Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Democratic precandidate for President of the United States made the following remarks before the start of the Humanity for Peace Rally: [video: https://humanityforpeace.net/ from 2:11 to 11:01]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Hi everybody, it’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. here, and I want to thank all of the organizers at Humanity for Peace for putting this event together, and for giving me the opportunity to address you.
My uncle, John F. Kennedy, once told one of his two closest friends, Ben Bradlee, who was the editor of the Washington Post, when Bradlee asked him, what do you want on your gravestone, what’s your epitaph? My uncle told him, “He kept the peace.” And when Bradlee questioned him on that further and pressed him, my uncle Jack said that the primary job of the President of the United States is to keep the country out of war. And he succeeded in doing that during his three years in office. He never sent a combat soldier abroad, who died. He kept the country out of Laos, he kept us out of Cuba on two occasions; he kept us out of Berlin in 1961.
And he kept us out of Vietnam. He sent only 16,000 military advisors there, mainly Green Berets, and on Oct. 22nd, they didn’t have permission to fight, although some of them did. And in October 1962, he learned that one of his Green Berets had died, and he asked his aide to give him a combat casualty list, and the aide came back and said 75 had died so far; he said, that’s too many. And he signed National Security Order 263, ordering all 16,000 troops home, and the first 1,000 coming home beginning at the end of November. And of course, a month after that, right at the end of November, he was killed. And a week later, President Johnson remanded that order. Within a year Johnson had sent the 250,000 troops that the military wanted from the beginning.
My uncle understood one thing about war, and it’s something we need to understand today: Because today we’re closer to a nuclear exchange than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. My uncle understood that, if you want to keep the country out of war, you have to be able to put yourself into the shoes of your adversary. When he came into office, the intelligence agencies and people around him, knew almost nothing about Nikita Khrushchev. President Eisenhower had said that it wouldn’t be a soldier, a President who had started out as a soldier, who would put Americans into World War III, because soldiers knew about war. He was a soldier himself. My uncle had been a soldier, was the only President to win the Purple Heart. And Khrushchev, of course, was a soldier, and had been in the most brutal battle of World War II in Stalingrad.
But the CIA knew almost nothing about him, because there was a mole in Langley and all of the Kremlin officials who had defected to the United States, or who had tried to work as spies for the United States, were immediately detected. So the CIA knew almost nothing about Khrushchev and they assumed that everybody in the Kremlin was a monolith.
My uncle felt disabled by that lack of knowledge. And in 1961, he started out his relationship with Khrushchev on a rocky road. They met in Vienna, and he found Khrushchev was pugnacious and bombastic, and had practically dared my uncle to go to war with him. My uncle quickly understood that he, himself, was surrounded by military warhawks in the intelligence apparatus, in the military brass and the Pentagon, who saw nuclear exchange with Russia as not only unavoidable, but also desirable. When my uncle maintained a proposition to go to war on several occasions, they said that we were going to win that war, because we had more missiles than the Russians, which we do not have today; they have 1,000 more than us. But, his brass told him that there would be only 30 million American casualties and 130 million Russians and that would be victory. And my uncle left that meeting, saying, “and we call ourselves the human race.”
He knew that he had to, in 1961, in August, there was a confrontation at the Berlin Wall, where U.S. tanks were facing down Russian tanks at Checkpoint Charley, and the world was this close to nuclear war at that point. And my uncle made a back-channel cable to Khrushchev, asking him to pull out his tanks. Khrushchev sent a note back to my uncle’s cable, saying “my back is to the wall, I have no place to retreat,” and my uncle realized at that point that Khrushchev was in the same position that he was in: He was also surrounded by military warhawks who were egging for a fight with the United States. And they realized that only the two of them were going to prevent that full-on nuclear exchange. My uncle made a proposition, a promise to him, that if Khrushchev withdrew his tanks, my uncle would follow within a few hours, and they did that. And afterwards they trusted each other, and they realized that they had to communicate directly with each other.
They began a series of 26 letters that they exchanged with each other, highly personal letters that were smuggled by a Soviet GRU spy named Georgi Bolshakov, that end-run their own State Department, their diplomatic corps, the military and intelligence apparatus. So they were talking directly to each other.
They also installed hotlines in Cape Cod, where I live, and those wires are still protruding at the home, the summer lighthouse that my brother owns, and another hotline at the White House, where they could pick up the phone and talk directly to each other.
And that’s more important today than it ever was. They were in a very analogous situation, where we are putting Vladimir Putin in a place where his back is against the wall: And it’s a time more than ever that we need to be talking to each other. We have made no effort to talk to the Soviet—to the Russian leadership, for many, many months, almost a year. And there have been many efforts by the Russian leadership to engage us, and engage Ukraine in peace negotiations, and we have rebuffed those.
In April of 2022, the Russians and—we now know—the Russians and the Ukrainians initialed a peace agreement, that was based on the Minsk Accords, and the Russians were already beginning to withdraw their troops. And yet, we sent, the U.S. White House sent [then-British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson over there to torpedo that deal.
We need to be doing the opposite of that: We need to be talking directly with Vladimir Putin, and all sides and we need to settle this insanity, before we initiate another nuclear exchange that will destroy all of humanity.
I want to thank you for all the work that you’re doing, and I want to congratulate you and send you all my gratitude for making this a priority for all of humanity. Thank you very much.
Mike Billington
EIR
16839 Hill Haven Lane
Hamilton, VA 20158