“Another Type of Warfare”

On 6 June 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy (JFK) gave the commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, New York. Just nine months earlier, on 12 October 1961, JFK had visited Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he observed Special Warfare demonstrations near McKellar’s Pond by Special Forces (SF) soldiers wearing their newly sanctioned green berets.1 This visit was followed by a letter from the White House to the Army in April 1962, in which JFK wrote, “‘The green beret’ is … a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom.”2 The President’s speech to the West Point Class of 1962 reiterated his view that there were more suitable ways to addressing Communist-inspired “wars of national liberation” than with large-scale conventional warfare or nuclear retaliation. The U.S. Army’s leading unconventional warfare experts, Special Forces, were central to his security strategy.

On Wednesday morning, 6 June 1962, on the anniversary of the 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy (D-Day), the President landed aboard a Sikorsky S-61 helicopter onto The Plain (parade ground) at West Point. Followed by his Military Aide, General (GEN) Chester V. Clifton, Kennedy walked down the stairs onto the field and stood for a 21-gun salute and honors by the USMA Band. There, he was joined by Color Guard cadets; the Secretary of the Army, Elvis J. Stahr, Jr.; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, GEN Lyman L. Lemnitzer; Chief of Staff of the United States Army, GEN George H. Decker; and Superintendent of the USMA and future senior commander in Vietnam, Major General (MG) William C. Westmoreland.3

Accompanied by Westmoreland and escorted by honor guard commander, Cadet Captain Paul J. Kirkegaard, JFK proceeded to review the honor guard; greet other military leaders; pay his respects to the elderly MG (retired) Henry Clay Hodges, Jr., West Point Class of 1881; and meet three cadets, Peter J. Oldfield, David G. Binney, and Kevin G. Renaghan, whom he had nominated to the Academy during his time as a U.S. Senator. Kennedy and Westmoreland then loaded into the back seat of the presidential Lincoln Continental convertible to make the half-mile trip to Gillis Field House, where the graduation ceremony was to take place.4

The presidential entourage proceeded to the packed arena, and commencement was soon underway. Following the invocation by Chaplain Theodore C. Speers and MG Westmoreland’s introductory remarks, the Combined Chapel Choirs sang the West Point hymn, “The Corps.” The Superintendent then returned to the microphone to introduce the President as the keynote speaker.5 Originally drafted by White House Special Counsel and speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, and with handwritten edits by JFK himself, the speech began at 10:01 am and lasted just over seventeen minutes.6 His overarching message was that the world was constantly changing; that some of the challenges facing the nation had historic precedents, while others were entirely unique; and that, as part of the larger profession of arms, the graduates must be prepared, adaptable, and constantly learning in order to meet them.

The highlight for U.S. Army Special Warfare, and SF in particular, came at about seven minutes into his remarks. According to the Commander-in-Chief:

To cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you; you may hold a position of command with our special forces, forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional, forces which are growing in number and importance and significance, for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the “nuclear age,” or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation. Korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the Second World War. Men have fought and died in Malaya, in Greece, in the Philippines, in Algeria, and Cuba and Cyprus, and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese peninsula. No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate. This is another type of warfare, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins, war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called “wars of liberation,” to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

But I have spoken thus far only of the military challenges which your education must prepare you for. The nonmilitary problems which you will face will also be most demanding, diplomatic, political, and economic. In the years ahead, some of you will serve as advisers to foreign aid missions or even to foreign governments. Some will negotiate terms of a cease-fire with broad political as well as military ramifications. Some of you will go to the far corners of the earth, and to the far reaches of space. Some of you will sit in the highest councils of the Pentagon. Others will hold delicate command posts which are international in character. Still others will advise on plans to abolish arms instead of using them to abolish others. Whatever your position, the scope of your decisions will not be confined to the traditional tenets of military competence and training.

You will need to know and understand not only the foreign policy of the United States but the foreign policy of all countries scattered around the world who 20 years ago were the most distant names to us. You will need to give orders in different tongues and read maps by different systems. You will be involved in economic judgments which most economists would hesitate to make. At what point, for example, does military aid become burdensome to a country and make its freedom endangered rather than helping to secure it. To what extent can the gold and dollar cost of our overseas deployments be offset by foreign procurement? Or at what stage can a new weapons system be considered sufficiently advanced to justify large dollar appropriations?

In many countries, your posture and performance will provide the local population with the only evidence of what our country is really like. In other countries, your military mission, its advice and action, will play a key role in determining whether those people will remain free. You will need to understand the importance of military power and also the limits of military power, to decide what arms should be used to fight and when they should be used to prevent a fight, to determine what represents our vital interests and what interests are only marginal.

Above all, you will have a responsibility to deter war as well as to fight it. For the basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible of a final military solution. While we will long require the services and admire the dedication and commitment of the fighting men of this country, neither our strategy nor our psychology as a nation, and certainly not our economy, must become permanently dependent upon an ever-increasing military establishment.

Our forces, therefore, must fulfill a broader role as a complement to our diplomacy, as an arm of our diplomacy, as a deterrent to our adversaries, and as a symbol to our allies of our determination to support them.

These words captured the tone of the U.S. commitment to, and SF-led advisory efforts in, Southeast Asia and elsewhere across the globe in the 1960s.

After Kennedy’s speech and gifting of a class ring, Kennedy personally awarded diplomas to the top 30 Distinguished Cadets, culminating with Cadet John H. Fagan, Jr., first in his class of 598. The pressures of his office forced JFK to depart the ceremony before completion. As Kennedy and his party exited Gillis Field House, the USMA band played Ruffles and Flourishes and “Hail to the Chief.”10 He bade farewell to Westmoreland and departed in the presidential limousine.11 The President’s time at West Point entered the pages of history.