Good morning, everyone. I'm Taigen Leighton, teacher at Ancient Dragon Zen Gate. I'm very happy to have a number of people who this morning sat for the first time or sat here for the first time. And I've often been asked how I came to Zen practice. And at different times, I've given various answers, all of them, you know, part of the truth. But when I started thinking about today's talk on this occasion, a couple of days ago was the 50th anniversary of John Kennedy's murder, I realized that as good an answer as any to that question was that I came to Zen because of John Kennedy's murder. So, Looking around, I can see that many of you remember that day, but quite a few of you don't.

[01:07]

I was 13 years old myself, a couple of months short of 14. And it was a pretty world-shaking event, you know, as 9-11 was. I guess for people now in their mid or late 20s of the same age, but maybe more so. Growing up in the 50s, well, at least to me, things seemed like everything was kind of, you know, the world was kind of stable, you know. Growing up in a middle class, white American, you know, secular context. The thought of an American president being killed, that wasn't being murdered, being assassinated, that just wasn't imaginable.

[02:15]

It didn't happen. So, a few months after that event, I had my first major religious conversion. major conversion experience. And I have remembered that event since and mentioned it in connection with what led me eventually to Zen Buddhist practice. But I somehow never connected it with Kennedy's. There were other things that were going on. But it was just a few months later, and I realize now that it had a lot to do with Kennedy's murder. So what happened on that occasion, I was, I think, lying on grass somewhere and I was looking up at the sky at night and had this realization, and it was that, at least to me, it was clear that the sky was infinite.

[03:21]

And if that was the case in space, then it had to be so in time, and then suddenly, The idea of a creator deity just didn't make sense. And I became an atheist. I had been raised Jewish. I had had a bar mitzvah about 10 months before. We weren't Orthodox. It was kind of in a secular family. But still, I hadn't really somehow that I hadn't thought about that in what we would now call spiritual terms. But still, that experience is with me. I don't, I can't believe in the Western Abrahamic creator deity. I have a great deal of respect for people who do believe that. And I've been very involved in interfaith dialogue of various kinds. But anyway, that experience, And again, it was a few months after everything was shaken by John Kennedy's murder.

[04:33]

That led directly to years of deep questioning and various other conversions in the years after. Seven years later, I had the opportunity to spend a few months going around to Japanese Buddhist temples and being in Kyoto and Nara and experiencing Japanese Buddhist statues and art and gardens and had a great impact on me. And 11 years after Kennedy's killing, I began formal everyday Zazen practice, which I've continued in Soto Zen. So I want to talk today about John Kennedy and his murder. And come back to how that relates still to my Zen practice.

[05:43]

So since his murder, thanks to what I would call mainstream media propaganda, Kennedy has been seen mainly as a womanizer. And, you know, that's true. Although, you know, I have to note that 1963 was a while before the feminist revolution and all the good changes that that brought. But in the early 60s, you know, my preteen years, John Kennedy was the spirit of youth, of change and hope and fresh vision. He started the Peace Corps. And I guess I knew people who were prepared, who were thinking of going into the Peace Corps. And actually, I've met over the years a number of people who had been in the Peace Corps.

[06:48]

and really find people who were transformed by that experience. Anyway, the spirit of John Kennedy was kind of like, you know, the spirit of hope and change that Obama expressed when he first campaigned and was first elected. So I need to say something about, you know, the disclaimer about our practice in Zazen talking about this kind of thing, we sit upright and face the reality of our own body and minds. That's this practice we've been doing of Zazen. And it's so simple, and it's also not easy, you know, to actually just be present and face the thoughts and feelings and everything, you know, all of the realities of our world. So we're connected to our world. The things that happen in this body and mind are connected to our world.

[07:54]

And we have to face reality in many dimensions. And now we're facing, in our world today, facing climate change and the dangers this week from Fukushima. this severe peril from nuclear radiation, from them trying to extract fuel rods from the meltdown there. Maybe that's even more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis that John Kennedy faced the year before he was killed. And I'll come back to it, but John and his brother Bobby managed to extricate us peacefully from that, together with Khrushchev. despite many on the Joint Chiefs of Staff actively wanting nuclear war. Anyway, in the recent months, it's been really striking as this 50th anniversary is approached that there's been this kind of frenzy on the mainstream corporate media about how there couldn't possibly have been a conspiracy.

[08:58]

And of course, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. To even mention any kind of conspiracy is considered some kind of proof of stupidity or psychosis or something. But of course, those things do happen going back to Julius Caesar. It happens. So I'm not advocating any particular conspiracy theory. I don't know what happened in Dallas. I don't know. And maybe we'll never know exactly. So I'm not agnostic about any particular theory. But for people who were paying attention back then, it was kind of absurd what the Warren Commission claimed, that Harvey Oswald acted alone. And in all the talk about that this week, I haven't heard, and I haven't paid attention to so much. There's been a lot of stuff in the media. But just to note that the House Select Committee on Assassination, the official House of Representatives committee that was established in 1976 finally reported officially in 1978 that Kennedy's killing was the result of conspiracy.

[10:14]

And so was Dr. King's murder. So that record is, official record is there. So I wanted to talk a little bit about, well, about who John F. Kennedy was and his courage and things I've forgotten about who John F. Kennedy was or maybe never completely knew. And I want to speak from this really actually important book, JFK and the Unspeakable, by James Douglas. There's a copy of it in our library. I don't think it's out now. But James Douglas is a Catholic worker. He was a follower and correspondent with Thomas Merton. And so there's a kind of spiritual perspective about how he tells the story, but it's extremely well documented. There's pages and pages and pages of it.

[11:18]

Very well documented. And it's interesting that Thomas Merton also corresponded with Ethel Kennedy and had some impact on the Kennedys. Anyway. But I'd forgotten in part and all of the things about Kennedy said in the mainstream media since, and actually some of it I hadn't known, about how courageous John Kennedy was. And I think it's worthy to be recounted. Who he was and what he was trying to do when he was killed. So I think it's worth remembering now, 50 years after. This book includes way, way, way too much detail to, you know, even to include in one talk, so I really recommend it. But one context for talking about all of this is President Dwight Eisenhower, the great general from World War II, who was the Republican president before John Kennedy was president, warned in his farewell address in January of 61,

[12:31]

about the military-industrial complex. And actually, originally he was going to talk about the military-industrial-congressional complex. He decided to take the last part out. But he said that now there's a conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry. The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, he said, is felt in every city, every state, house, every office of the federal government. He cautioned, quote, our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved, so is the very structure of our society and the councils of government. We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex, the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist," unquote. And the point of his warning was not merely that a weapons industry exists, but that, and we see this now, that was 1961, and this is 2013.

[13:44]

just the fact that the current domination over the American economy and government by arms corporations and the overwhelming lobbying of legislators warned against by Eisenhower, you know, we have a situation where policy is made at the service of military rather than vice versa. And all congressional districts are impacted by potential base closures dependent on military spending and our missile economy. So I have to say that I respect soldiers very much. And I respect the military also. I think one of the things that's interesting is that the Pentagon is the part of our government that's actually talking about climate change and how we have to respond to climate change. But also, there's been this corruption of our government Weapons Corporations, as of January 2011, the Boston Globe reported that despite apparent clear conflict of interest from 2004 to 2008, 80% of retiring three or four-star generals quickly took jobs as consultants or executives at weapons corporations.

[15:04]

Anyway, so going back to Kennedy, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Both Kennedy and Khrushchev were horrified at how close we had come to nuclear war. There's a movie, 13 Days, with Kevin Costner that really details this really well, what really happened then. And actually, there's been a lot of material more recently. Robert McNamara, before he died, wrote about this. There was a conference of the people involved from both Russia and the United States. And we came really, really close to passing a clear war. And the hardliners in the military in both the United States and Russia really wanted war. So Kennedy started out and campaigned against Nixon as a cold warrior. But he changed. And after the Cold War, I mean after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he decided he had to end the Cold War.

[16:09]

So all of this is really, really well documented in this book, JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglas. Great, a lot of detailed documentation. And after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so it was just a year between October 62 and he was killed in November 63, but Kennedy and Khrushchev communicated secretly, extensively, secretly from their own government, hardline militarists, about how to end the Cold War. So Khrushchev was also totally appalled by what had almost happened. They were even planning a joint mission to the moon. One of the things that Kennedy had talked about was the space race and the mission to the moon, and he had kind of started that. So a lot of this, so Kennedy was actually determined to have both an end to the Cold War and nuclear disarmament.

[17:12]

And a lot of it was detailed in a speech she gave, a commencement speech she gave at American University in Washington on June 10, 1963. So I just want to read a few passages from that speech because they're just, you know, it just gives us a different picture of who this man was. So this is, these are from President Kennedy's words. Today, the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely, the acquisition of such idle stockpiles, which can only destroy and never create, is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace. I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational and irrational men. And I'm not going to try and do the Boston accent that he gave this in. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as traumatic as the pursuit of war.

[18:16]

And frequently, the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears, but we have no more urgent task. And then he said, we must reexamine our own attitudes as individuals and as a nation, for our attitude is essential as theirs. This strikes me as something that's so related to our practice, to examine our own attitudes. And he was talking about this to the American people. He said later in the speech, we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be, so we are both, both nations, both United States and Soviet Union, are devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons. said, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so.

[19:34]

This was back when there were active nuclear arms tests going on, both sides. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it. And I'll note that Secretary of State Kerry yesterday managed to initiate a treaty with Iran, which is a great accomplishment, a starting treaty about taking on their nuclear arms. So that's another good thing. Anyway, again, further, just finally, a few more things from the speech at American University that President Kennedy gave. It is the responsibility of the executive branch at all levels of government, local, state, and national to provide and protect that freedom, the freedom for all of our citizens by all means within our authority. He quotes scripture, when a man's way pleases the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.

[20:42]

And is not peace in the last analysis basically a matter of human rights, the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation, the right to breathe air as nature provided it, the right of future generations to a healthy existence. Then he says, the United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough, more than enough, of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it, but we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. You are not helpless before the task or hopeless of its success. Confident in our faith, we must labor on, not toward a strategy of annihilation, but toward a strategy of peace." Anyway, this speech that he gave in June of 63, not so long before he was killed,

[21:43]

And he went on to campaign around the country for peace. And actually, according to the polls, he was persuading the American people. It was a strong peace movement. He was very persuasive. Also, Kennedy had tried not to get involved in Vietnam. And again, this is all very, very, very, very thoroughly documented in this book. But his orders to try and change the acceleration of the war in Vietnam were subverted directly by the military and even by his own State Department. And Kennedy was planning to withdraw completely from Vietnam when he returned from Dallas. Kennedy was also trying to make peace with Castro. There was a French journalist who was acting secretly, directly as an intermediary for Kennedy who was meeting with Fidel Castro when they heard that Kennedy was killed.

[22:46]

And Castro wrote, this changes everything. So, Douglass also in the book goes into great detail about what happened in Dallas and all the many complicated issues. As the House Select Committee on Assassination also said that it wasn't the Russian or Cuban government that was involved in the assassination. Some people who were in some ways connected with the intelligence and military powers he had antagonized seemed to have been connected. One of the things that happened is right after he was assassinated was that the war was, well, Lyndon Johnson immediately became president and he, so, The day after Kennedy was killed, Johnson met with Ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, who was one of the people who blocked Kennedy's orders about decelerating the war in Vietnam.

[23:56]

And Johnson told Lodge, I'm not going to lose Vietnam. I'm not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went. Johnston also, one month after that, on Christmas Eve of 63, told the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just let me get elected and then you can have your war in Vietnam. So he campaigned in 64 for peace, but he actually was committed to the Vietnam War. So many of you remember the Vietnam War. So just to return to my own personal story, the Vietnam War was central in my own life. I did not go to Vietnam, and I wasn't gonna go to Vietnam, but that amongst my own conversions after atheism was to the peace movement, and that through various steps led directly to my

[25:03]

Buddhist practice, and Vietnam was central to our country's history since Kennedy. Anyway, some people would argue with the conclusions in Douglas' book. Sure, so you don't have to agree with everything I'm saying now, but I would encourage you to look at this book. It's just incredibly well-documented. Just a few other things, and I hope we have some time for discussion or comments. We'll see. Just to note that we know now, which we didn't know then, that Kennedy lived in chronic, severe back pain. He had diseases. Just in terms of Kennedy's courage. And he knew, he had this feeling that he was going to be killed. There's this very moving scene in the book. There was this poem, Rendezvous with Death, that was from a soldier in World War I, I think.

[26:07]

Yeah, he was killed in World War I. And he had Jackie and even his daughter, Caroline, memorize it. It's an amazing scene where Caroline suddenly comes into a meeting of the National Security Council. And Douglass makes this, well, you know, what's important is that, about Kennedy, acknowledging all his flaws, which, you know, he was a human being, he had flaws, is that in the face of death he stood up for peace. He opposed war, he opposed the Cold War, and he opposed nuclear weapons. So, you know, such courage is possible even for a politician. he chose dialogue and diplomacy with the so-called enemy rather than endless war.

[27:14]

Douglass makes this interesting comparison to later assassinations, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Bobby Kennedy. So all four of them had the sense that they were, you know, that they were, that they faced death. And all four of them had this transformation in the last year or less of their life. It's very interesting. Douglass talks about plausible deniability as the kind of denial that was instituted actually going back to the use of atom bomb in Hiroshima during World War II. and the denial of reality of what the nuclear war was, so that some of the Joint Chiefs of Staff anyway were really, in the Cuban Missile Crisis and after, were really eager to have a nuclear war.

[28:28]

They thought they could win a nuclear war. But John Kennedy turned to nuclear war and worked together with Pushkin. And today, of course, we see this denial on so many levels in terms of the dangers of climate change. Even in the face of these climate-intensified storms, the devastation in the Philippines, I've been watching the coverage of the tornadoes a week ago today in Illinois. Some towns were just leveled and so there's all these devastating photos of what happened and not once is the word climate change used. And then of course Fukushima and what's going on there. three nuclear meltdowns.

[29:33]

They don't know where the cores of the nuclear reactors were and they're this week apparently trying to decommission that and it's a very dangerous process that is being done by the private Tokyo utility company. So I want to read a little bit more from Douglas and then come back to what this has to do with our practice. So, again, Douglass is, you know, he's a Catholic worker, from the Dorothy Day tradition, a spiritual guy who got involved in doing all this research about Kennedy. He talks about Kennedy, he talks about King, and also He says he attended the only trial ever held for King's murder, which took place in Memphis, only a few blocks from the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was killed.

[30:43]

In a wrongful death lawsuit initiated by the King family, 70 witnesses testified over a six-week period. They described a sophisticated government plot that involved the FBI, the CIA, the Memphis police, mafia intermediaries, and an Army Special Forces sniper team. The twelve jurors, six black and six white, returned after two and one half hours of deliberation with the verdict that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. So, that's the only legal record of that. Of course, the House Special Commission on Assassinations agreed. And he says that that opened his eyes to parallel questions in the murders of Kennedy, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy. And just a little bit more, he talks about

[31:49]

He talks about John Kennedy and nuclear war and what happened. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK had to confront the unspeakable in the form of total nuclear war. At the height of that terrifying conflict, he felt the situation spiraling out of control, especially because of the pressures and provocations of his generals. At a moment when the world was falling into darkness, Kennedy did what his generals thought was unforgivable. He not only rejected their pressures for war, even worse, the president reached out to the enemy for help. That could be considered treason, he thought. So what happened? And again, this movie, 13 Days, goes into it. They threw back channels, and Bobby Kennedy was very involved in this. They made a secret deal with Khrushchev that Khrushchev would withdraw the missiles from Cuba in return for which unofficially, Kennedy said he would withdraw American missiles from Turkey just as close to Russia as Cuba missiles were to us.

[33:02]

It talks about an interview with Khrushchev's son where he confirmed that his father had finally decided not long before President Kennedy's death to accept Kennedy's proposal that the United States the Soviet Union go to the moon together. There's a lot here that I want to read. Because of the turn away from nuclear war by John and Bobby Kennedy and Khrushchev, today we are still living I'm struggling for peace on this earth. Hope is a lie. We still have a chance. So this is Douglass' words.

[34:07]

From a Buddhist standpoint, it was enlightenment of a cosmic kind. Others might call it a divine miracle. In terms of the Hebrew scriptures, it was the teshuvah, turning or repentance. Readers of the Christian gospels can say that Kennedy and Khrushchev We're only doing what Jesus said, love your enemies. That would be love as Gandhi understood it, love as the other side of truth, a respect and understanding of our opponents that goes far enough to integrate their truth into our own. In the last few months of Kennedy's life, he and Cruz Schiffer walking that extra mile where which was beginning to see the other's truth. Anyways, he says,

[35:09]

So, you know, as I said in the beginning, directly, you know, because of the experience I had and the questioning that I started myself a few months after Kennedy was killed, that led me, you know, through various steps. At that time, I didn't know about There was no Buddhist practice in America then. There was no such thing as Zen teachers. There were a few books about Buddhist philosophy, I suppose. But anyway, that's what led me to this. And I would say that this practice of Zazen that we've been doing gives us all this, the courage, can give us all the courage to work and speak out for peace. in our own hearts and minds, with the people in our lives and communities, and in our world. So this facing the realities in our own lives and in the world, what Kennedy was willing to do with Khrushchev, to see the other's point of view, to see beyond this idea of enemies, to see the other's perspective,

[36:37]

It starts with the work we do by ourselves on our own cushions or chairs, just to be able to sit still and face our own inner conflicts, to be at peace with that. And for Kennedy facing death, part of our practice is that we all face death. We are willing to admit that our life is limited. We're willing to face our own limitations, our own particular situation. And, you know, we have to start with ourselves. But also, we also see that the world around us includes tremendous denial and sadness and distress, and we don't have to be fooled by it. we can face the realities of the world.

[37:47]

And it takes some work to do that, to look and see what's really going on. But to be able to sit upright and breathe and just relax into, okay, here I am, this is the situation I'm in, and to face that, and to face what's going on in our world is no small thing. John Kennedy happened to have the karma or whatever, the situation to be in that position of immense power and to be at that pivotal point in history. And he got there because he was a Cold Warrior and whatever, and Bobby Kennedy too. So just to say about, there's a lot more to say about this transformation that happened in the last year, Dr. King going from being a civil rights leader to opposing the war and speaking out about the economy and about human rights.

[38:52]

And Malcolm X going beyond, speaking only for his race, but from his trip to Mecca, you know, we don't know what would have happened if these people had lived. But I imagine even that if Malcolm had lived, he might have transformed world Islam, let Ah, race relations here. He was that brilliant and had that capacity. And Bobby Kennedy started out as working for Joe McCarthy and a real tough guy. But in that last half year or more, he clearly, campaigning with Cesar Chavez and facing the poverty of America, he clearly saw something. Something happened. Anyway, and in our own practices, in our own lives, in our own situations, this practice has the possibility to open us up like that.

[39:56]

So, I bow to John Kennedy.

[40:00]

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