To Move the World (12 page)
Authors: Jeffrey D. Sachs
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.”
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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.”
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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.
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Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
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and Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, were shown the sections regarding nuclear testing just a few days before.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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 problems.
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.