Kennedy spoke often in these absolutist, apocalyptic terms; he had done so in his inaugural when he asked Americans to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship,” and all the rest. Vigilantism of some sort was perhaps an understandable result. Kennedy’s rhetoric now haunted him. Eisenhower’s farewell address had been prophetic: a permanent sense of Cold War emergency was indeed giving birth to “a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties” to a citizenry wracked with “imbalance and frustration.”
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