America’s 35th president fought tirelessly against communism from the earliest days of his political career. When President Trump reposted a video featuring President John F. Kennedy warning about subversion in America, he renewed focus on a threat we have long ignored at our peril.
Spotlighting JFK’s admonition is part of the administration’s all-out attack on foreign subversion—an effort that has no presidential precedent. Its designation of Antifa and certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as terrorist organizations was a first. The revocation of visas for foreign subversives, if carried out on a larger scale, will be unmatched in scope.
Kennedy understood that peace through strength was broader than deploying military power or international diplomacy. But he never had the chance to deliver that warning. During the July 16 Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and other officials made clear that the Trump administration would use every tool of statecraft to dismantle decades-old subversive networks operating in the United States.
This effort has also refocused attention on an older—but no less potent—enemy: communist subversion. The State Department published a 100-page report “Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism,” detailing how Cuban communists have worked for decades to overthrow the United States. It names names, past and present.
Cuba brings us back to President Kennedy. Despite his failed effort to remove Fidel Castro’s communist regime, Kennedy frequently warned that communists abused constitutional protections and infiltrated U.S. institutions—the news media, labor unions, academia, and government itself. JFK’s words still apply today to surviving Soviet spin-offs like the Cuban regime, critical theory, critical race theory, cultural Marxism, and democratic socialism.
As a new senator at the height of Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigative hearings, Kennedy warned in successive speeches that the greatest foreign threat would rely on “the weapons of subversion, economic disintegration, and guerrilla warfare to accomplish our destruction, rather than the direct assault of an all-out war.” Kennedy warned every possible audience—schoolteachers, university professors, community leaders, newspaper editors, women’s clubs, union leaders, military personnel, veterans, business groups, political fundraisers, civil liberties leaders, church groups, and the general public—about the communist threat right up to his last day.
Kennedy recognized the danger posed by American traitors who sought to corrode Americans’ belief in their country and the principles of their nation’s founding. He praised some American labor unions for ridding themselves of communist subversion. Defending President Eisenhower’s counter-subversion approach in 1957, Kennedy chided his fractured Republican opponents: “found that their chief concern was with questions of disloyalty and subversion—not within the Federal Government but within the Republican Party.”
That was just three weeks to the day after Joe McCarthy’s death. JFK never publicly criticized McCarthy, who had been a welcome guest at his father’s Cape Cod compound. “Half my people in Massachusetts look on McCarthy as a hero,” he once said. Kennedy repeatedly warned of what he called “nonmilitary avenues of Soviet advance”: “I fear our emphasis on the dangers of missile attacks may cause us to forget. For their thrust is more subtle.”
Among those threats were “economic and political penetration, intimidation, and subversion.” He noted in 1958: “There is little value in rushing new billions in defense expenditures to fight total wars… if we are unprepared to prevent continued Soviet advances through subversion and intimidation.” As he prepared his presidential run, Kennedy mused that the public had been so subjected to subversive attacks they no longer shared civic principles once united them.
On the campaign trail in 1960, Kennedy raised subversion before audiences asked about it. As the Democratic nominee, he became more critical of the Eisenhower administration for prioritizing massive military buildups over countering communist ideological conquests made easier by America’s weakness in counter-subversion. In his last weeks of campaigning, Kennedy called the communist threat more challenging than dealing with Nazis: “I must say that the problems we will face in the next 10 years are far more complex than any that Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman faced.”
He warned: “What has happened in the last two years in the field of foreign policy indicates a whole technique of subversion and infiltration, which will be extremely hard to counter.” Kennedy hammered away at the threat during his fourth debate with Vice President Richard M. Nixon—a striking contrast given Nixon’s role on the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Kennedy vowed “to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas” in his inaugural address—the same speech where he declared, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” He warned in a 1961 emergency address to Congress that “nuclear weapons cannot prevent subversion.”
On the day of his assassination in Dallas, President Kennedy was ready once again to warn about subversion. The president’s remarks as prepared read: “Kennedy understood that peace through strength was broader than deploying military power or international diplomacy.” But he never had the chance to deliver that warning.
