"... we have no more urgent task ..."

All this -- All this is not unrelated to world peace. "When a man's way[s] please the Lord," the Scriptures tell us, "he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights: the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation; the right to breathe air as nature provided it; the right of future generations to a healthy existence?

Those words are from a speech delivered June 10, 1963.  President John F. Kennedy gave it for the graduation at American University, and This link will provide both the text and a video.   I came to reread this morning because of James Carroll, how notes in his column JFK's torch for Obama the deliberate choosing of American U as the site where Ted Kennedy endorsed Obama.

This diary is not about the primary.  It is about a vision of what peace entails, as espoused by JFK and described by Carroll.  It is about the hopes some have for a very different world.    
Carroll reminds us about the speech:

At American University John Kennedy laid out an urgent vision for this country. He did not live to advance that vision, and it remains unrealized to this day.

The most telling fact about the commencement address Kennedy delivered on June 10, 1963, is that Kennedy wrote it in secret. A small circle of trusted aides contributed to the text, but Kennedy kept the national security establishment in the dark about his intentions, which is surprising, given his subject. He came "to this time and place," he said, "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."

"Too many think peace is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief." Indeed, Kennedy's speech was an end-run around his national security experts, a direct appeal to the broad public, an attempt to break the iron grip of Cold War militarism that imprisoned the White House and the State Department, as much as the Pentagon. Kennedy had been preparing the speech ever since he had stared into the abyss of nuclear war the previous October, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He knew that, but for his own lonely opposition to the nation's most "realistic" defense leaders, the nuclear holocaust would have happened. "I speak of peace because of the new face of war."

Carroll rightly points out that the broad vision espoused by Kennedy initiated a process that led to arms negotiations, even as an arms race continued. Then with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war we became complacent, continuing through the last administration to maintain a Cold War stance, losing the sense of urgency which Kennedy sought to impart.

Kennedy's speech is hard to extract.  But there are words that are so relevant in light of the doctrines espoused by the current administration.  For example, early in the speech Kennedy offers a paragraph about his understanding of peace:

I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth: peace. What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and 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 in all time.

The last line of that paragraph seems to me to be a deliberate reference to an earlier event, the effort of Neville Chamberlain at Munich to avoid another Great war.  The term "peace in our time" had perhaps been totally devalued by its connection with that effort - it seemed in retrospect to mean merely a postponing of an eventual conflict.  Kennedy confronts that challenge by looking far past it:  peace in all time.  

Kenedy was speaking in a context of total and nuclear war, something narrowly avoided months earlier in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He addresses this in is very next paragraph:

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

Kennedy wrote in the specific context of the threat of a nuclear holocaust, something that seemed almost unavoidable given the incrasing stockpile of weapons of which he noted

single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.

From this point on I wish to examine Kennedy's words in light of our own times.  We live in a time when political leaders of both parties justify preemptive military action on the necessity of our security, to prevent other nations from achieving nuclear weapons, or because we argue they are sponsors of terrorism, explicitly or implicitly.   The mindset from which such assertions come has permeated our consciousness, perverted our political dialog.  And unless we can see how this, there is little hope that we can as a nation and a society coalesce around a leadership that will seek a better way, the only way we can hope the world will survive.

John F. Kennedy came to power as a military hawk, arguing (probably while knowing the fallacy of his arguments) that the Eisenhower administration had endangered the security of the nation by allowing the development of a missile gap when compared with the USSR.   In this speech he takes an entirely different approach to the issues of national security with which every President must deal.  Note the following:

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary, rational end of rational men. I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war, and frequently the words of the pursuers fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

we have no more urgent task - words as true today as they were almost 25 years ago. He addresses the challenge of those who would argue that peace is impossible:

First examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again. I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.

Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions -- on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace; no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process -- a way of solving problems.

Let me repeat that last line: For peace is a process -- a way of solving problems.  This requires a very different attitude than has been the ground of our political discussions about issues of national security.  And I do not propose in a single diary to explore all the dimensions of those discussions, and how they need to change if we are to have any hope of moving towards peace.

Nor can I go through the entire speech.  I hope I have given you a sense of its importance.  That is, its importance to our own time, for yet again we are in a time where the kinds of belligerant approaches to international relations that brought the world to the brink of a nuclear cataclysm are too endemic, not only in our nation to be sure.  But we are responsible for our nation, and we need to remember that because Kennedy spoke - and acted - as he did, that at least for while there was a lessening of tensions between the world's two major nuclear powers.  Had there not been such a lessening, and had not subsequent presidents been willing to at least partially pursue the vision espoused by Kennedy through their continued negotiations on arms reductions, we might well NOT be here to have the opportunity to continue movement towards Kennedy's vision.

Kennedy argued for direct talks between potential adversaries.  This led not only to face to face negotiations, but also to establishment of the hotline.  It is easy to contrast this attitude with those of our own time who insist on our potential opponents taking the first action before we will even consider direct discussion.  Kennedy initiated and found his adversary, also contemplating the abyss of a hot nuclear confrontation, willing to respond.  

Like his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy saw peace in a broad context.  Perhaps that was because both men had experienced the horror of war.  Eisenhower reminded us that every dollar spend on weapons was taken from schools and hospitals.   And Kennedy?   Read these words:

Finally, my fellow Americans, let us examine our attitude towards peace and freedom here at home. The quality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad. We must show it in the dedication of our own lives -- as many of you who are graduating today will have an opportunity to do, by serving without pay in the Peace Corps abroad or in the proposed National Service Corps here at home. But wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because freedom is incomplete. It is the responsibility of the executive branch at all levels of government -- local, State, and National -- to provide and protect that freedom for all of our citizens by all means within our authority. It is the responsibility of the legislative branch at all levels, wherever the authority is not now adequate, to make it adequate. And it is the responsibility of all citizens in all sections of this country to respect the rights of others and respect the law of the land.

All this -- All this is not unrelated to world peace. "When a man's way[s] please the Lord," the Scriptures tell us, "he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights: the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation; the right to breathe air as nature provided it; the right of future generations to a healthy existence?

I wish that events in our time did not give the lie to the penultimate paragraph of Kennedy's speech.  That paragraph reads:

The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough -- more than enough -- of war and hate and oppression.

Carroll thinks we can regain the kind of momentum that flowed from Kennedy's speech.   He sees Teddy Kennedy's endorsement of Obama in that light.  I am going to offer the final three paragraphs from Carroll's column to provide a context for what I wish to say:

To rekindle the flame of the American University speech would be to restore a preference of negotiation over confrontation, to build self-criticism into policy making, and to affirm the utter realism of idealistic hope. Ted Kennedy sees the possibility in Barack Obama of the realization of his brother's greatest vision.

That vision, conceived negatively, boils down to this: If humans do not change the way we resolve international conflicts, the planet is ultimately doomed to nuclear devastation. The abolition of all nuclear weapons, starting with our own, must be at the top of the new president's agenda.

Conceived positively, the American University vision means that humans are poised, by necessity, for a great leap into a new and better world. Yes, we can.

Carroll argues that we again face the possibility of nuclear destruction.  And I would agree this far -  were we to justify our use of nuclear weapons in an attempt to destroy "hardened" sites in a place like N Korea or Iran, we would destroy any hope of eliminating the ongoing threat of a nuclear holocaust.  We legitimately have fears of the spread of nuclear weapons, as Kennedy had fear of the use of those weapons that already existed.  JFK came to realize that the continuing escalation of nuclear stockpiles and harsh rhetoric would inevitably lead to the use of and concomitant destruction by such weapons.  He sought a different way for the world to proceed.  We might well be advised by his example.  Carroll focuses on nuclear weaponry.  I would argue that as important as the hope for their abolition may be, it is also insufficient:  it does not matter to the one killed or maimed if the weaponry used is a nuclear bomb, a thermite bomb, or merely the high-speed projectiles of current US weaponry, deployed from planes and armored vehicles, or shoulder fired.  If we fear the results of a nuclear arms race, what then can we say about our own continued development of weapons of horror - of chemical and biological weapons, of our illegally expanding our capacity as we have just done at Livermore?

We need a different attitude.  We as a people must demand of those who would seek political leadership that they be willing to walk a different path.  Is it possible?  Forty-five years ago we had a president who challenged us to walk on that different path.  I do not idealize either he man or his presidency.  He did call for peace at home in his address announcing his desire for a Civil Rights Bill.  That spoke to his willingness to address the kinds of inequity at home that led to a lack of civil peace.   And the final paragraph of his speech at American can still challenge us about a broader peace.  So let me end with his words, not mine, except for my usual final salutation.  

We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also 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 must labor on--not towards a strategy of annihilation but towards a strategy of peace.

PEACE

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