It’s acutely painful to read Bill Clinton’s long-winded paeans to the triumph of neoliberalism and the dawn of an era that will “reap the benefits of free markets without abandoning the social contract and its concern for the common good,” but that also required seizing “the opportunity to turn back the clock on greenhouse gas emissions so that we can leave a healthy planet to our children.” (That speech, dear reader, was delivered 28 years ago.) John F. Kennedy’s 1963 address, delivered shortly after the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis and two months before his own assassination, celebrated the signing of the first nuclear test-ban treaty and “a pause in the Cold War,” called for an end to apartheid in South Africa and discrimination in the American South, and proposed a joint U.S.-Soviet mission to the moon. As one president told the General Assembly a few years back, the U.N. was a “beautiful constellation of nations, each very special, each very unique, and each shining brightly in its part of the world,” and each person gathered in the auditorium was “the emissary of a distinct culture, a rich history, and a people bound together by ties of memory, tradition and the values that make our homelands like nowhere else on Earth.”
Author: Andrew O'Hehir
Published at: 2025-09-28 10:45:34
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