‘Peace For All Time’: JFK American U Speech at 62

Peter Kuznick delivers a talk at a Simone Weil Center symposium on John F. Kennedy’s momentous 1963 American University speech, marking the president’s transformation from Cold Warrior to peace seeker.

By Peter Kuznick
Simone Weil Center

On June 10, 1963, John F. Kennedy delivered his historic American University commencement address, which may be the most important and visionary American presidential speech of the 20th century — one that is as relevant in today’s troubled world as it was when it was delivered [62] years ago. 

Coming just eight months after the world had teetered on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a war that Kennedy understood he and Nikita Khrushchev had averted by luck as much as by statesmanship, the speech marked Kennedy’s extraordinary transformation from Cold Warrior to Peace Warrior, a transformation that had occurred in a remarkably brief period of time.

Kennedy had ridden to the White House on the back of a nonexistent missile gap and an anti-communism so fierce that he excoriated Richard Nixon for having been soft on the communists in the aftermath of Sputnik and the Cuban Revolution.

But he had also shown a healthy disdain for European colonialism. The disastrous and humiliating Bay of Pigs invasion in the early months of his presidency opened his eyes to some of the forces he would be up against in changing the course of U.S. foreign policy. It was then that he excoriated “those C.I.A. bastards” and Joint Chiefs “sons of bitches” and threatened to “shatter the C.I.A. into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

His utter contempt for the military and intelligence community was reinforced by their pressure on him during the 1962 crisis to bomb the missile sites in Cuba, invade the island, and topple the Castro government, advice we now know would have triggered World War III.

Following the October Crisis, as the Cubans call it, it was Khrushchev who first reached out to Kennedy with a gesture of friendship and an appeal to halt the madness. Understanding how close they had come to nuclear annihilation and how little control either could exercise over the outcome, Khrushchev wrote Kennedy a long letter on Oct. 30, stating,

“Evil has brought some good. The good is that now people have felt more tangibly the breathing of the burning flames of thermonuclear war and have a more clear realization of the threat looming over them if the arms race is not stopped.”

He guessed correctly that this was as true for Americans as it was for Russians. He made a series of daring proposals for eliminating “everything in our relations capable of generating a new crisis.” He offered a nonaggression treaty between the Warsaw Pact and NATO but even better, he said, why not “disband all military blocs?”

He called for an end to all nuclear tests, not just in the atmosphere, as a step toward complete disarmament and encouraged resolution of both the German question and the imbroglio over the seating of China at the UN. He urged Kennedy to offer his own counterproposals. But Kennedy’s lukewarm response dashed Khrushchev’s hopes for real progress.

It took a visit to Moscow in early December by Saturday Review editor and antinuclear activist Norman Cousins to break the impasse.

Cousins had been one of the leading critics of the madness of the early nuclear age with his powerful condemnations of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in editorials such as “Modern Man Is Obsolete,” which described the “primitive fear” gripping the nation in the immediate aftermath of the bombings.

Before Cousins departed for Moscow in what would prove one of the most successful instances of citizen diplomacy during the Cold War, Kennedy asked him to help convince Khrushchev that Kennedy too wanted to improve relations and negotiate an arms control treaty.

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Cousins and Khrushchev met for over three hours, during which Khrushchev said something that in its haunting simplicity and incontrovertible truth still resonates 60 years later:

“Peace is the most important goal in the world. If we don’t have peace and the nuclear bombs start to fall, what difference will it make whether we are Communists or Catholic or capitalists or Chinese or Russians or Americans? Who could tell us apart? Who will be left to tell us apart?”

Khrushchev was sincere in his abhorrence of nuclear war, having a decade earlier, after his initial briefing on the devastation that such a war would cause, been unable to sleep for days.

Khrushchev expressed confidence that they could agree on a test ban treaty inspection regime that would satisfy U.S. concerns about Soviet cheating and Soviet concerns about U.S. spying.

Prospects looked good until Kennedy, under pressure from U.S. hawks, sharply increased the number of on-site inspections that the U.S. would demand.

With prospects for a treaty faltering, Cousins returned to Moscow to speak with Khrushchev in April 1963 and, upon return, explained to Kennedy the pressure the Soviet leader was under from his hawkish advisors.

Kennedy observed,

“One of the ironic things about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems.”

Kennedy sent Undersecretary of State and former U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman to Moscow. Harriman cabled Kennedy that Khrushchev “meant what he was saying about peaceful coexistence.”

The two had attended a U.S.-Soviet track meet at Lenin Stadium. The crowd went wild when the American and Soviet runners marched onto the field arm in arm. Then Harriman and Khrushchev rose to a huge ovation. Harriman said he saw tears in Khrushchev’s eyes.

Cousins conveyed Khrushchev’s frustration with Kennedy’s thus far tepid response. Kennedy asked Cousins if there was anything he could do to reassure the Soviet leader of his sincerity.

Cousins urged Kennedy to give a stirring speech calling for ending the Cold War and starting a new era of U.S.-Soviet comity. Cousins even submitted a draft of the speech, which Ted Sorenson and other close Kennedy advisors built upon without any input whatsoever from the C.I.A., State Department or Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In it, on that momentous occasion, Kennedy proferred his new impassioned vision for world peace to American University students, faculty, and guests. He said he had “chosen this time and place to discuss…the most important topic on earth: world peace” and explained, “What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”

Kennedy elaborated,

“I am talking about genuine peace — the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living — the kind of peace 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.”

He insisted that war 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.” But he wasn’t finished.

He next called for reexamining “our attitude toward the Soviet Union.” “It is sad,” he admitted, to

“realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also…a warning to the American people not to…see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodations as impossible and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”

The alternative to peace, he stated, was simply unthinkable: “Today, should total war ever break out again … All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.”  

With that recognition, he went even further: “Let us re-examine our attitude toward the Cold War,” he said. As if speaking to American and Russian leaders [62] years into the future, he wisely advised,

“nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

Kennedy concluded with the upbeat words:

“we shall do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on — not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”

And embedded in the speech is one passage whose poignance has haunted listeners for generations, much like Martin Luther King’s prescient and unforgettable speech the night before his assassination. Kennedy said,

“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 planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” 

Kennedy’s speech was widely heralded in the Soviet Union, where it was probably more appreciated at the time than it was in the United States. Pravda republished it in its entirety, except for one paragraph. Khrushchev told Harriman it was “the greatest speech by any American president since Roosevelt.”

Although Kennedy would survive for only another four months before being cut down in Dallas and the old Cold Warrior in him would occasionally again raise its ugly head, it was clear that Kennedy was intent upon changing the course of history.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told [the journalist and historian] David Talbott, “The American University speech laid out exactly what Kennedy’s intentions were. If he had lived, the world would have been different. I feel quite confident of that.”

The new demarche did pave the way for passage of the first nuclear arms control agreement three months later, a milestone that Sorenson believed gave Kennedy “greater satisfaction” than any “other achievement” as president.

The evidence is overwhelming that he also intended to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam as part of his plan to remake the world and end the Cold War. He took steps to replace the space race with joint exploration and even contemplated a much-needed course correction on Cuba.

But it was the prospect of changing relations with the Soviet Union that excited him the most. He told friends that he would conclude another arms control agreement and then become the first sitting president to ever visit the communist heartland, where he would receive a hero’s welcome.

That this never occurred was a tragedy of unspeakable proportions — one from which the world has still not recovered as today’s proxy war between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine makes sadly and dangerously apparent.

Peter Kuznick is professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute, American University.

This address was delivered to the Simone Weil Center on June 9, 2022.

Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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