How two pacifists and their president cut out the Joint Chiefs of Staff and crafted a revolutionary foreign policy statement
"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."It is likely that JFK, with his keen sense of the absurd, smelled out the ritualized game aspect of the whole Cold War scenario as soon as he got within sniffing distance of where the levers were pulled. And of course he would have known, at the same time, that it was a rigged game, like all of them ultimately are. Only this was rigged for destruction, rigged by the defense and national security apparatuses of the two countries, a rigged and demoniac game. At first he accepted it because he couldn't see a way around it. But Kennedy had had possibly the most existential moment of any 20th Century American. He (and Nikita Kruschev) had actually looked down the nuclear barrel, into the literally unthinkable blackness at the bottom. After that, no-one could tell him he had to keep the game in play. So he decided to tell his country that we were going to stop playing.
The origins of the speech lay in Pope John XXIII's recruitment of Norman Cousins, a lifelong peace activist and Unitarian, as an informal link between the Vatican, the Kremlin and the White House. Cousins spent some time with Kruschev; he then came home to talk with Kennedy. It became clear to Cousins and Kennedy that Kennedy and Kruschev were in symmetrical positions in their two power structures: "Kruschev would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from the hard-line crowd, who see every move in that direction as appeasement. I've got similar problems," Kennedy said.
David Talbot picks up the story in his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years:
"When Cousins sugested that Kennedy blast through the impasse with 'a breathtaking new approach, calling for an end to the Cold War and a fresh start in American-Russian relationships,' Kennedy was intrigued. He asked Cousines to confer on the speech with Ted Sorensen [JFK's speech writer] a fellow Unitarian with whom Cousins was friendly.
"The idea of two anti-war Unitarians working on a presidential speech to re-define U.S.-Soviet relations would surely have been deeply disturbing to national security apparatchiks, as Kennedy knew. The president directed Sorensen to keep his working draft under tight wraps, and not to circulate it as usual to the Pentagon, CIA and State Department for comments."
Americans had been indoctrinated for years with the idea that the Soviet Union represented all that was abhorrent to American ideals, that they were fanatically bound to their goal of exterminating us, that confrontation was inevitable, that we could not share the planet with them. To which JFK said, sure we can. No person with a mind and a soul wants this. And so let's begin with our minds and souls, and worry less about theirs. Because the moral onus is as much on us as on them. Because peace, not victory, is the highest good.
Not many heard or absorbed the speech, then or now. A week later it had brought 896 letters into the White House in response. A bill on the cost of freight shipping brought in 28,000.
"Please read it. It's one of the great documents of the 20th Century."
- Robert McNamara
Read the American University speech here.
Watch it here.
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