The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

Jack certainly had no time for the reds. During his first campaign, he said, “The time has come when we must speak plainly on the great issue facing the world today. The issue is Soviet Russia.”43 He saw labor unions as self-serving and infiltrated by communists, and let their members know it in congressional hearings. And in 1954, when a special Senate committee recommended that Joseph McCarthy be condemned for breaking Senate rules, John F. Kennedy was the only Democrat not to vote against him.44 However, perhaps because he was so well traveled, or perhaps because he was Irish, and knew in some very small way what it felt like to come from a people who had been oppressed somewhere, JFK viewed the Third World differently from most of the Washington elites. While so many others saw any deviation from an explicit alliance with the US as communist subversion of the global order, JFK believed that emerging nations were insisting on their right to forge their own path, and that this was entirely understandable.