To Move the World Page 6

  Old unsettled issues—about both Germany and arms control—would threaten an agreement once again, causing both sides to question the goodwill, resolve, and ability of the other side to keep hardliners in check. As the past failures of U.S.-Soviet negotiations had vividly shown, there could never be unity on either side about the way forward. Only leadership at the top would suffice. The next nine months would be a drama of the two protagonists, Kennedy and Khrushchev. Kennedy’s theory of peace and Khrushchev’s quest for peaceful coexistence would face their ultimate test.

  * Key members of his foreign policy team included McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser; Robert McNamara, secretary of defense; Dean Rusk, secretary of state; Averell Harriman, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and Kennedy’s assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs (November 1961–April 1963) and undersecretary of state for political affairs (April 1963–March 1965); Carl Kaysen, deputy special assistant for national security affairs; Roswell Gilpatric, deputy secretary of defense; and Paul Nitze, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

  Chapter 4.

  THE RHETORIC OF PEACE

  KENNEDY AIMED TO conjure peace through the spoken word. This is how he understood great leadership. This is how he would turn his own personal courage and skills to the service of humanity. As a senator, Kennedy had risen to national prominence with his Pulitzer Prize–winning book of 1957, Profiles in Courage, which highlighted acts of political courage by eight senators.1 The book was, at the core, a compendium of bold oratory throughout U.S. Senate history, speeches by politicians of such piercing eloquence and truth that they outlasted their own age and inspired later generations. During the summer of 1963, Kennedy made a series of speeches on peace that would likewise move his contemporaries—including his adversaries—and later generations.

  In his efforts to rally public opinion to his side, Kennedy was acutely aware of one of the greatest foreign policy setbacks of the previous half century: President Woodrow Wilson’s failure in 1919 to sway public and senatorial opinion to the cause of the League of Nations. Kennedy thus sought to stir the public not with false promises but with hard realism, not with balm but with responsible talk about the great stakes of making peace. He would follow Churchill’s dictum of straight talk even if it was painful and politically dangerous. Kennedy would appeal to the people, so that peace would be a triumph of democracy itself.

  The Power of Oratory

  Kennedy was of course no stranger to the power of oratory. He had studied it since his youth, relished it, championed it, and aspired to greatness in it. His lifelong role model, in this arena as in so many others, was Churchill, whose incomparable rhetoric had helped save a civilization. If it was true at the Battle of Britain that “never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” then it was also probably true that never in the course of human conflict had so few words inspired so many to act so valiantly.2 Kennedy had been present for the speeches in the British House of Commons when war was declared in 1939, and had been deeply affected by them, particularly by Churchill’s words. Kennedy noted in April 1963 that Churchill “mobilized the English Language and sent it into battle.”3 Churchill’s oratory influenced Kennedy in more ways than one. On the campaign trail in 1960, Kennedy hired a drama coach to improve his speaking, and biographer Richard Reeves related his practice sessions: “Home alone in Washington, he would put on a silk bathrobe, pour himself a brandy, light up a cigar, and speak along with records of Winston Churchill’s greatest speeches.”4 Kennedy himself would soon mobilize language in the battle for peace.

  Kennedy had an important weapon, his own verbal Excalibur, a linguistic sword of unparalleled strength and balance, able to cut to the core of an issue with remarkable insight and eloquence. This was Ted Sorensen, trusted counselor, speechwriter, adviser, and according to most, Kennedy’s intellectual alter ego. As Kennedy’s top national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, noted, “There just is no exaggerating [Sorensen’s] value and his closeness to the President … he had a deep sense of the President’s own values and purpose.”5 Sorensen was Kennedy’s chief speechwriter throughout his eight Senate years. He helped Kennedy assemble and write Profiles in Courage. He was Kennedy’s wordsmith throughout the 1960 campaign and in the White House. And he was on hand as adviser, scribe, and speechwriter for every major challenge that Kennedy confronted, drafting the key documents that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis and those that would lead the final public campaign for peace.

  Kennedy with Ted Sorensen.

  Sorensen embodied virtues and values ideally suited for the cause of peace. He was a midwesterner, a son of Nebraska, with its great tradition of anti-war sentiment. At Sorensen’s urging, Kennedy featured Senator George Norris’s principled and brave opposition to the U.S. entry into World War I in Profiles in Courage. Sorensen was the son of a Jewish mother and Unitarian father—a “Jewnitarian,” as Sorensen joked in his memoirs. Both faiths shared the belief, in Sorensen’s words, that “human beings represent the one true God here on Earth, and that good works by man are sanctifying God’s name.”6 We can hear echoes of that faith in the closing words of Kennedy’s inaugural address: “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

  Kennedy and Sorensen teamed up on the great Peace Speech and the others that followed later that summer. While we don’t know all of the sources that they drew upon, they would likely have reviewed several important speeches on peace given since the end of World War II, including Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace,” delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, and three by Eisenhower: “Chance for Peace,” delivered in April 1953, the month following Stalin’s death; the “Atoms for Peace” speech at the UN in December 1953; and his farewell address, given three days before the end of his presidency in January 1961. As for Kennedy’s own previous speeches, two had set the stage for the peace initiative: the inaugural address, of course, and also his first speech to the UN General Assembly in September 1961.

  One final and enormous rhetorical influence arrived just before Kennedy’s speech. It came not as a speech, but as a written message from the beloved Pope John XXIII, in his dying days. The pope had sent a message of peace during the darkest days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Khrushchev had expressed his personal gratitude to the pope for that message. That in turn encouraged the pope to devote his final days to the encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), which moved the global public, particularly the pope’s message that “any disputes which may arise between nations must be resolved by negotiation and agreement, and not by recourse to arms.”7 The words of that inspiring encyclical, issued on April 11, 1963, just two months before Kennedy’s Peace Speech, likely informed Kennedy’s own speech.

  “Sinews of Peace”

  (March 5, 1946)

  Churchill’s words were the primary model for Kennedy: vigorous, down-to-earth, a clarion call. Churchill’s words informed, explained, called for action, and predicted success. He was a moralist, realist, activist, and visionary. After a Churchill speech, there was no choice but to sally forth, to do the deeds that would win the affection and honor of later generations. Churchill’s rhetorical power came above all from the sense of fierce realism that he conveyed. He would not hold back vital information from compatriots and allies. His listeners knew this, and felt empowered by it.

  In Fulton, Churchill had a few specific purposes.8 He bid his listeners that day, including President Harry Truman, to grasp the reality of the newly divided Europe. Using the phrase that came immediately to define the Cold War, he sounded the alarm: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” “Iron curtain” had an earlier provenance, having appeared in diplomatic, literary, and political references duri
ng the preceding half century; Churchill himself used it on several occasions in 1945. But it was the “Sinews of Peace” speech that defined the new era in those terms for the entire world.

  Churchill’s speech emphasized peace as well as the Cold War. It made clear that “we understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression.” Churchill underscored, “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their powers and doctrines.” He urged the United States and the United Kingdom to meet that expansionist tendency together firmly but peacefully.

  Churchill’s urgent message on that day was more about willpower than military might. He called for a special relationship between the United States and the British Commonwealth and Empire. He spoke of that relationship in the terms of everyday life, not of high diplomacy. “If two of the workmen [building the Temple of Peace] know each other particularly well and are old friends, if their families are intermingled … why cannot they work together at the common task as friends and partners?”

  He called for building the new United Nations, so that “its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can some day be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.” And under the general authority of the UN he called for a new relationship with Russia, not at a vague point in the future, but then and now, in 1946. We should reach, said Churchill, “a good understanding on all points with Russia under the general authority of the United Nations Organization and by the maintenance of that good understanding through many peaceful years, by the whole strength of the English-speaking world and its connections.”

  Churchill ended his remarks to his American listeners with a challenge, a promise, and a vision. Our efforts could redeem the future, create the peace we sought:

  If we adhere faithfully to the Charter of the United Nations and walk forward in sedate and sober strength seeking no man’s land or treasure, seeking to lay no arbitrary control upon the thoughts of men; if all British moral and material forces and convictions are joined with your own in fraternal association, the highroads of the future will be clear, not only for our time, but for a century to come.

  Churchill’s promise—peace “not only for our time, but for a century to come”—not only referenced Chamberlain’s debacle eight years earlier in declaring the attainment of “peace in our time” after Munich, but looked forward confidently to a new era of peace. It was a turn of phrase that John Kennedy would echo seventeen years later in his Peace Speech, when he declared that we seek “not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.”

  Churchill would rue the fact that “Sinews of Peace” was later remembered mainly as a call to the Cold War, as its principal effect in the United States was to warn the public about the new “iron curtain.” Yet the speech was vivid and unmistakable in its call for peace through strength:

  The safety of the world, ladies and gentlemen, requires a new unity in Europe, from which no nation should be permanently outcast. It is from the quarrels of the strong parent races in Europe that the world wars we have witnessed, or which occurred in former times, have sprung … Surely we should work with conscious purpose for a grand pacification of Europe, within the structure of the United Nations and in accordance with our Charter. That I feel opens a course of policy of very great importance.

  Even if the world would remember the speech mostly for its grim warning, Kennedy certainly would remember it also for the purposes that Churchill intended: as a call for peace through strength, resolve, and negotiation.

  “Chance for Peace”

  (April 16, 1953)

  Churchill’s speech was followed not by peace but by the Cold War, which began in earnest and rapidly spiraled into a series of crises: instability in Greece and Turkey and the Truman Doctrine in 1947; the Marshall Plan and its rejection by the Soviet Union the same year; the Berlin crisis and airlift in 1948–1949; the Soviet atomic bomb in 1949; the Chinese Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949; the Korean War from 1950 to 1953; and many more. The first major pause of that spiral came with Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953. Stalin’s ruthlessness, brutality, and paranoia had fueled much of the Cold War in its early years, in addition to terrorizing his own colleagues and nation. His death opened the possibility of a thaw, if not a new start entirely. Eisenhower took a step toward that thaw with an important speech one month after Stalin’s death, billed as the “Chance for Peace.”*9

  The speech was unusual for Eisenhower: a relatively bold attempt to defuse the Cold War dynamics. Eisenhower made a bid for a new relationship with the Soviet Union, but it was circumscribed, reflecting the doubts and cautions of Eisenhower’s own hardline advisers, especially Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

  The opening line is dramatic: “In this spring of 1953 the free world weighs one question above all others: the chance for a just peace for all peoples.” He recalled “the more hopeful spring of 1945, bright with the promise of victory and freedom,” a moment of hope that he himself had helped to make possible as the victorious supreme Allied commander of World War II.

  Eisenhower then went on to outline the “two distinct roads” charted by the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States, by Eisenhower’s light, charted a path that was faithful to the spirit of the UN: “to prohibit strife, to relieve tensions, to banish fears.” The Soviet Union, by contrast, pursued a goal of “power superiority at all cost,” in turn compelling the free nations to “remain armed, strong, and ready for the risk of war.” The result was a way of life “forged by eight years of fear and force.” On the current course, said Eisenhower, the best outcome is more fear and tension; the worst, atomic war.

  Eisenhower bemoaned the huge costs for both sides:

  Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

  The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

  It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

  It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway …

  This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

  Eisenhower posed the key question that “stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?” And he asked the question of the new Soviet leadership. Will it “awaken, with the rest of the world, to the point of peril reached and help turn the tide of history”? He acknowledged that “[w]e do not yet know.” Eisenhower said that only deeds would tell, giving the list: an Austrian peace treaty; the release of prisoners held since World War II; an honorable armistice in Korea; an end to the direct and indirect attacks on the security of Indochina and Malaya (the colonial possessions of Southeast Asia); and the fostering of a broader European community with a free and united Germany and the full independence of the East European nations.

  All of this would make possible vast rewards, including an agreement on arms reduction and the enormous savings that would result. The possibilities of such an agreement would present the world “with the greatest task, and the greatest opportunity, of all. It is this: the dedication of the energies, the resources, and the imaginations of all peaceful nations to a new kind of war. This would be a declared total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces of poverty and need.”

  Eisenhower made a pledge:

  This government is ready to ask its people to join with all nations in devoting a substantial percentage of the s
avings achieved by disarmament to a fund for world aid and reconstruction. The purposes of this great work would be to help other peoples to develop the undeveloped areas of the world, to stimulate profitable and fair world trade, to assist all peoples to know the blessings of productive freedom.

  The offer was bold, but also limited in a basic way that Kennedy’s offer ten years later would not be. As Eisenhower himself put it, he was offering the Soviet Union a test of good faith through a list of measures the Soviet Union must enact. “The test is clear,” he said of Soviet actions. Kennedy, by contrast, would bid Americans to reexamine their own attitudes to peace, the better to meet the Soviet Union on common ground.

  Eisenhower regarded this speech as one of his most important. In his 1961 memoirs, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, declared it to be the greatest speech of Eisenhower’s career. Unusually, the Soviet Union allowed its publication in full in the newspaper Pravda, showing the high regard that it gave to Eisenhower’s peace gesture.10

  The optimism lasted through the end of the year, when Eisenhower spoke to the UN General Assembly, offering “atoms for peace.”†11 There, Eisenhower spoke of the horrors of nuclear war and the horrendous consequences of the nuclear arms race. Both sides can inflict hideous damage on the other. And the nuclear stalemate was little reprieve, said Eisenhower: “To pause there [with devastating weapons pointed at each side] would be to confirm the hopeless finality of a belief that two atomic colossi are doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world.” Kennedy would echo these words a decade later when he also challenged the view that we are “doomed,” condemned to war.