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  Kennedy knew that he needed the American people on his side. Even if he signed a treaty with Khrushchev, it would count for nothing if it died in the Senate. The tragedy of Woodrow Wilson, who succeeded in negotiating the League of Nations only to fail to win Senate ratification for it, was always present in Kennedy’s mind. Nor could Kennedy ignore Chamberlain’s disaster at Munich, and Kennedy’s own vulnerability to right-wing cries of appeasement. Kennedy would need a campaign, state by state, Senate vote by Senate vote, to assure the American people that the treaty was in their interest. His success or failure in the peace campaign, he knew, would augur his success or failure in his reelection campaign the following year. And as a campaign begins with a kickoff speech, the campaign for global peace would begin with one as well. There could be no better venue than the hometown university on commencement day.

  At American University

  Kennedy had planned on making a major peace speech for months. Ted Sorensen recalled, “The President considered in the early spring of 1963 the idea of delivering a speech on peace, a speech which emphasized our peaceful posture and desires, a speech which talked in terms of a peace race instead of an arms race much as the President’s speech to the United Nations in 1961 had done.”1 Norman Cousins, the informal emissary among Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Pope John XXIII, after meeting with Khrushchev urged Kennedy to take a “breathtaking new approach toward the Russian people, calling for an end to the cold war and a fresh start in American-Russian relationships.”2 The American University commencement seemed the perfect time and place.

  The speech was prepared by a tight circle, lest a more skeptical administration member try to derail it or water it down. Ted Sorensen worked on the draft with a few key advisers, including McGeorge Bundy, Carl Kaysen, and William Foster, the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

  Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson saw it with less than a week to go.* Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,† and Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, were shown the sections regarding nuclear testing just a few days before.3 Sorensen’s draft sailed through with minor amendments. The final drafts showed improvements in phrasing, but no major changes in substance.

  Kennedy was in Hawaii the night before the speech for a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. William Foster recalled the rush to finish: “We worked like hell all day. Then Ted Sorensen, I think, sat up all night with his remarkable ability to polish and write and was able to send each of us and the President the final draft about six or seven in the morning to see if there were changes to be made. We had another meeting just before the speech, after we got the President’s comments back by cable.”4 Sorensen flew to Hawaii to bring the final draft and return with Kennedy on a Sunday night flight, during which Kennedy put his final touches on the address.‡ Carl Kaysen called in the final suggested changes from cabinet secretaries.

  Kennedy delivers the Peace Speech (June 10, 1963).

  Upon landing, Kennedy went briefly to the White House and then straight to the American University campus. The day was sunny and children played on the grass while college students awaited their diplomas. President Kennedy rose to the dais to accept an honorary degree and deliver the commencement address.5 He saluted the university leaders on the dais together with him, as well as his former Senate colleague Robert Byrd, an alumnus of American University. Senator Byrd, he quipped, “earned his degree through many years of attending night law school, while I am earning mine in the next 30 minutes.”

  Kennedy quickly set the theme of personal responsibility by noting that President Woodrow Wilson had said that “every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation as well as a man of his time.” He expressed confidence that the graduates would offer “a high measure of public service.” He quoted the English poet John Masefield, who extolled the university as “a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see.” That was Kennedy’s task that morning. He would use the occasion to discuss a topic “on which ignorance too often abounds,” a topic he declared to be “the most important topic on earth: peace.” He would make the case that peace with the Soviet Union was both possible and necessary, despite the pervasive fatalism that war was inevitable.

  Kennedy defined the challenge in global rather than national terms, the pattern he would follow throughout the twenty-six-minute speech:

  [W]hat kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.

  Here is that echo of Churchill, who had sought peace “not only for our time, but for a century to come.” We also see both men’s deliberate contrast with Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement at Munich.

  Next, by explaining the logic of the prisoner’s dilemma, how two sides can get trapped in a wasteful and dangerous arms race with both ending up the losers, Kennedy showed how peace was possible in a world where war seemed nearly inevitable. First, he had to dispel the idea that a nuclear war could be fought and won:

  Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

  Kennedy then acknowledged the perverse logic of deterrence:

  Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need them is essential to the keeping of peace.

  Yet he rejected the idea that we should be satisfied or comforted by such a situation:

  But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles—which can only destroy and never create—is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.

  For Kennedy knew the arms race was not only hugely costly, but an invitation to a devastating blunder, as had nearly occurred just eight months earlier.

  Kennedy therefore offered the first of three definitions of peace: “the necessary, rational end of rational men.” Men and women seek security for themselves and their children. Nations must do the same on their behalf. Vast stockpiles of arms in a balance of terror can never deliver the desired security, at least not in comparison with peace itself. But can peace really be achieved, or is that merely an illusion, a way to be suckered and overtaken by the other side?

  Kennedy’s answer was that peace is possible despite the many prophets of doom. The barriers are not only in our adversaries, but also, remarkably and paradoxically, in ourselves:

  Some say that it is useless to speak of peace or world law or world disarmament, and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitudes, as individuals and as a Nation, for our attitude is as essential as theirs.

  He then bid his countrymen to reexamine their attitudes in four areas: the possibility of peace; the Soviet Union; the Cold War; and freedom at home in the United States.

  Our Attitude Toward Peace

  Kennedy’s first task was to explain why peace should even be considered possible after eighteen years of continuous crisis, following six years of devastating war. He began by raising our hopes: that as humans we can solve even our toughest prob
lems.

  First examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.

  Yet Kennedy was ever the realist. He quickly cautioned:

  I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.

  Kennedy invoked his long-held belief that peace would have to be built step by step:

  Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions—on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace; no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation.

  Kennedy thereby arrived at his second definition: “For peace is a process—a way of solving problems.”

  But how can peace be reached with such an implacable foe as the Soviet Union? Begin, said Kennedy, with a realistic assessment of the conditions for peace:

  World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor, it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.

  Moreover, echoing the historian and theorist B. H. Liddell Hart, Kennedy reminded Americans that:

  history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.

  “So let us persevere,” said Kennedy.

  Balancing idealism and practicality, the grand vision of peace with the specific steps to get there, Kennedy charted the way forward with a lesson in good management that can serve a thousand purposes:

  By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly towards it.

  Here, in one sentence, is the art of great leadership. Define a goal clearly. Explain how it can be achieved in manageable steps. Help others to share the goal—in part through great oratory. Their hopes will move them “irresistibly” toward the goal.

  Our Attitude Toward the Soviet Union

  U.S. foreign policy speeches from 1945 until the Peace Speech contained a litany of sins committed by the Soviet Union, matched by proclamations of America’s unerring and unswerving goodwill. Kennedy sought to make a very different point. He was not interested in condemning the Soviet Union, in “piling up debating points,” as he put it later in the speech, but rather in convincing Americans that the Soviet Union shared America’s interests in peace, and so could be a partner in peace.

  Kennedy began this next section of the speech with a passing critique of Soviet propaganda, dryly commenting on it by quoting the scriptures: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.” (Secretary of State Dean Acheson had used the same biblical reference in 1949 congressional testimony about Soviet opposition to NATO.) But Kennedy quickly turned the tables. He did not want to castigate the Soviet Union but to warn Americans “not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”

  For Kennedy’s real intention was to humanize the “other side,” to show Americans the Soviet interests in peace. He started by reminding Americans not to demonize the Soviet people, however much Americans might abhor the communist system:

  No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.

  Peace, Kennedy was emphasizing, requires respect of the other party, a fair and generous appraisal of the other’s interests and worth. And Kennedy’s praise for the Russians was generous, speaking of their virtue and courage, the classical ideals of citizenship he held highest.

  Here, too, he followed Churchill, who had told the American people in “Sinews of Peace”:

  There is deep sympathy and goodwill in Britain—and I doubt not here also—towards the peoples of all the Russias and a resolve to persevere through many differences and rebuffs in establishing lasting friendships … Above all, we welcome, or should welcome, constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Measure by measure, phrase by phrase, Kennedy brilliantly drew America and the Soviet Union into a shared embrace of peace:

  Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other.

  Here is a paradox indeed. Two countries at the brink of war, yet in their long history, “almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other.” And Kennedy reminded his listeners of something equally fundamental: the Soviet Union’s unmatched sacrifices as the recent ally of the United States in the war against Hitler:

  And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland—a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago.

  But what binds the United States and the Soviet Union most in the quest for peace is an irony even stronger than recent history. Though the two countries are the world’s strongest, they are also perversely the world’s most vulnerable. Such is the reality of the nuclear age:

  Today, should total war ever break out again—no matter how—our two countries will be the primary target. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.

  Kennedy did not stop there, with the devastating tally of a future war, but went on to remind Americans (and Russians) of the crushing costs of the current Cold War itself:

  And even in the cold war, which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this Nation’s closest allies, our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle, with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counter-weapons.

  Putting together the pieces, the point is clear and overwhelming. Both the United States and the Soviet Union abhor war. They have never fought each other. They were allies in war. They can admire each other’s virtue and valor. They risk mutual annihilation. They are squandering their wealth in an arms race. Therefore, they also share a common interest in peace:

  In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine pe
ace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours. And even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.

  This last sentence, regarding a country’s keeping treaty obligations that are in its own interest, was vintage Churchill, who told the House of Commons in November 1953:

  The only really sure guide to the actions of mighty nations and powerful Governments is a correct estimate of what are and what they consider to be their own interests. I do not find it unreasonable or dangerous to conclude that internal prosperity rather than external conquest is not only the deep desire of the Russian peoples, but also the long-term interest of their rulers.6

  In reaching this conclusion, Kennedy’s rhetoric soared with empathy and insight, in what to my mind are the most eloquent and important words of the speech, and perhaps of his presidency:

  So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.