by Dr B.J.C.Perera
Specialist Consultant Paediatrician and Honorary Senior Fellow,
Postgraduate Institute of Medicine,
University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy or JFK was the 35th President of the United States of America. He served as President from 20th January 1961, until his assassination on 22nd November 1963. Though his presidency lasted only a short time, President Kennedy’s administration was known for innovation, intellect, and a fervent commitment to progress. It consisted of a paradigm shift of the traditional qualities of the then-prevalent American way of running a country.

Central to his governance was the establishment of a ‘Think Tank’; a supremely dynamic hub of intellectual exchanges and policy formulation, working at the highest levels possible. This article attempts to delve into the multifaceted aspects and workings of Kennedy’s ‘Think Tank’, exploring its composition, objectives, methods, and lasting impact on American governance, as well as global affairs.

Kennedy’s ‘Think Tank’ was a heterogeneous collective of brilliant minds from various disciplines, including, but not restricted to, academia, industry, government, and the military. Comprising of economists, scientists, researchers, strategists, and policymakers, the ‘Think Tank’ brought together diverse perspectives to tackle complex challenges facing the nation. Notable members included Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Theodore Sorensen, among many others who were most capable persons in their own right.

Their collective expertise spanned fields such as economics, defence, imports and exports, foreign policy, health, and social welfare, just to mention a few, clearly reflecting Kennedy’s vision for a comprehensive approach to governance. There was no limit to a fixed number of people who worked in the ‘Think Tank’. Kennedy often consulted with a wide range of experts and scholars on specific issues, drawing upon their expertise to facilitate policymaking and decision-making processes.

The composition of the ‘Think Tank’ evolved, with different individuals contributing to various initiatives and policy discussions throughout Kennedy’s presidency. Instead of focusing solely on IQ, Kennedy most likely valued a diverse range of skills, experience, and perspectives among his advisors and intellectuals to facilitate robust policy discussions and decision-making processes. At its core, Kennedy’s ‘Think Tank’ aimed to foster innovative solutions to pressing domestic and international issues.

Whether confronting the Cold War, advancing civil rights, or spurring economic growth, the ‘Think Tank’ served as a crucible for bold ideas, minute dissection of the possibilities and provision of advice on pragmatic policies. Kennedy envisioned it as a catalyst for change, a forum where rigorous analysis and creative thinking could inform the best processes of decision-making at the highest levels of government. Beyond mere problem-solving, the ‘Think Tank’ sought to shape long-term strategies that aligned with Kennedy’s vision of a more prosperous, just, and secure future.

A true-to-life analysis of the methods employed within Kennedy’s ‘Think Tank’ were many determinations characterised by rigour, honesty, non-partisan evaluations, collaboration, and forward-thinking. Regular meetings, brainstorming sessions, and policy workshops facilitated lively debate and the exchange of ideas. Members of the initiative drew upon empirical research, economic modelling, and geopolitical analysis to put forward their recommendations.

Moreover, Kennedy encouraged a culture of experimentation and even a bit of risk-taking, urging his advisors to explore unconventional approaches and thereby challenge conventional wisdom. This dynamic environment fostered a spirit of innovation that propelled the administration’s agenda forward.

Kennedy’s ‘Think Tank’ played a pivotal role in shaping several landmark initiatives and policies during his presidency. In the realm of national security, the Cuban Missile Crisis stands as a testament to the ‘Think Tank’s’ strategic acumen, as advisors navigated the treacherous waters of nuclear brinkmanship with prudence and resolve. Domestically, the ‘Think Tank’ contributed to the formulation of legislative initiatives such as the New Frontier, which aimed to stimulate economic growth, expand access to healthcare and education, and promote civil rights.

Furthermore, Kennedy’s ‘Think Tank’ spearheaded efforts to revitalize American diplomacy and bolster alliances abroad, laying the groundwork for initiatives such as the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps.

While Kennedy’s presidency was tragically cut short, the legacy of his ‘Think Tank’ endures as a testament to the power of visionary leadership and collaborative governance. Many of the policies and initiatives championed by the ‘Think Tank’ continue to shape the trajectory of American politics and global affairs, even to this day. Moreover, Kennedy’s emphasis on intellectual curiosity, unbridled honesty, strategic foresight, and moral clarity and transparency continue to inspire future generations of leaders to confront the challenges of their time with courage and conviction.

In an era marked by uncertainty and complexity, the enduring legacy of Kennedy’s ‘Think Tank’ serves as a beacon of hope, as well as wonder, and a reminder of the transformative potential of courageous and innovative ideas, implemented by collective action. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was an extremely strong statesman. However, little did many people realise that such strength emanated from a proper appraisal of even the most complex of problems, ably assisted by that unique ‘Think Tank’ of his. That proven oasis of splendour was the one that facilitated the best brains of the USA to work steadfastly and backstage on every issue that President JFK had to deal with.

President John F. Kennedy’s ‘Think Tank’ represented a bold experiment in governance, harnessing the supreme power of a combination of intellect and collaboration to confront the pressing challenges of its time. Through its diverse composition, innovative methods, and far-reaching impact, the ‘Think Tank’ left an indelible mark on American politics and global affairs. As we reflect on its legacy, we are reminded of the enduring importance of visionary leadership, rigorous analysis, and principled decision-making, in shaping a brighter future for generations to come, in a country where a person of the calibre of JKH was the Head of State.

There is a reflection as a thoughtful postscript to this article. As far as we are aware, over the last 76 years following our independence, no Sri Lankan Head of State has even thought of using such a ‘Think Tank’ formulated and assembled using the best independent brains and self-regulating strategists of our Motherland.

Traditionally, their advisors have consisted of a conglomerate of ‘yes’ persons, colloquially referred to as henchmen and henchwomen, who would not even dream of calling a spade, just what it is; a spade. The Heads of State, both male and female, have generally thought that they knew anything and everything. Such traits are the ones that fit in ruthlessly and quite significantly to the distinctive lexicon of lesser mortals. Many of them have had even more than a sprinkling of autocratic and steam-rolling behaviour with high-decibel value retorts to those who even vaguely disagreed. One has only to look at the way things have panned out in the United States of America and our so-called Paradise Isle, over the period from the early 1960s, to get a glimpse of the way things have progressed in the two countries. Need we say more?

The author acknowledges assistance from AI in writing this article.

TV news, much of newspapers, conversations at gatherings; even at invited dinner or lunch tables, very soon lead and land in the quagmire of Sri Lankan politics. This in spite of a likely change in the bigger picture being so many months hence – October 2024 the earliest -when an election will be held, most probably presidential.

Cass watches/listens to News First on MTV Channel. Their introductory opening to news relays on the forthcoming elections and politics is a chorus of voices asking the q ‘When’s the election?’ This reverberates in Cass’ head most of the time and is certainly not a pleasant reverberation, since it is perception associated with political mugs, meaning faces of politicians, some sad to report, not at all pleasing. So, we are in the muggy, squashy bog of political conjecturing.

Parties

The fate of parties is upfront and surprising. Both the SLFP and SLPP G-strings seem to be fast crumbling; the former due to internal significant squabbles and the latter with rats leaving the sinking ship who have even formed a separate grouping but are still considered SLPPers. The bud came into prominence by winning in a local government elections soon after the Party was formed by Basil Rajapaksa, not many years ago. Bud bloomed but now it is cancerous, showing decay and fading fast. Namal has no charisma like his papa had but that too has waned.

Cartoonist Jeffrey of The Island very succinctly depicted the cracks within the SLFP by showing cleavages and lost parts of a hand. Chief protagonist in this tragedy is shown to be Maithripala Sirisena since his statue alongside the damaged hand is also showing cracks and even shed parts.

The UNP was greatly diminished in the 2019 election. However, it has held together even with many deserting the Green Elephant and taking hold of a Telephone. The UNP seems to be a phoenix, rising from the ashes. And that solely due to its leader on whom was thrust the presidency of the country by the Prez who was chased out by the unity within the Araglaya and fled for dear life by boat, ship and aeroplane from one country to another, no longer a respected visitor but barely tolerated.

The JVP or NPP – National Peoples Power – given birth in 2019 by the JVP leadership, is rising meteor like.

These changes and break-ups are tedious to follow to an ordinary citizen like Cass. She is most fatigued by the fact that all steam given out in speeches, press interviews etc., said to be for the good and benefit of the people are all for the good and benefit of the individuals who assume pseudo nationalism.

Cass used the word ‘sickening’ in her title of this Cry. She does not retract her statement. It is truly sickening to see the manoevering within parties that is taking place and consequent in-fighting. All because of selfish concern; self-centered motives. Almost all politicians are believers of “me, long before country”. There are more than a handful of admirable persons too in politics, so mercifully all is not lost. Furthermore, many good persons stand in the wings, ready to come forward to save Mother Lanka from its ignominious position in the world order as of now. Voters are also more circumspect and wise now. They have been cheated and led up the garden path by political rhetoric and false promises. Wiser now, we hope.

Another massive perk for MPs

Most of the denizens who spend their working hours (some sleeping, some phoning, some just registering their presence and then vamoosing), and those who argue screaming their heads off are once again united in a demand for another perk to their already big bag of special goodies. They have signed a demand for tax free car import licenses. Cass hopes she got that right.

She is sure not all asked for this; the few realizing how unrealistic, how unjust, how insensible it is to ask for a duty free luxury car or the license to be sold at a fabulous price at this stage of the economic depression of the country. There are a few members of the present Parliament who are honourable, national minded, concerned about the people and willing to give of their service to the country for which they entered Parliament. Theirs is not to make money, to benefit unfairly, but to help improve the condition of Sri Lanka and its people. We can identify them; much more easily the greedy, the corrupt, the utterly insensitive and selfish MPs.

Cass’ question is why on earth duty free cars for MPs when their span of life in Parliament is drawing to a close with elections, maybe, held next year. She saw on TV that one reason for the demand is that the vehicles they now possess are 12 years old. Goodness, that’s comparatively new to the ordinary man in a bankrupt country. Cass supposes that the CB showed an improved balance of payments or money in the national kitty or outside. Hence the quick cashing in for personal benefit. They are also cashing in on perks being given to win votes.

The Speaker of course would allow this request but he has to pass it to the President. Cassandra uses her power to glance at the future and foretell, prophesy. What she discerns is that if the President allows duty free vehicle licenses to MPs to gain popularity with them, he will lose a hundred times more popularity with the people. Very many will be the votes he loses on this one issue, if he gives into the greed of some MPs.

May Day rallies are going on as Cass rounds off her Cry. She is not one bit interested in what the many-hued Leaders promise, or in the size of throngs present at the various venues. Much of the hinterland must have been conveyed to Colombo gifting them a free ride; a half day of entertainment, a buth packet and tot of arrack.

Her reason for non-interest is that a day dedicated to workers; the welfare of toilers for their daily rice; and their problems; has been high-jacked by politicians and it is a purely political day of display of crowds and loud speeches with some venue stages featuring singers and dancers. We hope ordinary life prevails after the high jinks of May First, May Day!

By Uditha Devapriya

A public intellectual is more than an academic. He is a thinker and a doer, a mover and a shaker. He wields considerable influence and sometimes popularity. He does not just reflect critically on policy, he also helps shape it. Though not always in the limelight, he must be ready to get up on the public stage, to interact with people without pandering to them. Intellectuals are by nature reserved and introspective. Public intellectuals are no less so. But they are more active in popular movements, taking part in them and leading them. They cannot be ivory towers, and they cannot be ideological purists.

In Sri Lanka almost anyone can parade himself as an intellectual – if he tries hard enough. But it is difficult to be a public intellectual. One is either an activist or a thinker. We have compartmentalised these two roles so much that we tend to view them in isolation. If it is hard to think of an intellectual who is also an activist, it is because intellectuals prefer to operate from their cloistered monasteries. Reduced to teaching and lecturing and making speeches, many of them end up trapped in echo chambers.

It goes without saying that there are virtually no public intellectuals in Sri Lanka. That space has more or less faded away. Yet there was a time when such individuals were not rarities, when our newspapers, journals, and magazines devoted reams of column space for them to debate, confront, and engage with each other. If such engagements indicated Sri Lanka’s intellectual trajectory back then, the diminution of them today points to a rupture of that trajectory. But I am not an evergreen cynic here. There are signs that things are changing: young radical-progressive columnists are making the waves, questioning accepted axioms and challenging establishment political and academic figures.

with Maithripala Sirisena

But what or who, you may ask, is the prototype for the public intellectual in Sri Lanka? This is not an easy question to answer, not least because there isn’t one specific or correct answer. In the golden era of Sri Lankan or Ceylonese journalism, we had Regi Siriwardena, Tarzie Vittachi, and Mervyn de Silva. A. J. Gunawardena and Ajith Samaranayake came of age in the next generation, as did Qadri Ismail. They wrote on specific themes and emerged as leading voices in their specific domains. And yet, who among them exuded an elan which resonated with multiple generations, including the present?

Going by his interventions over the last four decades, I think Dayan Jayatilleka fits that bill easily. Something of a controversial figure, Jayatilleka has today become our foremost political and foreign policy analyst, even if his analyses do not appeal to everyone. But then public intellectuals are not out there to get mass acceptance: they should not stake their reputation on popularity. They do try to appeal to their public. But not by pandering to it. In this, Jayatilleka has been a polarising intellectual: in the eyes of his critics, he has shifted so many times that he has become a reflection of his people. As he himself puts it, these shifts have only echoed the mood and temperament of the Sri Lankan electorate.

“If the Sri Lankan electorate didn’t opt for one government and then the other, we would have had the same government throughout. This is the kind of change that happens in every democracy. I would say that my underlying political values have not changed.”

A commentator, an author, a diplomat, and many other things besides, Jayatilleka has lived through and confronted some of the most tumultuous political events of the last half-century, in this country. He was born in 1956, was 15 when April 1971 broke out, 21 when J. R. Jayewardene took office, 31 when Ranasinghe Premadasa followed suit, and 53 when the 30-year war against the LTTE ended. In one sense, these events have never actually ended: they remain with us in their most essential form, bonding us to an eternal recurrence in a Nietzschean sense. Jayatilleka frequently engages with them, reminding us that though the past is another country, we seem condemned to live in it.

Consequently, there are very few articles that he has written which do not resonate with the young and the old. Whether he is reflecting on the war, the ethnic conflict, or the crisis of legitimacy in the Sri Lankan State, he speaks with an intellectual vigour which can disarm his critics. This, of course, should not compel one to side with his views all the way through. Not a few of these articles have invited criticisms, and Dr Jayatilleka has responded to them all. Yet even while disagreeing with them, one feels that he is the opposite of what Susan Sontag wrote of George Lukacs, that he is “many things to many men.”

While not disputing the essence of that statement – which thinker in the history of thought has not appeared as many things to many people? – it must be noted that Jayatilleka has been too consistent in many of his views to bear out such a characterisation. The charge most frequently levelled at him, from the 1980s, is that he has shifted sides and cited the most redoubtable philosophers – Gramsci, Althusser, Zizek, Buddha, Jesus, the great Marx himself – in defence of his shifts. Some of his writings, his actions, have been questioned and invited the most heated controversy. It is pointless to go through them all. But the crux of it all is that we cannot take him seriously because he does not seem to take himself seriously: he has changed too many times to think otherwise.

In fairness, and as a student and follower of politics and international relations myself, I understand where these arguments are coming from. But not where they lead to. The argument that public intellectuals must stick to one position and abide by it no matter what is ridiculous and self-defeating. This is so particularly in a country like Sri Lanka, where presidents, prime ministers, and politicians change so often he or she takes on completely different, contradictory, personalities, where what was politically defensible yesterday becomes morally indefensible today. Jayatilleka’s attitude to the likes of Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sajith Premadasa, and Anura Kumara Dissanayake underlies this well.

Ironically, some of Jayatilleka’s own critics have been as guilty of the crime they attribute to him. The insurrectionists of 1971, to give one example, were once fired by visions of equality and solidarity, but over time found their home in a bourgeois liberal space, in which they became critics of many of the ideals they had advocated in their youth. They found their home in a “radical” third way centre, first in the Chandrika Kumaratunga government and later in the Maithripala Sirisena Ranil Wickremesinghe government.

That both these regimes became anything but liberal, radical, or centrist, that they shifted to the right over time, does not seem to have deprived their intellectual defenders of credibility – even as they accuse Jayatilleka of, yes, lacking any credibility. That they got their reading of the political moment wrong – in effect becoming the Karl Roves of Sri Lanka – does not seem to have worried them in the least.

By comparison, Jayatilleka’s fealty to the ideals that animated his youth has been more solid, even if I disagree with some of them. When sections of the left drifted away to a rather amorphous left-liberal NGO-fied space in the 1980s, they inadvertently became prey to the most dubious political projects. As Rajiva Wijesinha has pointed out in Representing Sri Lanka, the very meaning of liberal politics changed, leaving in its wake a grotesque caricature of what it once had been. Briefly put, the United National Party, and some of its most right-wing figureheads, became the preferred icons of these new liberals – even as it spouted the most right-wing tenets imaginable. Jayatilleka proved to be an exception here: a pragmatist radical-progressive – a liberal realist, if one may say so.

All this calls for a new way of looking at the man, his thinking, his beliefs. Sontag praised Lukacs for being “marginal and central in a society which makes the position of the marginal intellectual almost intolerable.” I am not sure how true this is of Lukacs, but it is somewhat true of Jayatilleka. Certainly, he occupies an ambivalent place in our political-intellectual landscape.

In Geneva

On the one hand, his achievements are considerable, going by the number of books and essays published, awards and accolades won, and international mentions and honours. On the other hand, he has managed to anger if not alienate various political groups to the extent of becoming their bête noire.

Not surprisingly, many of these groups have tried to square him with the values of rival camps, without much success. Thus we have Dayan Jayatilleka the champion of minorities, Dayan Jayatilleka the supporter the 13th Amendment, and also Dayan Jayatilleka the latent chauvinist and Dayan Jayatilleka the stooge of majoritarian regimes: in effect, a “Sinhala Tiger” and a “hardcore federalist” rolled into one.

Studying the man on the basis of these descriptions would be like looking at a broken mirror: you see bits and pieces of yourself in shards of glass, but they never congeal into a total picture. No. To search for Jayatilleka, we must look into another mirror.

When my friend, colleague, and research partner in crime Uthpala Wijesuriya and I were called to come up with a catalogue of Jayatilleka’s articles, from the 1970s to the present, we were afforded the chance of not just looking at that mirror, but constructing one for others to look into. Up to now, the reading public in Sri Lanka has never been given a chance to look at just how the country’s leading public intellectual has evolved over time. This calls for an exhaustive but representative collection: a political anthology. A year after we were called to put together such a collection, we are confident that Sri Lankans, especially those interested in its politics and foreign policy, will finally get their chance.

“Interventions: Selected Political Writings”, a collection of Dayan Jayatilleka’s political writings over the last half century, will be launched today. It will be available at leading bookstores in the country soon. For more information, you can contact the publishers, Neptune Publications, at , or the editors, Uditha Devapriya and Uthpala Wijesuriya, at .

Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst based in Sri Lanka who contributes to a number of publications on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He can be reached at . Together with Uthpala Wijesuriya, he leads an informal art and culture research collective called U & U.