The following translation is that of a 1960 profile of then-candidate John F. Kennedy, drafted by the Soviet intelligence organs to ensure the political leadership of the USSR was kept abreast of the man who would soon become President of the United States. While it’s no secret that intelligence agencies across the world compile psychological profiles of various world leaders – presumably to understand what makes them tick, but most certainly to study ways to use the information for purposes of propaganda or manipulation – it is not often that we see these documents come to light.
Unfortunately, we do not have access to the entire document. We have pages 1, 7, and 8, which focus briefly on Kennedy’s biography and, to greater depth, his foreign policy stance. The unknown author(s) stress Kennedy’s interest in nuclear disarmament, as well as his contradictory approach on various elements of foreign policy.
ДЖОН ФИТЦДЖЕРАЛЬД КЕННЕДИ
(Jon Fitzgerald Kennedy)
/ Political Profile /
John F. Kennedy was born on 29 May 1917 in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, into a rich family of Irish descent.
Kennedy received secondary education in private schools. Upon completing high school in 1935, he studied in England in the London School of Economics, and later spent some time at Princeton University (USA), from which he transferred to Harvard University (USA), where he graduated with distinction in 1940 with a political science major. That same year, he attended a course of lectures at the Faculty of Trade and Commerce at Stanford University [sic].
Not long before World War II, Kennedy visited a number of countries in Latin America, the Near East, and Europe, including the Soviet Union.
In 1941, Kennedy volunteered to serve in the Navy, where he served until 1945, commanding a torpedo boat in the Pacific theater of military operations. In 1943, he contused. He was awarded a medal for displaying heroism when saving the lives of his crewmembers.
[Translator Note: The Russian word for ‘contused’ can also refer to shell-shock, although it hardly describes the events that occurred during Kennedy’s command of the PT-109.]
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Kennedy’s position in US foreign policy issues
In US foreign policy issues, and first and foremost, with regard to the main aspect of this policy – the issue of mutual relations between the US and USSR, Kennedy’s position, as with his position on issues regarding the US interior, is rather contradictory.
Kennedy considers relations between the US and the USSR as a relationship involving constant struggle and rivalry, which in his opinion, however, can at various stages take on different concrete forms. Believing that clashes of the “primary national interests” of the US and USSR take place in the world, and that, because of this, one cannot hope for a fundamental change in the relations between the two, Kennedy nevertheless allows for the possibility of a mutually acceptable settlement of these relations based on a mutual desire to avoid nuclear war. Thus, in principle, Kennedy is in favor of dialogue with the Soviet Union, rejecting as “too fatalistic” the notion that the Soviet Union “can never be trusted,” that it “does not comply with agreements,” etc.
Because of this, Kennedy is openly critical of the position of the US government and that of the West overall regarding the question of disarmament, pointing out that the West has no sort of constructive plan in this area. For his part, he recommended that the US create a single government body that would work at developing a “practically feasible disarmament program,” as well as plans to transition the American economy from a wartime to peacetime footing, and various international socio-economic cooperation programs. However, speaking of the need for the United States to develop a realistic disarmament plan, Kennedy has in mind not some far-reaching plan for disarmament all the way to completely eliminating the nation’s arms and armed forces, but instead a plan for monitoring existing arms and armed forces with only a slight reduction thereto.
Kennedy is quite consistent in advocating for reaching an agreement on terminating nuclear weapons testing, believing that a resumption of testing could damage US military positions due to the threat from the expanding circle of countries possessing nuclear weapons. In his 30 April 1960 letter, Kennedy informed Eisenhower that if he, Kennedy, is elected president, he would extend the moratorium on all underground nuclear weapons testing, if Eisenhower could achieve such a moratorium among interested countries.
During the events associated with the inflammatory flights of the American U2 aircraft and the subsequent disruption of the summit meeting, Kennedy announced that, as president, he would not have allowed these flights on the eve of the summit, and in the situation in Paris, could see it possible to apologize to the USSR for the flights (but not to punish the offenders, since in this case he would have been the guilty party). Regardless, laying blame for the disruption of the summit on the Soviet Union, Kennedy sees the main reason for the events in the fact that, in his view, it was more favorable for the Soviet Union, for political purposes, to make the most of <break in document>.
Translation © 2025 by Michael Estes and TranslatingHistory.org
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