dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

>>14812896

>my endorsement in 2020

>a State I won by almost 20 points.

>but Louisiana does have a great Senator in John Kennedy.

>>14813385

>The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high

Churchill and the Presidents: John F. Kennedy – Grave and Urgent Times

By FRED GLUECKSTEIN

| June 18, 2021

On 15 July 1960, Senator John Kennedy accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for President at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles. In his speech, Kennedy included words by the statesman and writer he admired most:

The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high, to permit the customary passions of political debate. We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future. As Winston Churchill said on taking officesome twenty years ago: If we open a quarrel between the present and past, we shall be in danger of losing the future.1

As a youngster, John Kennedy had an interest in history and was introduced to Churchill’s writings. In 1932 the American socialite Kay Halle, a Kennedy and Churchill family friend, visited 15-year-old Jack in the hospital. At his bedside was a volume of The World Crisis, Churchill’s memoir of the First World War. Years later, when Life magazine asked then President Kennedy to name his favorite books, Churchill made the list. Kennedy cited WSC’s biography of his ancestor John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough.

Aged 20 in 1937, Kennedy and a friend, Lem Billings, traveled throughout Europe. Fascinated by the dynamics of European politics and the threat of war, Jack returned to London in 1938 to work with his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who had been appointed U.S. Ambassador by President Franklin Roosevelt. In that role Kennedy met many high-level U.S. officials as a courtesy to his father. Of independent mind, the young man developed rather different attitudes toward Appeasement than his father, who saw it as expedient. The younger Kennedy thought it would lead to war.

The storm breaks

On leave from Harvard University to work on his thesis, Kennedy spent most of 1939 in London. When Hitler invaded Poland in September, Britain and France declared war. On September 3rd, together with his parents, brother Joe and sister Kathleen, Jack was seated in the gallery at Parliament. They listened intently to the Prime Minister, and others including Churchill. The latter spoke briefly, but his words were galvanizing:

In this solemn hour it is a consolation to recall and to dwell upon are efforts for peace. All have been ill-starred, but all have been faithful and sincere…. Outside the storms of war may blow and the lands may be lashed with the fury of its gales. But in our own hearts this Sunday morning there is peace….

This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred to man…. Surely and confidently we look forward to the day when our liberties and rights will be restored to us, and when we shall be able to share them with the peoples to whom such blessings are unknown.

Churchill’s powerful oratory “left an indelible impression on Jack,” wrote Robert Dallek.2 Mesmerized by his words, Kennedy, approached Arthur Krock, a family friend and New York Times columnist. Together they turned Jack’s senior thesis, “Appeasement at Munich,” into a best-seller titled Why England Slept. When it was published in 1940, Kennedy explained that the title was inspired by Churchill’s 1938 speech volume While England Slept. It was not his last Churchill title inspiration. Kennedy’s 1956 book Profiles in Courage was considered by some along the lines of Churchill’s Great Contemporaries.