50 Dollars JFK - Oppose Any Foe

Issued the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, this coin draws its title from Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address — a speech delivered at the height of Cold War tension, four months before the Bay of Pigs and two years before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Marshall Islands had particular reason to invoke that rhetoric: the Bikini and Enewetak atolls within its territory served as the primary U.S. nuclear test sites throughout the 1950s, displacing islanders who have never been fully resettled.

The RMI began issuing collector coinage aggressively in the early 1990s, producing dozens of commemorative types annually through the Bradford Exchange and similar marketing operations.