Associate Professor of Government Jennifer Lind will join Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Harvard Professor Emeritus Akira Iriye at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston Friday, March 21, for a public discussion entitled “RFK, JFK, and Japan.”
“It’s going to be a conversation,” Lind says. “We’ll be talking about the background of U.S.-Japan relations and about what was transformative under the years of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.”
In 1962, to prepare for a diplomatic trip he planned to take in 1964, President Kennedy asked his brother Robert Kennedy to travel to Japan. A critical alliance with the country was in trouble, and Kennedy hoped that the first-ever state visit by a U.S. president to Japan would help heal a growing diplomatic rift, says Lind, whose academic work encompasses international relations and East Asian international security.