PC: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
Less than five months after delivering this speech, he was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, his own future foreshortened in a way the line itself could not have anticipated. Because it doesn’t yet have a precedent to point to, the problem he was naming is treating them as the only inputs worth consulting, which quietly forecloses the possibility of adapting to something that hasn’t happened yet, simply. Kennedy would not live to see how that future actually unfolded. The words retain their original meaning about nations and history, but they’ve also taken on an unavoidable, sadder resonance for a man whose own remaining time turned out to be so brief, and whose calls to look toward what was still ahead were cut off by an event nobody could have planned for. The useful move here is noticing when a decision is being made almost entirely by looking backwards, at precedent, at how things have always been done, at old resentments still being carried forward, without much real attention paid to where the situation is actually heading. History and precedent remain genuinely useful, and Kennedy was not arguing otherwise.
Kennedy delivered this line on June 25, 1963, in a speech at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, addressing a Europe still reorganising itself less than two decades after the Second World War, at a moment when old hostilities and new alliances were both very much unsettled. Because they are easy, but because they are hard, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not. That question won’t guarantee anyone gets the future right.
The Frankfurt address was part of a European tour focused on strengthening the Atlantic partnership between the United States and a reconstituted, increasingly unified Western Europe, delivered just one day before Kennedy’s far more famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in West Berlin, a trip widely seen as a high point of his presidency’s foreign policy. Two nations, or two people, can face the same shifting circumstances around them and respond in completely different ways. One keeps orienting entirely around what has already happened, treating old grievances, old habits, and familiar arrangements as the fixed points everything else must be measured against. The other accepts that the ground itself is moving, and organises its attention around where things are headed rather than only where they have been. He was not offering comfort about how manageable change would be. He was stating, plainly, that refusing to look ahead was itself a kind of blindness, regardless of how carefully someone had studied everything behind them. ” Change is the law of life . And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future. What gives this line extra weight, in hindsight, is the moment in Kennedy’s own life and presidency it came from. The speech called on European nations to move past the divisions and grievances of the previous decades and build institutions and alliances suited to a changing world, rather than remaining anchored to the past. A fair test, before committing to a plan built mostly on precedent, is to ask what the situation will most likely look like in five or ten years, and whether the current plan still makes sense against that picture rather than only against the past. It usually keeps a plan from being built entirely out of a past that may no longer apply, and forces at least some attention onto the direction things are actually moving rather than only where they have already been. “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. “Things do not happen. Things are made to happen. Catch the latest World News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.