To Move the World (9 page)

Kennedy was of course no stranger to the power of oratory. He had studied it since his youth, relished it, championed it, and aspired to greatness in it. His lifelong role model, in this arena as in so many others, was Churchill, whose incomparable rhetoric had helped save a civilization. If it was true at the Battle of Britain that “never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” then it was also probably true that never in the course of human conflict had so few words inspired so many to act so valiantly.
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Kennedy had been present for the speeches in the British House of Commons when war was declared in 1939, and had been deeply affected by them, particularly by Churchill’s words. Kennedy noted in April 1963 that Churchill “mobilized the English Language and sent it into battle.”
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Churchill’s oratory influenced Kennedy in more ways than one. On the campaign trail in 1960, Kennedy hired a drama coach to improve his speaking, and biographer Richard Reeves related his practice sessions: “Home alone in Washington, he would put on a silk bathrobe, pour himself a brandy, light up a cigar, and speak along with records of Winston Churchill’s greatest speeches.”
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Kennedy himself would soon mobilize language in the battle for peace.

Kennedy had an important weapon, his own verbal Excalibur, a linguistic sword of unparalleled strength and balance, able to cut to the core of an issue with remarkable insight and eloquence. This was Ted Sorensen, trusted counselor, speechwriter, adviser, and according to most, Kennedy’s intellectual alter ego. As Kennedy’s top national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, noted, “There just is no exaggerating [Sorensen’s] value and his closeness to the President … he had a deep sense of the President’s own values and purpose.”
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Sorensen was Kennedy’s chief speechwriter throughout his eight Senate years. He helped Kennedy assemble and write
Profiles in Courage
. He was Kennedy’s wordsmith throughout the 1960 campaign and in the White House. And he was on hand as adviser, scribe, and speechwriter for every major challenge that Kennedy confronted, drafting the key documents that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis and those that would lead the final public campaign for peace.

Kennedy with Ted Sorensen.

Sorensen embodied virtues and values ideally suited for the cause of peace. He was a midwesterner, a son of Nebraska, with its great tradition of anti-war sentiment. At Sorensen’s urging, Kennedy featured Senator George Norris’s principled and brave opposition to the U.S. entry into World War I in
Profiles in Courage
. Sorensen was the son of a Jewish mother and Unitarian father—a
“Jewnitarian,” as Sorensen joked in his memoirs. Both faiths shared the belief, in Sorensen’s words, that “human beings represent the one true God here on Earth, and that good works by man are sanctifying God’s name.”
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We can hear echoes of that faith in the closing words of Kennedy’s inaugural address: “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

Kennedy and Sorensen teamed up on the great Peace Speech and the others that followed later that summer. While we don’t know all of the sources that they drew upon, they would likely have reviewed several important speeches on peace given since the end of World War II, including Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace,” delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, and three by Eisenhower: “Chance for Peace,” delivered in April 1953, the month following Stalin’s death; the “Atoms for Peace” speech at the UN in December 1953; and his farewell address, given three days before the end of his presidency in January 1961. As for Kennedy’s own previous speeches, two had set the stage for the peace initiative: the inaugural address, of course, and also his first speech to the UN General Assembly in September 1961.

One final and enormous rhetorical influence arrived just before Kennedy’s speech. It came not as a speech, but as a written message from the beloved Pope John XXIII, in his dying days. The pope had sent a message of peace during the darkest days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Khrushchev had expressed his personal gratitude to the pope for that message. That in turn encouraged the pope to devote his final days to the encyclical
Pacem in Terris
(Peace on Earth), which moved the global public, particularly the pope’s message that “any disputes which may arise between nations must be resolved by negotiation and agreement, and not by recourse to arms.”
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The words of that inspiring encyclical, issued
on April 11, 1963, just two months before Kennedy’s Peace Speech, likely informed Kennedy’s own speech.

(March 5, 1946)
 

Churchill’s words were the primary model for Kennedy: vigorous, down-to-earth, a clarion call. Churchill’s words informed, explained, called for action, and predicted success. He was a moralist, realist, activist, and visionary. After a Churchill speech, there was no choice but to sally forth, to do the deeds that would win the affection and honor of later generations. Churchill’s rhetorical power came above all from the sense of fierce realism that he conveyed. He would not hold back vital information from compatriots and allies. His listeners knew this, and felt empowered by it.

In Fulton, Churchill had a few specific purposes.
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He bid his listeners that day, including President Harry Truman, to grasp the reality of the newly divided Europe. Using the phrase that came immediately to define the Cold War, he sounded the alarm: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” “Iron curtain” had an earlier provenance, having appeared in diplomatic, literary, and political references during the preceding half century; Churchill himself used it on several occasions in 1945. But it was the “Sinews of Peace” speech that defined the new era in those terms for the entire world.

Churchill’s speech emphasized peace as well as the Cold War. It made clear that “we understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression.” Churchill underscored, “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their powers and doctrines.” He urged the United States and the United Kingdom to meet that expansionist tendency together firmly but peacefully.

Churchill’s urgent message on that day was more about willpower
than military might. He called for a special relationship between the United States and the British Commonwealth and Empire. He spoke of that relationship in the terms of everyday life, not of high diplomacy. “If two of the workmen [building the Temple of Peace] know each other particularly well and are old friends, if their families are intermingled … why cannot they work together at the common task as friends and partners?”

He called for building the new United Nations, so that “its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can some day be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.” And under the general authority of the UN he called for a new relationship with Russia, not at a vague point in the future, but then and now, in 1946. We should reach, said Churchill, “a good understanding on all points with Russia under the general authority of the United Nations Organization and by the maintenance of that good understanding through many peaceful years, by the whole strength of the English-speaking world and its connections.”

Churchill ended his remarks to his American listeners with a challenge, a promise, and a vision. Our efforts could redeem the future, create the peace we sought:

Churchill’s promise—peace “not only for our time, but for a century to come”—not only referenced Chamberlain’s debacle
eight years earlier in declaring the attainment of “peace in our time” after Munich, but looked forward confidently to a new era of peace. It was a turn of phrase that John Kennedy would echo seventeen years later in his Peace Speech, when he declared that we seek “not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.”

Churchill would rue the fact that “Sinews of Peace” was later remembered mainly as a call to the Cold War, as its principal effect in the United States was to warn the public about the new “iron curtain.” Yet the speech was vivid and unmistakable in its call for peace through strength:

Even if the world would remember the speech mostly for its grim warning, Kennedy certainly would remember it also for the purposes that Churchill intended: as a call for peace through strength, resolve, and negotiation.

(April 16, 1953)
 

Churchill’s speech was followed not by peace but by the Cold War, which began in earnest and rapidly spiraled into a series of crises: instability in Greece and Turkey and the Truman Doctrine in 1947; the Marshall Plan and its rejection by the Soviet Union the
same year; the Berlin crisis and airlift in 1948–1949; the Soviet atomic bomb in 1949; the Chinese Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949; the Korean War from 1950 to 1953; and many more. The first major pause of that spiral came with Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953. Stalin’s ruthlessness, brutality, and paranoia had fueled much of the Cold War in its early years, in addition to terrorizing his own colleagues and nation. His death opened the possibility of a thaw, if not a new start entirely. Eisenhower took a step toward that thaw with an important speech one month after Stalin’s death, billed as the “Chance for Peace.”
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The speech was unusual for Eisenhower: a relatively bold attempt to defuse the Cold War dynamics. Eisenhower made a bid for a new relationship with the Soviet Union, but it was circumscribed, reflecting the doubts and cautions of Eisenhower’s own hardline advisers, especially Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

The opening line is dramatic: “In this spring of 1953 the free world weighs one question above all others: the chance for a just peace for all peoples.” He recalled “the more hopeful spring of 1945, bright with the promise of victory and freedom,” a moment of hope that he himself had helped to make possible as the victorious supreme Allied commander of World War II.