Kenny, uh, said, uh, ask not what you think your country can do for you.

Ask what you can do for your country.

Um, they were thin young men, as opposed to portly, gray haired man who had been running the country and America was at its zenith.

We're the most powerful country economically, politically, culturally in the world.

And we could make the world over in our own image, and we could fix it was wrong with us.

Uh, we were young, we were innocent, and therefore we were very urgent.

The forties played into it because we won the war, and, uh, all the losers and all our allies had been devastated by the war, and we hadn't.

So our economy was unbelievably powerful.

And, um, we had won the war for democracy.

So we felt good about ourselves, and standard of living was going up.

The inflation was low.

Unemployment was low.

Um, suburbs were filling up.

Um, and in the fifties, there was a consolidation of American corporate power hit, uh, and it just pumped stuff into the society.

So we had so much material well being way had television for the first time we had everything.

And, um, that gave us a sense that everything was possible, even doing good.

We didn't have doubts about our wisdom about our goodness, about America's intents and purposes in the world.

We didn't have doubts.

Now we have doubts.

Now we're older and we're wiser.

We didn't have doubts about what American power could achieve.

We didn't have doubts.

Um, hold.

That changed after the sixties, Um, and the Kennedys were young and vigorous and intelligent and glamorous, and they had the Harvard people around them, and they had the glamour from Hollywood around him.

So America was ascending in always.

So it was.

Everything was possible.

Things were changing and they were changing for the good on.

And you thought that if you hurled your body and your mind and your instincts against the problem, the problem would give there was reason to get up and expend all your energy.

It was a fabulous time.

My views of the world began to be formed once I left my home in a segregated school one room schoolhouse.

Uh, my father was buried in a segregated cemetery in the early forties, so there was no way for me to think ever that things were gonna be perfect.

Um, I began to understand that the Kennedys were not everything than I had hoped they would be very soon, because I soon came to conclude that the Justice Department with Robert Kennedy was running in, which ran civil rights waas uh, a pretty paternalistic operation and that it was condescending toward black people.

It's really drove me crazy.

Bunch of corporate lawyers, you know, young corporate lawyers or law professors.

I mean, Nick Katz and back condescending to me about about race.

I mean, I'm still angry about it.

Uh, John Douglas.

Very nice man, but what does he know?

I mean, his father was a senator, and his brother runs the piston coal company that's knocking off the UMW.

Mean, he didn't naturally learn these things, and he didn't learn him as well as he thought.

Uh, Ramsey.

Clark, who is one of my dearest friends, was there wasn't very happy with him.

Nolan and Dolan and all those guys.

So I knew very soon and the Kennedys message waas that we only one it by a razor thin margin.

And you have to be patient.

What We've been hearing patients since before the Constitutional Convention in 17 87.

And so at that moment, I knew the Kennedys weren't all they were cracked up to be.

No, there was another giant problem.

And I guess I began fully to understand that in December, late December 1962 when I, uh, was on a round the world trip with my boss and we stopped in Hawaii and the U.

S Commander of the Pacific Forces CINC Pac most powerful military men in the world, all the U.

S.

Forces in Asia We're on his command and he did a big briefing for us.

It is headquarters in Hollywood.

Hey, said that the Vietnam thing was just a small blip, and it would be over sri by mid early or mid 65.

Um, subsequently, we after stopped in a few other countries.

We got to Vietnam and, um, I talk to people, and, uh, I talk to young people, people my age in the military in a i.

D and state departments in the C I.

A.

And I concluded that David Halberstam's reports in The New York Times, which were far more pessimistic than the cable traffic we were getting back in Washington.

We're right much more right than were the reports, uh, that we're getting from the embassy.

And I concluded on that trip in January 63 that, um, we couldn't succeed there.

When I came back and I tried to make that argument, I was shunned.

Shut it aside because off this can do attitude, in part and in part because the racism there, a lot of people who just couldn't believe that a little touch of American power couldn't blow these little yellow people away.

So that's when I knew that the sixties was gonna be more trouble than I'd hoped.