John F Kennedy: Anti-Imperialist, Part 2

The Peace Speech

As some authors have noted, particularly Richard Mahoney, Senator Kennedy was strongly attacked because of his Algeria speech. It was simply too far ahead of its time. The attention the speech garnered in the press was remarkable. Kennedy’s office clipped 138 editorials. By an almost 2-1 ratio, the reaction was unfavorable. (JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 21) Kennedy really thought he had made a mistake. But his father told him: He didn’t know it but he was lucky. Algeria was only going to get worse, and within a few months everyone will find out you were right. Which is what happened. By the end of the year, Kennedy was on the cover of Time Magazine. (12/2/57) The story inside was titled ‘Man out Front’.

British author and TV host Alistair Cooke astutely noted that Kennedy had now,

…made himself the Democrat whom the president must do something about, the one presidential hopeful the Republicans will delight to scorn. It is a form of running martyrdom that Senators Humphrey and Johnson may come to envy. (Mahoney, p. 29)

This was a correct diagnosis. The Algeria speech made Kennedy the leading light in his party on foreign policy. And it launched him into the top tier of Democratic candidates for the nomination in 1960. It was a significant milestone in his career.

The next speech that McCarthy deals with is the one that both Oliver Stone and James Douglass made famous. It is Kennedy’s Commencement Address from American University made in the summer of 1963. One of the achievements of the book is that it is one of the very few volumes that includes both the Algeria speech and the so-called Peace Speech. There should be some background noted about this singular speech.

First, Kennedy made this address a few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Moscow had rather stupidly moved all three legs of the nuclear triad into Cuba, thinking it would be undetected. It was not. Therefore, Washington knew the Russians now had a first strike capability just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev managed to negotiate a way out, but it was a frightening 13 days.

Secondly, after this close call, secret negotiations over a test ban treaty began with Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins being the go between. In April, the negotiations had hit an impasse. During a meeting with JFK at the White House an interesting exchange took place. Kennedy observed that the Russian leader was trying to negotiate in good faith. But he was constrained by those in the hard line camp who interpret this as appeasement. Kennedy said he was in the same predicament. The stasis then encourages the hard liners on each side, “each using the actions of the other to justify its own position.” (Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 345)

But, Kennedy added, it was necessary to get an agreement this year. Because if one is not achieved, the genie may be out of the bottle. The president was referring to the issue of non-proliferation. He was haunted by the possibility that if no agreement was signed now, by 1970 there could be ten nuclear powers, not just four: “I regard that as the greatest possible danger and hazard.” (Ted Sorenson, Kennedy, p. 821)

Kennedy said that he was not willing to accept failure. He then asked Cousins, “Do you have any suggestions?” Cousins replied that the time was ripe for Kennedy to make his most important speech since entering office. Kennedy asked Cousins to send him a memorandum on the subject. Which Cousins did. (op. cit. Douglass, p. 346) A meeting then occurred between Cousins and speech writer Ted Sorenson. He asked Cousins for specific ideas.

And that was not all. To show how determined Kennedy was on this front, consider the following. He joined with British leader Harold MacMillan in proposing high level talks to be held in Moscow on a test ban. Kennedy wanted to announce this in his American University speech. And on the eve of that speech, Khrushchev agreed. (Sorenson, p. 822)

Kennedy also decided, pretty much unilaterally he would also announce that, once the present series of tests was completed, America would not be “the first to resume nuclear tests in the atmosphere.” (ibid). He also wanted to announce this at American University.

Sorenson later wrote that Kennedy deliberately planned on trying to reach beyond the established boundaries of the Cold War. And the author of the speech also credits Norman Cousins. (ibid)

McGeorge Bundy then told others in the White House that JFK had decided to make a major address on arms control. Bundy asked people like Arthur Schlesinger to send their thoughts to Sorenson. As Schlesinger correctly notes in his book, Kennedy “had evidently concluded that a fresh context was required to save the dying negotiations.” The speech was scheduled for June 10^th at American University. On June 7^th, Bundy put together a small group, which included Schlesinger and Sorenson, to look at a first draft. (Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 900) Sorenson had decided that, since it was such a departure, this speech would not be pre-examined for clearance by other departments. JFK was determined to “put forward a fundamentally new emphasis on the peaceful and the positive in our relations with the Soviets.” (Sorenson, p. 823)

On his first glance, Schlesinger’s reaction was penetrating and astute:

Its central substantive proposal was a moratorium on atmospheric testing; but its effect was to redefine the whole national attitude toward the Cold War. It was a brilliant and faithful reproduction of the President’s views and we read it with mounting admiration and excitement. (ibid)

What Cousins had done, but what Kennedy and Khrushchev had kept under wraps was this: Pope John XXIII was a part of the circle of communications trying to get a deal on atmospheric atomic missile testing put under control. In April of 1963 the Pope had passed a paper called Pacem in Terris which was billed as a papal encycial. In that document, which the pope had given to Cousins to give to Moscow, it said that there can be, and should be, communications between Moscow and Washington, and this should include discussions of atomic arms limitations. (Douglass, p. 347) It was most unfortunate that while Kennedy was traveling to see Pope John in Rome and review the encyclical, that tragedy struck the Pope: the author died. On June 21, Cardinal Montini succeeded him as John Paul VI.

Kennedy was flying back from a mayors’ conference in Hawaii as Sorenson was completing the speech. On his return, a Saturday, Kennedy began contemplating the speech and then put the finishing touches on Sorenson’s draft. The speech was to be delivered on Monday, June 10th. Kennedy had sent a message to the Soviets in advance that they should be very much interested in what he was going to say that day. (Sorenson, p. 823)

Kennedy started the speech by praising the concept of the university. (The entire speech is in McCarthy pp. 52-62 ) He began by quoting the English poet John Masefield on a university being “a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see.” Therefore, this was an ideal setting for him to address today’s subject, on which “ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived—yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.”

He went on to say that he was not talking about a Pax Americana, that is a peace enforced by American arms or only for Americans. He then segued to the absolute necessity of peace in the face of the fact of the possibility of atomic war. He then exemplified what he meant by this: we now live ”. . . in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all of the allied air forces in the Second World War.” But it was even worse than that. Because in the aftermath of any nuclear exchange, radiation would be carried by wind and water to the far corners of the world. He then asked: but is this the only way to guarantee peace? He did not think such was the case.

He then said something compelling: “I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war….But we have no more urgent task.” We needed then to re-examine our own attitudes toward the Cold War before asking the Russians to do so. If we do not see our goal clearly, then this will make war more possible.

The kind of peace he envisioned was one in which international problems could be solved by discussion and negotiations. To him this meant not seeing the USSR through a distorted lens: “No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.” Here he added that the two countries had never been at war with each other. And he reminded the audience that no nation had ever suffered the losses that Russia did due to the Nazi invasion in World War II:

At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms 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 Kennedy now added, if war should break out now between the two superpowers, it would be much worse. And it would happen in just 24 hours. Therefore both countries have a powerful interest in both keeping the peace and in halting the arms race: “We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle, in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counter-weapons.” Therefore, there should be a common ground for negotiation since the monies used on weapons of war could be used much more productively. From here Kennedy built to a crescendo:

So let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to 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.

Kennedy then referred to the arms negotiations in Moscow that had been agreed upon. He also added that he did not plan on continuing atomic testing in the atmosphere as long as others do not. He closed with his belief that peace was basically a matter of human rights:

The right to live out our lives without fear of devastation—the right to breathe air as nature provided it—the right of future generations to a healthy existence….We shall do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just.

The speech got little attention at home. According to David Talbot, the White House only got 896 letters from the public. A relatively small amount compared to other issues of the week. Barry Goldwater and other Republicans paid scant attention, calling it a “soft stand”. (Brothers, p. 206) But the Russians found the speech excellent. The verbatim text was printed by the Soviet press and it was also broadcast there. Khrushchev called it the best speech given by an American president since Roosevelt. (Sorenson, p. 825) Within two months, the atmospheric Test Ban Treaty was signed.

There should be one last point made about the Peace Speech. Amazingly, it was made within 48 hours of Kennedy making his landmark civil rights speech on national television, the evening of June 11^th. That has been called the greatest speech on the subject since Lincoln. Many presidents do not make two memorable speeches in their entire term—think of Jimmy Carter. Kennedy made two epochal speeches in two days. That McCarthy included both the Algeria speech and the Peace Speech in his book makes it worth purchasing in and of itself.

Part 3: Kennedy and the Congo

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