Memorial Day 2017, our national holiday honoring the legacies of America’s fallen warriors, happens to be the 100th birthday of President John F. Kennedy. Though a handful of ceremonies are planned to observe JFK’s Birth Centennial, I can’t locate anything in the media or on the internet noting the extraordinarily profound coincidence. For no American serviceman interred with our 35th president in Arlington Cemetery can match John Fitzgerald Kennedy for his sacrificial military contribution to our nation and, concomitantly, the world.

But it was as our president in 1963 that John F. Kennedy surpassed all of his American military peers. For it was he alone who compelled the Soviet Union to sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that summer which, as scientists now realize, forestalled the certain extinction of the human race. Had that insane atmospheric testing continued unabatedly – let alone without an augmenting proliferation – all human life would have perished from our planet by the late 1970s. JFK’s commitment to our extremely endangered species was a critical factor in his own death a few months later. All May 29 Memorial Day Observances should thus find time to salute the centenarian spirit of America’s ultimate military hero, Commander in Chief John F. Kennedy.

Martin Crane

East Lyme