To Move the World (10 page)

Eisenhower then went on to outline the “two distinct roads” charted by the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States, by Eisenhower’s light, charted a path that was faithful to the spirit of the UN: “to prohibit strife, to relieve tensions, to banish fears.” The Soviet Union, by contrast, pursued a goal of “power superiority at all cost,” in turn compelling the free nations to “remain armed, strong, and ready for the risk of war.” The result was a way of life “forged by eight years of fear and force.” On the current course, said Eisenhower, the best outcome is more fear and tension; the worst, atomic war.

Eisenhower bemoaned the huge costs for both sides:

Eisenhower posed the key question that “stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?” And he asked the question of the new Soviet leadership. Will it “awaken, with the rest of the world, to the point of peril reached and help turn the tide of history”? He acknowledged that “[w]e do not yet know.” Eisenhower said that only deeds would tell, giving the list: an Austrian peace treaty; the release of prisoners held since World War II; an honorable armistice in Korea; an end to the direct and
indirect attacks on the security of Indochina and Malaya (the colonial possessions of Southeast Asia); and the fostering of a broader European community with a free and united Germany and the full independence of the East European nations.

All of this would make possible vast rewards, including an agreement on arms reduction and the enormous savings that would result. The possibilities of such an agreement would present the world “with the greatest task, and the greatest opportunity, of all. It is this: the dedication of the energies, the resources, and the imaginations of all peaceful nations to a new kind of war. This would be a declared total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces of poverty and need.”

Eisenhower made a pledge:

The offer was bold, but also limited in a basic way that Kennedy’s offer ten years later would not be. As Eisenhower himself put it, he was offering the Soviet Union a test of good faith through a list of measures the Soviet Union must enact. “The test is clear,” he said of Soviet actions. Kennedy, by contrast, would bid Americans to reexamine their own attitudes to peace, the better to meet the Soviet Union on common ground.

Eisenhower regarded this speech as one of his most important. In his 1961 memoirs, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, declared it to be the greatest speech of Eisenhower’s career. Unusually, the Soviet Union allowed its publication in full in
the newspaper
Pravda
, showing the high regard that it gave to Eisenhower’s peace gesture.
¹⁰

The optimism lasted through the end of the year, when Eisenhower spoke to the UN General Assembly, offering “atoms for peace.”
^†
11
There, Eisenhower spoke of the horrors of nuclear war and the horrendous consequences of the nuclear arms race. Both sides can inflict hideous damage on the other. And the nuclear stalemate was little reprieve, said Eisenhower: “To pause there [with devastating weapons pointed at each side] would be to confirm the hopeless finality of a belief that two atomic colossi are doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world.” Kennedy would echo these words a decade later when he also challenged the view that we are “doomed,” condemned to war.

Eisenhower called for patience in moving the world “out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light.” He called for a step-by-step process of agreements on disarmament. And specifically, he suggested that both sides allocate a fraction of their fissionable material “to serve the peaceful purposes of mankind,” for agriculture, medicine, and electrical power.

Yet the hopes of 1953 proved evanescent. The Soviet Union was torn by an internal power struggle, pitting Khrushchev against his competitors for power, Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov, and Vyacheslav Molotov. Khrushchev won the backing of Soviet generals in part by urging a hardline response to the United States. And equally important, Eisenhower’s own side pushed back, especially Secretary of State Dulles. Both sides missed the most important opportunity since the end of World War II to halt the spiraling instability and escalation.

Prime Minister Churchill met with Eisenhower in Bermuda in December 1953 to urge a new peace initiative. Convinced that Stalin’s death offered a rare opportunity to wind down the Cold War, Churchill told the House of Commons on May 11, 1953, that “[i]t would be a mistake to assume that nothing can be settled with Soviet Russia unless or until everything is settled.”
¹²
Yet Eisenhower was more skeptical. He told Churchill rather brutally that Russia “was a woman of the streets and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath,” demonstrating his deep hesitation about negotiating with the Soviets despite his desire for peace.
¹³
Churchill was dismayed to watch the United States squander this opportunity under the thrall of simplistic Cold War ideology and the dogma of “massive retaliation.”

Nevertheless, Eisenhower longed to be a peacemaker. Given the severe limitations in mutual understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union, however, his moment never arrived. Stubborn disagreements between the United States and the Soviet Union over whether onsite inspections were required to distinguish underground nuclear explosions from earthquakes (as the United States held) prevented the completion of a much-discussed test ban treaty. And as so often happened in the Cold War, even when events were moving slowly in the right direction, they were knocked off track by miscalculation: Eisenhower’s last push for peace in 1960 ended in the flames of Gary Powers’s downed U-2 spy plane.

(January 17, 1961)
 

Eisenhower delivered his most famous speech just three days before he left the White House to John Kennedy.
¹⁴
Only two presidential farewell addresses are widely remembered today. George Washington used his to warn Americans about “entangling alliances
overseas.” Eisenhower used his to warn Americans about entangling alliances right at home, specifically those among the military, industry, and the government. Eisenhower’s warning about the risk of the “military-industrial complex” has reverberated through a half century.

How poignant and powerful for America’s greatest twentieth-century general to caution America about the threat the military posed to American democracy. No one besides Eisenhower could have had the stature and credibility to deliver this message:

These words were prescient, and also bittersweet. Eisenhower had wanted to make peace with his Soviet counterparts, but he never succeeded. Events, experts, the CIA, and cabinet members always put obstacles in his path. He himself was perhaps too skeptical and detached. Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, but he never really held it in check, or found the voice and presidential direction to achieve agreement with the Soviet Union.

(January 20, 1961)
 

Kennedy would draw on these precedents of public persuasion, and especially on Churchill’s concepts and phrases, in his own quest for peace in 1963. He would talk about the mutual gains from disarmament; the need to stop the upward ratcheting of risks; the danger of accidents; and the interests of both sides in peace. Yet Kennedy also made important innovations in rhetoric and strategy, innovations that reflected his hard-won insights and personal courage.

Kennedy spoke of the quest for peace on countless occasions, starting with the powerful words of his inaugural address on January 20, 1961.
¹⁵
In his first moments as president, he stated clearly the unique challenge and risk of the time. “[M]an holds in his mortal hands,” said Kennedy, “the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.” This echoed the paradox previously expressed forcefully by Churchill, that “[w]e, and all nations, stand, at this hour in human history, before the portals of supreme catastrophe and of measureless reward. My faith is that in God’s mercy we shall choose aright.”
¹⁶

Kennedy called on both sides to “begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.” He then spelled out his strategy in an uncanny way. Echoing Eisenhower’s words in the 1953 “Chance for Peace” address, Kennedy said, “[N]either can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course—both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.” This called for negotiation, Churchill’s “jaw-jaw” over “war-war.” Characteristically,
Kennedy would pose that challenge as a collective one, something for “us” as Americans. “So let us begin anew,” he invited his compatriots, “remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

And here was another famous Kennedy locution:
antimetabole
, a word derived from the Greek and meaning the repetition of words in transposed order. Kennedy and Sorensen loved the device (“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country”). It expressed well Kennedy’s sense of irony, complexity, and play, and it conveyed rhetorically the powerful idea of human choice: Would we choose to negotiate or be overwhelmed by fear?

Again and again, Kennedy would call on “us” to move forward, sometimes “us” Americans, and sometimes “us” meaning both the United States and Soviet Union. “Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.” After years of false steps, “let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms.” “Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.”

In the inaugural address, Kennedy also emphasized, as Churchill and Eisenhower had before him, that progress would be incremental, not a single transformation. He aimed for a “beachhead of cooperation to push back the jungle of suspicion.” The quest for peace would take time. It would not be finished in his time or ours, but we must take the first steps: