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will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our
liberties or democratic processes.... We should take nothing for granted.
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of
the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful
methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. ”In
1961, it seemed, Eisenhower was calling for a new global order–one of course
built on American dominance but with a decline in the production of weapons
of mass destruction and a reorientation of society toward more civilian pri-
orities. Such visions, however, would not last long as the incoming president
would have American involved in crises, wars and interventions at various
places in short order–most notably, Cuba, Berlin, and Vietnam. In his inaugu-
ral speech, just three days after Eisenhower’s warnings about the militarization
of American society, the new president drew a line in the sand: “Let every
nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear
any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order
to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge—and
more.” The famous poet Robert Frost had prepared a poem for the inaugural
but could not read it because the sun’s glare was so great, and so from mem-
ory he recited “The Gift Outright,” which would take on great symbolic
power. It was an homage to American imperialism: “Such as we were we gave
ourselves outright/(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)/To the land
vaguely realizing westward/But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced/Such as
she was, such as she would become.” And the Kennedy legacy would be
“many deeds of war”– and more.
In fact, as Kennedy took office, he faced an immediate crisis just south of
Florida, in the small island nation of Cuba. Cuba had, since 1898, been a vir-
tual American economic colony with significant U.S. investment–Americans
owned 80 percent of Cuba’s utilities, 90 percent of its mining, 40 percent of its
sugar, and had a base at Guantanamo, or “Gitmo”– which has again become
infamous as the location for terror suspects to be held in the Bush and Obama
years– and it especially had casinos where tourists could go for entertainment
and gambling [an environment accurately depicted in Godfather, Part II]. But
that all changed on New Year’s Day 1959 when a revolution that had been in
the making for less than a decade overthrew the American client, Fulgencio
Batista, and brought to power Fidel Castro. The U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, Earl
Smith, observed in 1960 that “the United States, until the advent of Castro, was