On This Day: JFK's Visionary 'Peace Speech'
In his famous speech at American University, the president adopted the language of a leading antinuclear and peace activist
Sixty years ago today, on June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered the “Peace Speech,” his historic American University commencement address. Coming just eight months after the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s address is widely regarded as one of the most visionary American presidential speeches of the 20th century.
“What kind of peace do we seek?” he asked. “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war but the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living… that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to 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 for all time.” War, he insisted, makes no sense “in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost 10 times the explosive force delivered by all of the allied air forces in the Second World War” when “All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.”
The speech, notes Peter Kuznick, AU Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, was written by speechwriter Theodore Sorenson with input from a small group of close advisors. It included language proposed in a 16-page June 1 draft submitted by Norman Cousins, a Saturday Review editor and staunch antinuclear and peace activist.
The speech articulated the liberal turn in JFK’s foreign policy after the Cuban missile crisis. It heartened Soviet leadership. It troubled the Pentagon. JFK, who had campaigned as a Cold War hawk, was calling for an end to the Cold War. As historian Jon Meacham said on Rob Reiner’s “Who Killed JFK?” podcast, “The JFK of 1961 was not the JFK of 1962 and the JFK of 1962 was not the JFK of 1963.”
JFK wanted to take America in a new direction, and his enemies knew it.
Read Kuznick’s article here (h/t Katrina Vanden Heuvel)
Still think this was the final trigger for the assassination - and, reading the speech last week at the Kennedy Library in Boston, it’s staggering how progressive, indeed socialist, it was for 1963. He really was decades ahead of his time.
Jfk 4/27/61 American newspapers assoc..
It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions–by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a wartime discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.