartment just two hours before.

Amazingly, when I ran to her and asked her why she was crying, I learned it was not because of the cruelty of the eviction but rather because her “hero” JFK had just been taken from her and the world. As I sat with her in that chair trying to comfort her, my young mind could not comprehend my mother prioritizing that over our shared family humiliation.

But with adulthood came enlightenment.

This time of the year should not be remembered for the day Kennedy’s life was taken, but rather for the time he literally saved humanity from nuclear annihilation.

On Oct. 16, 1962, President Kennedy was presented with irrefutable proof that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba along with 28 long-range bombers. In July, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had reached a secret agreement with Cuban premier Fidel Castro to place the nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter another “Bay of Pigs”–style invasion attempt.

Aside from Castro’s needs, the act of placing the missiles 90 miles off the U.S. coast made sense from Khrushchev’s perspective. The Soviet Union, after all, was surrounded by U.S. nuclear missiles in immediate proximity to its borders. 

Shockingly, the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff was calling for a full-out preemptive nuclear attack on Cuba. President Kennedy not only found the idea repulsive and blood-chilling, but in direct contradiction to American values. At the height of the crisis, Kennedy was still able to joke to Special Assistant Kenny O’Donnell, “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we … do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong.” 

How right the young president was proven. In 1997, the Russians revealed that a number of their missiles in Cuba had already been armed with nuclear warheads. Worse than that, Soviet leadership had authorized individual missile battery commanders to fire at will toward the United States if attacked.

Rather than risk nuclear obliteration, Kennedy chose to dial down the red-hot rhetoric by instead going on national television on October 22 to announce that America was imposing “a strict quarantine of all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba.”

While much saner, it was a strategy still fraught with great risk. Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev were dancing the nuclear tango alone. Both had hardliners screaming at them to do the unthinkable. If Kennedy gave in to the Joint Chiefs and bombed Cuba, Khrushchev would have been forced to at least overrun West Berlin, or worse, launch a nuclear strike at the American homeland.

As the horror played out, something quite extraordinary happened. As described by our State Department: “The dramatic crisis was also characterized by the fact that it was primarily played out at the White House and the Kremlin level with relatively little input from the respective bureaucracies typically involved in the foreign policy process.”

President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy knew that if there was any hope of averting nuclear war, they would have to cut out the crazed middlemen on both sides and deal directly with the Soviet leader.

As the demands from the White House and the Kremlin flew back and forth that “the Soviets dismantle the missile bases already under construction or completed, and return all offensive weapons to the U.S.S.R.,” that the U.S. “promise not to invade Cuba,” that the U.S. “immediately remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey,” that the Soviets “call back their ships on the way to Cuba” the fuse burned closer to nuclear war.

As it did, Kennedy took the biggest gamble of his life. He acted upon a rumor that Khrushchev wanted to backchannel a deal. His instinct told him it was the only way out, as bombers and missiles were readied to end the world. 

Kennedy then doubled-down on the gamble by ignoring a second “demand” from Khrushchev — clearly pushed by his generals — and only responding to the first demand. It was a brilliant tactic that ultimately allowed both countries to save face.

Today, almost no one can understand how close the world came to losing hundreds of millions of lives. 

But rather than gloat, Kennedy further shocked the diplomatic world by offering a remarkable olive branch. During his speech at American University on June 10, 1963, Kennedy asked all Americans to pause and imagine they were Russians. Instead of vilifying and demonizing them, the President sought to humanize them:

“Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union … Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war.”

Sixty years after we lost him, we should not remember President Kennedy for his death, but rather for resisting suicidal pressure, trusting his instincts and taking a gamble to save humanity.

That is a Thanksgiving to immortalize. 

Douglas MacKinnon, a political and communications consultant, was a writer in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon during the last three years of the Bush administration.