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In the spirit of history that so moves him, Kennedy last week, on the 105th anniversary of Woodrow Wilson's birth, hailed the 28th U.S. President as the "shaper of the first working plan for international cooperation among all peoples of the world. 'What we seek,' Wilson said, 'is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.' Every subsequent effort to create a stable world order has gone back for inspiration to his efforts and has owed much to his vision." The Wilson papers now being prepared for publication, said Kennedy, will serve as a reminder that "the twentieth century has not been lacking in the highest quality of leadership."
To that quality of leadership John Kennedy aspires with all the intense ambition that he brought to winning the presidency. "Before my term has ended," he said in his State of the Union message last January, "we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure." In the years since Wilson, Americans and their Presidents have vanquished many threats from those who would abolish the "consent of the governed." But the test that faces the youngest elected and the most vigorous President of the 20th century — and all those who live under his leadership—is far greater: to meet and battle, in a time of great national peril, the marauding forces of Communism on every front in every part of the world. In his first year as President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy showed qualities that have made him a promising leader in that battle. Those same qualities, if developed further, may yet make him a great President.
* Richard Nixon has said: "If I had been responsible for failing to make a critical decision on the Cuban business which would have brought victory, I would have been impeached."