Faced with the great challenge of his time — the thermonuclear menace of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — Jack Kennedy famously laid out the American position: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge — and more.”
That was heady stuff — but exhausting, too, and expensive. Americans tire of heroism pretty quickly. We are the weary kind, and the weariness is thoroughly bipartisan: Kennedy’s determination to fight the Cold War was met with opposition not only from the Left, which was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but also from the Right, with some conservatives of the old school taking to heart Randolph Bourne’s dictum that “war is the health of the state” and believing that what they saw as imperialism abroad was inexorably linked to imperialism at home. And both sides coveted the money that was being spent, calculating that we could fill a lot of potholes in Poughkeepsie for the cost of an aircraft carrier or three. The Walter Mondale Democrats and the Ron Paul Republicans saw eye to eye on that, at least.
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