June 10 was the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University. Reading or listening to the speech today, it is not difficult to see why the U.S. national-security establishment deemed Kennedy to be a grave threat to national security, just as it did with certain foreign leaders, such as Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz and, later, President Salvador Allende of Chile. For some 150 years, the federal government had been a limited-government republic. After World War II, however, the federal government was converted to a national-security state. The...