Consider carefully this except from "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters,", James W Douglass, especially in light of everything we're currently dealing with here. JFK was a hero in my book!
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At the July 20, 1961, NSC meeting, General Hickey, chairman of the "Net Evaluation Subcommittee" of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented a plan for a nuclear surprise attack on the Soviet Union "in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions." Other presenters of the preemptive strike plan included General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA director Allen Dulles. Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s military aide, Howard Burris, wrote a memorandum on the meeting for Johnson, who was not present.
According to the Burris memorandum, President Kennedy raised a series of questions in response to the first-strike presentation he heard. He asked about a preemptive attack’s likely damage to the U.S.S.R., its impact if launched in 1962, and how long U.S. citizens would have to remain in fallout shelters following such an attack. While the Burris memorandum is valuable in its revelation of the first-strike agenda, it does not mention Kennedy’s ultimate disgust with the entire process. We know that fact first from its disclosure in an oral history by Roswell Gilpatric, JFK’s Deputy Secretary of Defense. Gilpatric described the meeting’s abrupt conclusion: "Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it."
Kennedy’s disgusted reaction to this National Security Council meeting was also recorded in books written by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., McGeorge Bundy, and Dean Rusk. None of them, however, identified the first-strike focus of the meeting that prompted the disgust. They describe the meeting in only the most general terms as "the Net Evaluation, an annual doomsday briefing analyzing the chances of nuclear war" (Schlesinger) or "a formal briefing on the net assessment of a general nuclear war between the two superpowers" (Bundy). However, as much as JFK was appalled by a general nuclear war, his walkout was in response to a more specific evil in his own ranks: U.S. military and CIA leaders were enlisting his support for a plan to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.
Kennedy didn’t just walk out. He also said what he thought of the entire proceeding. As he led Rusk back to the Oval Office, with what Rusk described as "a strange look on his face," Kennedy turned and said to his Secretary of State, "And we call ourselves the human race."
"And we call ourselves the human race" was directed especially at the "we," himself included, who had been seriously discussing a preemptive nuclear strike on millions of other humans, at least until he was so revolted by the process that he had to leave the room. His walkout could not have pleased his military and CIA chiefs.
Nevertheless, the judgment Kennedy made, "And we call ourselves the human race," continued to apply to himself, as he became increasingly ensnared in his national security state’s nuclear war plans.