The Kennedy era through the looking glass
Second floor – The United States in the World
“We all are mortal”: this lapidary ending to what is probably the most beautiful sentence in JFK’s speeches (which is why we put it on display at the entrance of this exhibition) is the most eloquent proof of the unease in his relationship with international politics, where the art of rhetoric is brought to its highest peak: not just a mere technique of communication, but a form of ethical thought, a search for a genuine dialogue amongst all human beings; paradoxically, also in the encounter with a crowd. It is therefore particularly tragic that John Kennedy, like Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy along the same lines, would find his death precisely during his encounter with a crowd.
There is no evidence of a Rossellini project about JFK, but it is likely that the idea had crossed his mind while working on the chapters of his cinematic encyclopedia in the years he was shooting at Rice University for his project of a film about scientific research; at that time, however, his son Renzo had persuaded him to tackle another, somehow related endeavor: La forza e la ragione (Power and Reason) the brilliant filmed interview with Salvador Allende, soon to become the victim of a coup d’état with the direct involvement of CIA, by then outside the control of the US presidency. Another film, however, directed by Rossellini in that period on behalf of the United Nations, A Question of People, was bound to resume the relationship with the people of the world. In JFK’s view, this was the real horizon within which the United States had the duty to exercise its leadership role.
In this exhibition, we will find some of the geopolitical issues where JFK modified his initial viewpoint about the United States as a world power. The excellent maps of a journal, Limes, emphasize in particular the division between Europe and the Iron Curtain, and its current consequences with the war in Ukraine. By all means, JFK was very sympathetic to the situation of Berlin – then divided by a wall – as a geographic symbol in which it was necessary to reiterate some fundamental values, while persisting in the search for peaceful solutions. It is hard to overlook the fact that, in 1952, he had travelled to Europe and visited Trieste and Gorizia, two borderline cities that are emotionally very close to us.
One can nevertheless notice that JFK sought to go beyond the Atlantic alliance and the Asian equivalent to NATO, the SEATO organization, by trying to achieve a deeper understanding of the specificities of each country: even his pragmatic line of thought about Vietnam (as defined by Emile de Antonio) is a starting point for such approach, despite the fact that JFK wasn’t quick to understand that his chosen ally – Diem, a Catholic – tended to exacerbate conflicts not only towards the North but also at home, against the Buddhist population, rather seeing him operate as a mediator.
In Vietnam, now free from the French colonial rule, but also in Africa, where new independent states are born in the 1960s, JFK’s attitude is leaning towards the search for mediations which he won’t be always able to find. He often stresses the urgency to divert possible allies from the dynamism of the Soviet Union; this antagonism, however, is the source – for example – of a real attention towards what were then called the “Arab revolutions”; quite probably, a theme that has become, up to the present day, a chronically dramatic issue – such as the conflict between Israel and Palestine – could have been the bearer of different developments, if the choice of alliances had not pushed the existing antagonisms to their extremes.
The story isn’t different from what actually happened, if not as a literary genre. By the same token, capturing the moments in which it was still calling into question the proper directions to follow may allow us to understand that what happened was not inevitable. This is one of the reasons why we will keep looking at the Kennedy presidency as something that directly concerns us.
Odore di terra romanza
Laura Canali, cartografa di Limes – Rivista Italiana di geopolitica, 2024
“Una geopoesia non è come una mappa di Limes che spiega dinamiche e segue un ragionamento geopolitico, una geopoesia è come un richiamo, una sollecitazione della memoria, uno stimolo a vedere il mondo attraverso i sentimenti. Vorrebbe essere una porta magica da attraversare, una suggestione, un sentiero appena intravisto.“
Laura Canali era consapevole del fatto che condensare in un’unica opera quel “compendio dell’universo” di nievana memoria che è il Friuli Venezia Giulia non sarebbe stata una sfida facile ma sapeva anche che avrebbe dovuto abbandonare i confini del “suo” mondo per perdersi e ritrovarsi completamente nella terra che si accingeva a esplorare. E così ha fatto. Ha intrapreso un viaggio “avventuroso e intimo” tra i paesaggi montani di Forni di Sopra, per poi scendere verso Gemona, la pianura friulana, raggiungendo Aquileia.
In questi territori il terremoto del 1976 echeggia nella memoria collettiva, mentre le cicatrici delle guerre del passato si fondono con la bellezza selvaggia dei fiumi e delle montagne. Dolore e speranza danno vita a un dialogo tra l’umanità e la natura aspra delle Alpi. Il Tagliamento, con il suo corso irregolare, si è rivelato un simbolo potente di vita e di cambiamento, una guida attraverso le profondità della storia e della geografia.
“C’è come qualcosa che scorre, come il Tagliamento, ma è dentro le persone. Lo senti, lo percepisci a ogni incontro. Ogni essere umano deve conservare e consegnare la storia agli altri, non solo ai figli di questa terra ma a tutti e anche a me.
Questa è la linea che ho scelto per la mia geopoesia, un’anima forte, una colonna vertebrale fatta di ciottoli bianchi.“
I segni dei conflitti passati si stagliano anche sui confini di Gorizia e Nova Gorica, testimoni mutevoli ora di divisione, ora di riunificazione. Nei vicoli stretti e nei cimiteri antichi risuonano le voci degli eroi, dei patrioti, dei vinti e dei liberati in un abbraccio senza tempo.
“Camminare in Friuli Venezia Giulia, incontrare le persone, a caso, ho sentito che volevano comunicare, raccontare, nessuno sarebbe andato via, nessuna smania di fare, andare, ma stare condividendo.
I gesti, le abitudini, il racconto, le persone normali, questo è il messaggio potente che il Friuli Venezia Giulia ci trasmette sobriamente, senza strillare, solo a chi si avvicina, solo a chi vuole vedere oltre, solo a chi vuole ascoltare.“
E così, attraverso le voci udite, il colore delle chiese, i profili dei monti e le geometrie delle città ha iniziato a prendere forma questa mappa geopoetica la quale, intrecciando versi e paesaggi e unendo il passato al presente, la terra al cielo, l’amore alla memoria ha donato all’autrice uno sguardo nuovo su un mondo in costante mutamento.
The Nuclear Threat
The nuclear theme highlights the fact that, with the JFK presidency, all the unresolved issues in the history that preceded it are emerging once again. In the years between the end of World War II and its aftermath, the topic of the nuclear war is – metaphorically speaking – definitely conflagrating. Similarly, it is only in the 1960s that Hannah Arendt formulates her concept of the “banality of evil”, but it seems that her theory explains not just the persecution of the Jews but also some fortunate dismissals of the nuclear option. Insofar as the USSR does not have this weapon (thanks to the choices made by pacifist scientists and other idealistic personalities sentenced to death, such as the Rosenbergs), a sense of euphoric power is clearly transpiring. The figure of president Truman is especially important for the unflinching resolution of his conscience. Truman’s passion for playing the piano (he would continue to do so at Kennedy’s White House) reveals once again how the same hobby, as practiced by McCarey, was somehow its opposite, the awareness that serenity is always surrounded by the off-screen ghosts of threat and death, and that their world is not so different from the one we now live in.
The purported certainty that ownership of the atomic weapon by both antagonists was a guarantee of security will be repeatedly challenged by history. The most acute instance of this is the Cuban crisis, which many players (beginning with the CIA) would have preferred to push to its endgame (“how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”, in Kubrick’s words), nevertheless clashed with a “human factor” of different orientation, both with Kennedy and Khrushchev (there was an appealing journalistic symmetry of the latter’s name with the other K).
Soy Cuba
It may well be that JFK was trying to appease all sides, but it is true that JFK took one step at the time (“pragmatically”, as – once again – de Antonio would have said) when facing a situation already in place because of earlier short-sighted political decisions. Seen today, Person to Person (Murrow and Schaffner, 1959), in which the CBS studio sets up a live broadcast in Fidel Castro’s home, gives us the certainty that he was seeking a peaceful coexistence with the US, and was even ruling out the establishment of a Communist regime. A few months later, when meeting vice-president Nixon in the course of his only visit to the United States, Fidel found himself with no other option than taking another embrace – with the Soviet Union. The American government therefore acted in a direction that was precisely the opposite to the search for mediations that would be undertaken by JFK. There was, of course, a certain degree of tactics in Castro’s speech; by his side there was Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who believed in a permanent world revolution, and actually remembered – in his beautiful last speech in Santiago Alvarez’s Hasta la victoria siempre – that Kennedy assured him before his death that there would not have been another Cuba, that is, another Latin American country no longer allied with the US. In fact, the “Monroe Doctrine” is transformed under JFK into the strategy of the Alliance for Progress, to be offered to Latin Americans as a democratic “third way” between Communism and/or friendly dictatorial regimes, where the US were tolerating those very violations of democracy they were accusing their adversaries to perpetrate.
Once again, JFK’s choices appear to be more interrogative than conclusive.
We decided to exhibit the remarkable film treatment with Omar Sharif in the role of Guevara, in the only American movie about the antagonist made shortly after the assassination: a film directed by the talented Richard Fleischer, who is able to offer an unbiased view of the subject but is ultimately forced to comply with the official position of the US (to the point that he felt compelled to claim that “the CIA had nothing to do with it”).
Heart of Darkness
One of the lesser known episodes of the JFK presidency is his attitude towards the new countries that emerged from the process of African decolonization. Kennedy was probably the only American president who interiorized the refusal of European colonial empires that was typical of Woodrow Wilson, and was bound to be supported, under the FDR presidencies, by Henry A. Wallace (a luckless personality of American history, appropriately treated with attention by Oliver Stone). Kennedy appears to be leaning towards treating the newborn countries as equals; with him, there is no doubt that the movement of non-aligned countries so disparaged by the US power would have been handled with equanimity.
In the context of this attitude, Kennedy’s stance towards the Congo crisis is noted for its highest moral values. Eisenhower was still president, but Kennedy had been elected, and was waiting for the swearing ceremony to be held on January 20, 1961. Patrice Lumumba, formerly a fighter for Congo’s independence from Belgium and now a democratically elected prime minister, was arrested by military opponents and secessionists from Katanga, maneuvered by Belgium with the complicity of CIA. On January 17, 1961, Lumumba and two of his ministers are killed after appalling tortures. This happened three days before the presidential appointment of JFK, who unsuccessfully tried to save the life of Congo’s legitimate leader through the US embassy, at a time when the United States were regarding Lumumba as a friend of the Soviet Union, therefore a Communist.
We have chosen to highlight the importance of Kennedy’s choice, which he made when he was not yet president but was already guided by a moral imperative, in addition to the rules of legitimacy of interlocutors, also at the international level.
It is therefore appropriate that Conrad’s “heart of darkness”, focused on Congo’s river, became a metaphor of the Vietnam war in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
Up to the present day, the Democratic Republic of Congo (reborn from the ashes of the dictatorial Zaire of Mobutu, who guided Lumumba’s killing from behind the scenes as Compaoré later did with Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso) appears to be overwhelmed by abuses to a full-fledged democracy.
It must be acknowledged that Italian cinema grasped the dramatic significance of the events in Congo: not only through the cynicism of Africa addio by Jacopetti e Prosperi, but also with the sensibility of a small film from the same period like Congo vivo (Giuseppe Bennati, 1962), starring Jean Seberg, and especially with Valerio Zurlini’s masterpiece Seduto alla sua destra (1968), an evangelic reading of Lumumba’s sacrifice.
Why Vietnam?
Vietnamese leader Ho Chi-min, seen here also in a compelling image from his youth, was above all a patriot who fought for the independence from the French empire. He decided to contact US president Wilson, believing as he was in the birth of a new world after World War I; we now know, however, that his messages were never delivered to Wilson, and that he was therefore bound to be perceived by the US as one of the many enemies abandoned to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.
Kennedy’s attitude towards Vietnam is certainly marked by many hesitations; from his viewpoint, however, North Vietnam was an enemy country, to be counteracted through the support to the friendly state of the South. He probably believed, like many others, that Vietnam was another Korea, where there was no choice but to protect a border against the North Vietnam’s determination to unify the country.
Kennedy is therefore convinced that a South Vietnamese, Diem, is the right man to be allied with. The two families become friends, also in the name of their shared Catholicism.
He eventually became aware that the Diems had been corrupted by power, but he saw no alternative. On November 2nd, 1963, a few days before his death, he was shocked by the coup with which the Diem brothers were wiped out through violence.
The assassinations of Lumumba (a few days before Kennedy’s presidential inauguration) and of the Diem brothers shortly before his own death further convinced him of two basic principles: the priority of a legalitarian approach as the best guarantee of a democratic culture, and the outright rejection of violence; the latter is, first of all, a moral choice, a gesture of humanitarian piety.
We will never know what Kennedy would have done in Vietnam, had he been in Johnson’s position. It is almost certain, however, that he would have tried to understand what was happening, before deciding that the US had no choice other than to intervene in a forceful manner.
Why Vietnam? is, instead, the question asked by Johnson in a 1965 propaganda documentary, addressing “my fellow Americans” (conversely, it is difficult to find films where Johnson speaks to non-Americans). The documentary comes close to being a slip of the mind: it recalls the commitments with the allies “of three American presidents” (Ike, JFK, LBJ), but the actions of the one who was in between are never mentioned; instead, the film invokes a parallel with the Munich pact that did not prevent Hitler from going ahead with his plan. A French omnibus film such as Loin du Vietnam would contradict in 1967 this comparison, arguing that a better term of reference for Vietnam would be the Spanish civil war. An American patriot like Emile de Antonio will go as far as to compare in 1968 the Vietnam war with the American war of independence, as well as the Civil War.
The Torn Curtain
In the aftermath of the defeat of the totalitarian dream of unifying the world under the Nazi flag, the idea of a divided world had become dominant – after the brief parenthesis of the collaboration among winners of different political beliefs – in the entire post-war period. For many, on both sides of the fence, this looked like a reassuring idea, oblivious to what was obviously contradicting it. Even the United States were deceiving themselves with this representation of reality, which was portraying it as a showcase of the “good guys”. JFK’s political culture does not contradict such idea; there is no doubt that some of its axioms, such as the distance of the American spirit from Communism, were taken for granted.
It is nevertheless surprising how JFK would adopt a skewed perspective in order to interpret the facts. When he was very young, before World War II, he had tried to look at the world from the UK’s viewpoint.
Judging from the witnesses of the period, his activity as a senator was not particularly brilliant. But then, maybe he was already seeing the US president as the true meaning to be given to America; that figure was operating from an international perspective, perceived as the only one within which America, too, could be seen within an appropriate framework, in a sense that was opposite to the one expressed by Theodor Roosevelt, according to whom America itself was a framework for the whole world.
When JFK delivered his famous Berlin speech, that “Ich bin ein Berliner” is not just a rhetorical gimmick: it is a way to put oneself in other people’s clothes. On other occasions, he was seeking Jackie’s support for his elocutions in Spanish or Polish; maybe, more of them will be found in other languages.
Kennedy’s speech in Berlin is evidently based on bipolarism and anticommunism. Parallel to that speech, however, there were his personal contacts with the Soviet prime minister and his representatives; similarly, parallel to his supportive speech to the anti-Castro exiles, there were other openings to dialogue. It is true that all politicians do this, something that may be defined as lying. Who knows why, but with JFK this looks like a different signal, a shifting of perspective adopted in order to choose the right framing.
There are many films about Berlin; many of them are excellent. None of them, however, seems more appropriate than the one made by Giorgio Bianchi, a perfect coda to the theme discussed here. Federico Fellini should be credited for having included Totò e Peppino divisi a Berlino among his ten favorite films. Even today, those images are far more effective than those seen in many fiction films on which they are based; that wall that suddenly appears on the screen (thanks to the genius of Giorgio Giovannini, art director for Mario Bava) is the most fitting image of that “installation” called the Berlin Wall. Its demolition in 1989 already looks here like a fait accompli.
The exhibition continues with the photographs of JFK’s visit to Trieste and Gorizia in 1952, where he seems to look – as he did in his trips to England and Asia – for the meaning of what was happening, in two cities deeply affected by the notion of “border”.
In his televised report, shown ahead of the marathon-like broadcast on JFK’s visit to Italy, Ruggero Orlando explains with great insight the contradiction inherent to the concept of frontier in the Italian and English languages, in which he finds instead a new horizon.
Kennedy Night Mov(i)es
Italy 1963-1998, 349′
The television coverage of John F. Kennedy’s trip to Italy in 1963, found and edited by Ciro Giorgini for the late night program Fuori orario (1998), revised and reissued in 2023 by Paolo Luciani.
The Italian national television network, RAI, had provided coverage of JFK’s entire trip, from the initial stop in Rome to the final visit to Naples, during which he met president Antonio Segni and other Italian politicians, as well as the newly elected Pope Paul VI. As it was customary at the time, the films were shot and preserved on film after having been used for live broadcasts, and especially in the editing of the televised news (such practice is now rarely followed in television archives). A great researcher and curator of television programs (and the author of some documentaries, as the program about John Ford’s Ireland), Ciro Giorgini had found in the 1990s some raw television footage, including full coverage of Paul VI’s visit to India and the Holy Land, and Kennedy’s trip to Italy. In each instance, he opted for the most respectful approach, that is, to preserve the raw footage as such, including those empty stretches of time where “nothing happens” and the camera wanders on exteriors or interiors while waiting for the featured guest. When seen today, these long pauses in the action reveal themselves as particularly fascinating. Giorgini added a report from the same period by Ruggero Orlando (to be shown as a sort of prologue), one of the best summaries of Kennedy’s presidency up to that moment.
This exhibition presents the complete version of the edition that was recently broadcast; for technical reasons, it is divided in two parts, corresponding to the morning and afternoon opening hours of the show. We gratefully acknowledge Fuori orario and Teche RAI for their collaboration.
Italy and the Reception of JFK’s Books
In addition to the document about the trip to Italy and its ancillary photographic documentation, also pertaining to the meetings of US Presidents and their delegates with the Popes (including the meeting between Robert Kennedy and John XXIII in February 1962), the exhibition explores a theme that was never tackled before, providing ample evidence of how the personality of JFK and his presidency had been interpreted in our country.
We present here all the Italian editions from the 1960s of JFK’s books, as well as a book about his father Joseph, plus a posthumous anthology of Kennedy’s speeches.
Surprisingly enough, all the four volumes published during JFK’s presidency (to be precise, the first came out when he still was a candidate, another one soon after his death) were distributed by the Edizioni del Borghese, a publisher close to the extreme right, notable for the care in the typographic design of its book. The company was established by Leo Longanesi, who wrote screenplays for Mario Camerini, and directed an unfinished but noteworthy film. In the 1930s he founded one of the most innovative periodicals of its time, Omnibus, unwelcome to the Fascist regime and swiftly suppressed by it; he then created book series for the publishing company Rizzoli, with his own dust jackets and graphic designs, then for his own company, Longanesi, later abandoned to join the periodical Il Borghese and its eponymous publishing house. Longanesi had the foresight to publish Buzzati’s Il deserto dei tartari and Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere; at the Edizioni del Borghese, he distinguished himself for his unorthodox choices, such as the publication of complete stage plays by Aldo De Benedetti, a writer and playwright who was marginalized by the racial laws of the period.
The attention of the Edizioni del Borghese towards JFK and the Kennedy family is noteworthy indeed: in addition to the book about JFK’s father Joseph, the company published in 1960 – for the first time in Italy – an excellent translation by Henry Furst under the title Ritratti del coraggio, with an appealing dust jacket designed by Longanesi himself, as well as a preface “extorted” from the former Italian president Luigi Einaudi (later excluded from the second edition). 1964 saw the publication of Why England Slept in its first Italian edition. To summarize the point, both volumes written by Kennedy during his lifetime arrived in Italy through a right-wing publisher: in a striking move, on the dust jacket’s inner flap of the first edition of Ritratti, the author is presented as a “Catholic candidate to the presidency of the United States”, therefore against JFK’s actual stance during his electoral campaign (“I am a Democrat candidate to the presidency, and a Catholic in my private life”).
The Edizioni del Borghese’s attention towards Kennedy is due to the publishing house’s flexible editorial policies, but also and especially to an admiration towards Kennedy’s father. Interestingly enough, the revival of Kennedy’s figure in the following years was championed by the left, especially by the daily newspaper L’Unità, edited by Walter Veltroni (which also reissued Jim Garrison’s book), and with the JFK anthology La nuova frontiera, distributed in 1997 as part of the series “I grandi discordi” published by Manifestolibri.
A Note on the Documentation about JFK and Trieste
An extensive body of photographic documents about JFK’s visits to our region is available at the Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte del Comune in Trieste, which we gratefully acknowledge for having made them available for this show. Their main focus is JFK’s stopover in Trieste, and his meetings with local politicians. Additional documents have been retrieved from the JFK Library.
The correspondence with Mario Franzil, born in Udine in 1909, is of particular interest. At the time of JFK’s trip to Italy, Franzil was the leader of the Christian Democrat group in the city council of Trieste.
He would later be elected major of Trieste, a position he held from 1958 to 1966, succeeding his conservative colleague Gianni Bartoli and inaugurating the era of Morotean majority (after party leader Aldo Moro) among the local Christian Democrats, a harbinger of the center-left alliances later formed at the national level in a city still torn by ethnic and political diatribes. The time of JFK’s leadership, characterized by a relatively non-interventionist role of the US government in Italy’s parliamentary coalitions, is therefore intimately linked to the more extended period of time during which Franzil was Trieste’s mayor. It is worth noting that when visiting Trieste, congressman Kennedy had him as his main interlocutor, an indirect but tangible proof that the US presidency enabled JFK to fully express his longtime political experience.
L’Esigenza “T”
The peace treaty signed with Yugoslavia at the end of World War II had determined the creation of a “Free Territory of Trieste” divided in two areas: Zone A, which included Duino, Aurisina, Trieste, and Muggia, was administered by the anglo-american forces; conversely, Zone B (Capodistria, Pirano, Isola, Umago, Buie e Cittanova) was under Yugoslavia’s direct control. In 1948, France, the United States and Great Britain had agreed to a “Three-pronged Statement” according to which the entire territory was to be given back to Italy.
In October 1953, the Anglo-American allies announced the withdrawal of their soldiers from Zone A and their replacement with a contingent from the Italian army. Marshal Tito, whose goal was the annexation of both zones, reacted by claiming that the arrival of the Italian forces at the border amounted to an outright aggression, to which he would respond with the occupation of Trieste.
The event marked the beginning of the so-called “T Requirement” (“T” standing for Trieste). On August 29, 1953, the Chief of Staff of the Italian army received an order from the Minister of Defense to take preventive action at the Yugoslavian border by deploying the 5th Army Corps, already standing in the area.
A further step was taken in mid-October with the deployment of the entire 5th Army Corps along the whole border (specifically, the Alpine brigades “Julia”′ e “Cadore”, the Infantry divisions “Mantova” and “Folgore”, and the Armored division “Ariete”). The Infantry division “Cremona” and the Alpine brigade “Tridentina” were called for extra support, in addition to other regiments and artillery units, as well as the intelligence and communications personnel of the 5th Army Corps, with all the logistical resources necessary to secure the provisions for the troops. Additionally, over 12,000 men of the reserve troops – the first section of the 1931 contingent – were recalled to duty, supplemented by specialized staff from professional units and schools from the entire peninsula.
The measures also included the creation of fortification buildings; the use of Pioneer Arrest units for the “interruption” operations and laying of the minefields, as well as the activation of the troops from position to garrison for the permanent fortification recently built on the river Tagliamento line.
At the same time, a so-called “Delta Plan” was set up, with the objective of implementing a surprise action to guarantee the occupation of Zone A in the event that Tito proceeded with the annexation of Zone B. To this end, the deployment of the “Trieste” Division (based in Emilia-Romagna) was envisaged, with extra support to be provided by four infantry battalions from southern Italy. The “T Requirement” ended in early December 1953; by the 20th of that month, all the troops had returned to their original locations.
A Space Odyssey
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
When JFK becomes president, he must prove to be able to keep one of the promises he had made during the electoral campaign, that is, to counteract the images conveyed by the propaganda of the period, in which the Soviet Union was winning the so-called “space race”. At the time, it was of course stressed that this advantage had been acquired without following the rules of communication in the free world – where the space missions were announced ahead of time, with the possibility of failure – while “the Russians” were announcing them only when they had been successful.
A film like La rabbia, with its two parts by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giovannino Guareschi in direct antagonism to each other, in many respects prisoner of the contradictions of the 1950s even though released only in 1963, appears today as a powerful work precisely in spite of the ideological dogmas of their authors. Pasolini’s episode, notwithstanding its highlights of the sections featuring John XXIII and Marilyn Monroe, flounders precisely in its humanistic portrait of the Soviet space missions. Guareschi’s treatment of Kennedy is lackluster to say the least (Pasolini, of course, only deals with Eisenhower), as well as sterile in its colonial nostalgia, but is at his best in the attack on the Soviet experiments on animals, even though there are vague allusions to the poor dog Laika and to other probable unknown soldiers in the socialist conquest of space.
On a final note, it must be acknowledged that John Kennedy – as stressed by the rebaptizing of Cape Canaveral with his name – did the right things in order to win the space race against the Soviets. The images shown in our exhibition, with their sci-fi colors that have become so real, underscore this with a proper aesthetic fascination. While the costs of the space research were bound to undermine the Soviet leadership in this field (most of all, one should pay tribute to Amadeo Bordiga, who poked fun at the rape of Earth’s crust as the only dimension of Communism), the Americans will be first to set foot on the Moon.
Leaving aside the sporting aspect of this competitiveness, JFK’s action had an additional merit: he refuted the idea of space as a territory for nuclear competition. According to some, this attitude was bound to earn him some deadly enemies.