JFK And ‘Peace For All Time’

Was he kidding? Are these words for real? “I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived — yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.”

This was 60 years ago: June 10, 1963. John F. Kennedy — less than six months before his assassination — delivered a commencement address at American University. He spoke like a renegade, defying the certainties of state, the old Cross of Iron, that war is inevitable and always (when we wage it) necessary. At the time, the United States was ankle-deep in the Vietnam war and, at least according to some accounts, Kennedy

wanted out. He was also in direct communication with Nikita Khrushchev; the two, working in sync, had averted a nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis less than a year earlier, and were in the process of establishing a nuclear disarmament treaty.

My takeaway, after reading Kennedy’s speech, “A Strategy of Peace,” all these decades later, is stunned wonderment. You mean peace actually had political traction then, at least for a brief moment in time? It wasn’t just a cry of protest from the social margins, a.k.a., a fantasy? The creation of a global political structure based on cooperation rather than domination (or mutu