JFK’s quest for peace | Jeffrey Sachs

Click above for the video 

This interview is six months old but still fascinating. Jeffrey Sachs talking to Chris Hedges, gives a gripping account of the Kennedy-Khrushchev negotiations over the Cuba missile crisis. It’s scary how close we came to total nuclear war and the annihilation of mankind…. As Sachs puts it, we were within seconds of nuclear holocaust. 

That’s why today Putin’s nuke-rattling is so buttock-tightening. A simple mistake; a simple miscalculation…. And Boom. No more single-planet humans, let alone interstellar humans. All that will remain are the cockroaches.

I remember all this in real time. And maybe some of my older Occasional Readers do too.

I was 10 to 12 over the time Sachs is talking about. We’d just arrived in New York City where my Dad was an Australian Representative to the United Nations. Our first digs were nearby the U.N. at 22nd Street West. Which is where we had our first ever television.  It that we’d been too poor to afford a TV: we just  didn’t have TV in Canberra until 2 June 1962. Never mind social media, no broadcast television!

Back to NYC: I remember our apartment. And the grainy black and white TV. A wonder! The I Love Lucy show. Daytime television! 

And then came the Kennedy-Nixon debate. The first ever presidential debate, September 26 1960, and we watched it on our little bulbous TV. The debate was famous not just for being the first. It was later noted that people who listened on radio thought Nixon had won; those who watched on TV thought Kennedy had won. Why the difference? Kennedy, young, handsome, assured; Nixon sweaty with five-o’clock shadow. The beginning of looks over substance politics, Reagan a Hollywood actor, to Trump the game show host. 

A few weeks later at the U.N. Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table and yelled “we will bury you”, meaning the west. So there was no paranoia about communism. They were out to rule the world. I still remember my dad coming home and saying “guess what Krushchev did today?!”

Two years later and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Which I leave to David Sachs to describe in the vid above. Which he does so well. Again, I recall my dad being so worried. I didn’t realise then that he was seeing secret diplomatic cables and the dangerous crisis we were in. 

In short, thanks for the two K’s: Khrushchev and Kennedy. They saved the world. 

ADDED: towards the end Jeffrey Sachs says: “The Democrats are now the party of war; and the Republicans are the party of peace. Amazing!”. He, a lifetime Democrat. Noting the inversion, in our lifetime. Used to be the opposite.