“If the self-discipline of the free cannot match the iron discipline of the mailed fist—in economic, political, scientific and all the other kinds of struggles as well as the military—then the peril to freedom will continue to rise.”
John F. Kennedy
Address Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors (Primary source)
This speech was delivered in the immediate aftermath of the failed CIA-backed invasion of Cuba by a force of Cuban exiles. Rather than acknowledging U.S. responsibility, Kennedy framed the operation publicly as a struggle by Cuban patriots against Fidel Castro’s communist regime, stressing that American armed forces had not intervened.
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