10 JUNE 1963
The Real Jubilee

JFK American University Address:
Calling For An End To The Cold War 		JFK at American U: call to end the Cold War
Fifty years ago President Kennedy gave the commencement address to the graduating class at American University. In his book, The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev, Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins summed up the significance of that remarkable speech: “At American University on June 10, 1963, President Kennedy proposed an end to the Cold War.” Khrushchev called the American University Address “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.” This is the real jubilee of 2013, not 22 November.
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6 June 2013—Edward Snowden: I’m just another guy who sits there, day to day, in the office, watches what’s happening, and goes, “This is something that’s not our place to decide. The public needs to decide whether these [surveillance] programs and policies are right or wrong.” And I’m willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say, “I didn’t change these. I didn’t modify the story. This is the truth. This is what’s happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this.”
     Yeah, I could be, you know, rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me or any of their third-party partners.... And that’s a fear I’ll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be. You can’t come forward against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk, because they’re such powerful adversaries that no one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you, they’ll get you, in time.
We forget ... that violence is so securely founded among us—in war, in forms of land use, in various methods of economic “growth” and “development”—because it is immensely profitable. People do not become wealthy by treating one another or the world kindly and with respect. Do we not need to remember this? Do we have a single eminent leader who would dare to remind us?
—Wendell Berry, “The Commerce of Violence,” The Progressive, June 2013