John F. Kennedy's Speech at American University: A Simone Weil Center Symposium
The Simone Weil Center offers in what follows four perspectives on John F. Kennedy’s famous June 10, 1963, speech at American University. The authors – James Carden, Peter Kuznick, Paul Grenier and Matthew Dal Santo – each address in turn its political, international, philosophical and theological dimensions. – The Editors
Breaching The Wall of Difference
—James W. Carden
In order to underscore just how dangerous the current Great Power proxy war being waged in Ukraine is, the point of comparison I and others often reach for is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
In some ways, because the robust channels of communication built up as a result of that crisis no longer exist, and -- alarmingly - because there is minimally competent leadership in Washington -- the situation in which we find ourselves is even more dangerous than it was in October, 1962.
There’s also a stunning lack of awareness, not least among the American intelligentsia (such as it is) and the political establishment of the stakes involved.
If part of the legacy and legend of John Fitzgerald Kennedy includes a touch of playboy recklessness, what cannot be ignored is that, faced with the most serious national security crisis since the Second World War, President Kennedy -- in the face of potentially catastrophic advice from a number of his political and military advisers -- rose to the occasion.
The October nuclear war scare gave rise, some eight months later, by way of a June commencement address at American University, to the most profound expression of human solidarity given by an American chief executive.
It is worth noting then, in this context, that in the month prior to Kennedy’s address the dean of Washington columnists, Walter Lippmann, criticized Kennedy in a televised interview for being too timid, too cautious. “He’s one of the boys,” observed Lippmann. “One of his two or three serious weaknesses as a public leader,” he continued, “is that he does not want to be unpopular anywhere—anywhere—with anyone; and I think that a public leader, at times, has to get into struggles where somebody gets a bloody nose, and Kennedy doesn’t want that ever.”[1]
But the speech indicates (and too late, perhaps, given the events of the following November), that the days of go-along, get-along Jack Kennedy were over, and that instead the President was gearing up for a fight with elements of his own national security bureaucracy, particularly the CIA and the Pentagon brass, of which he had come to think so little.[2]
Kennedy told the assembled AU graduates that demonizing the Soviets and doubling down on a militarized version of containment, which had been enshrined as official US policy since the Truman administration’s adoption of National Security Directive 68, was not the solution. The stakes, after all, were simply too great.
Said Kennedy,
…should total war ever break out again—no matter how—our two countries will be the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.
Part of what Kennedy hoped to achieve with the speech was a jump-start in negotiations with the Soviets over a limited nuclear test ban treaty. And in that, he found success.
Yet his effort to humanize the Russian “other” has, alas, foundered over the course of subsequent decades, not least, ironically, in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union.
Kennedy voiced his concern with the deteriorating state of relations between the two nuclear superpowers.
“We are both,” he said, “caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counter-weapons.”
The president also suggested that one way to break out of such a cycle would be to reexamine the attitudes held on both sides of the Cold War divide.
Kennedy acknowledged that while it was “discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write,” it was also “a warning” to the American people:
…not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats. No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.
Sentiments such as these need to be voiced at the highest levels today - in both Washington and Moscow.
Instead, what we have is a shared belief in both capitals that East and West are separated by a wall of insuperable difference.
James W. Carden is a member of the board of the Simone Weil Center. He is a columnist at the Asia Times.
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“Peace For All Time”: Norman Cousins, Nikita Khrushchev, and John Kennedy’s Visionary American University Commencement Address
—Peter Kuznick
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 59 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 CIA bastards” and Joint Chiefs “sons of bitches” and threatened to “shatter the CIA 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 October 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. Cousins and Khrushchev met for over three hours, during which Khrushchev said something that in its haunting simplicity and incontrovertible truth still resonates sixty 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 Averill 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 CIA, 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 ten 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 59 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 barely survive 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 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, Director, Nuclear Studies Institute, American University
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Peace and Ideology: The Transformative Achievement of JFK’s American University Speech
—Paul Grenier
In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile crisis, Pope John XXIII issued a call to the leaders of the US and the USSR to look beyond considerations of national interest and to instead realize that they had a moral responsibility to all mankind. So as to overcome the crisis in their mutual relations, the two nuclear powers should “encourage and accept discussions at all levels and at any time.” Acting in any other manner threatened the entire world with nuclear holocaust.
The pope’s message grabbed headlines all over the world, including in the lead paper of the Soviet Union, Pravda, where it appeared under a front-page banner headline.
As James Douglass recounts in his remarkable book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Pope John XXIII continued, until his death on June 3, 1963, to play a central, behind-the-scenes role that gave birth to a far-going dialogue between Kennedy, Khrushchev, Pope John XXIII and Fidel Castro. That dialogue, oriented toward building a lasting peace and ending the Cold War, took place with the assistance of the American journalist and peace activist Norman Cousins. The role of someone like Cousins, acting behind the scenes as the direct representative of the American president, was the sine qua non of any such process: it was made necessary due to the president’s extreme isolation within an otherwise hostile U.S. national security apparatus. Even as the president, with the help of his emissary shuttling back and forth between Moscow and the Vatican, worked furtively to build peace, the U.S. national security state and, especially, the C.I.A., worked just as actively to undermine his every effort.
This dramatic story, which I won’t attempt to reproduce here – those interested should read the corresponding sections of Douglass’s book[3] -- has indeed been treated ever since as something unspeakable, first of all within America’s policy-relevant world of pundits and politicians. And yet, as we learn from Douglass, Kennedy’s American University speech was to a very important extent made possible by the process inspired by the Catholic pope; and the substance of its message shaped by his encyclical, Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth).
By way of context, and as Peter Kuznick has already noted in his contribution, the negotiations between Kennedy and Khrushchev oriented toward signing an atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty had reached an impasse due to the intransigence of the political apparatus on both sides, and due to an almost complete mutual lack of trust. The whole raison d'être of Kennedy’s AU speech was to so reshape the public imagination about what might be possible to achieve, in the area of peace, that it would transform the overall political atmosphere. As we learn from Douglass’s book, that purpose of reshaping imaginations was to a very great extent successfully achieved – in the USSR, and in Cuba, that is. The leaders of the USSR and Cuba proved eager to follow Kennedy’s lead; and looked forward to all that might be achieved in what they assumed would be six more years of a Kennedy presidency. In the U.S. at the time, the speech garnered little notice.
It was the position of the Catholic pope, as expressed in his encyclical, that peace can only be built on trust, and that trust, in turn, can only be founded on truth. And yet, from the perspective of early 1960s America, the communist ideology professed by the USSR presented an insuperable barrier to any such trust. Though American elites, especially in the technical sciences, had by the early 1960s already for the most part become secularized; for much of the rest of the American public, religion remained something important. Many Americans viewed the confrontation between the U.S. and the USSR as a confrontation between good and evil. No doubt many Russians returned the compliment.
How could trust be established when the USSR was guided by its ‘dialectical-materialist’ ideology, and the U.S. by liberal-democracy? When the USSR promoted Marxist atheism, and the U.S. religious liberty? On what common comprehension of truth could any such trust be built? If the president was to have any chance of success, his speech needed to somehow transform this atmosphere of ideologically and philosophically charged mutual hostility.
As Douglass notes, a key insight borrowed by the Kennedy speech from Pacem in Terris pertained precisely to this question of ideology. The encyclical declares that we must take care to note the impact of the passage of time, as well as the mystery of the human person, whose soul forever remains at least potentially open to the light of what is good and true. Such lines as the following from Pacem in Terris – which could, incidentally, almost be a quote from the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky – are imbued with Christian personalism:
A man who has fallen into error does not cease to be a man. He never forfeits his personal dignity; and that is something that must always be taken into account. Besides, there exists in man's very nature an undying capacity to break through the barriers of error and seek the road to truth. God, in His great providence, is ever present with His aid. Today, maybe, a man lacks faith and turns aside into error; tomorrow, perhaps, illumined by God's light, he may indeed embrace the truth.
As regards the effects of time on ideology, the encyclical notes that:
… it is perfectly legitimate to make a clear distinction between a false philosophy of the nature, origin and purpose of men and the world, and economic, social, cultural, and political undertakings, even when such undertakings draw their origin and inspiration from that philosophy. True, the philosophic formula does not change once it has been set down in precise terms, but the undertakings clearly cannot avoid being influenced to a certain extent by the changing conditions in which they have to operate. Besides, who can deny the possible existence of good and commendable elements in these undertakings, elements which do indeed conform to the dictates of right reason, and are an expression of man's lawful aspirations?
The Soviet Union, despite its origins in an ideology that – at least from the perspective of a Catholic believer -- denied important truths, was now, in 1962, something more than that original ideological system. The pope would, of course, be fully aware that, in 1956, Khrushchev had delivered a speech in which he sharply condemned the sweeping purges that had taken place under Stalin. The supposedly ‘secret speech’ had, after all, inspired the subsequent uprising in Hungary, which uprising had not been a secret to anyone.
The salient point was that the USSR, its people and institutions, had evolved over the decades that had transpired since its founding. What is more, the pope, at this point, knew from the direct interactions between Cousins and Khrushchev that the Soviet leader -- in the wake of the terrifying experience of the missile crisis – had himself in crucial respects become more human and less ideologically driven. Russians and their institutions were by no means lacking in real virtues. The people of the Soviet Union were fully human. There was no reason to dogmatically assert that they were incapable of being open to truth.
All of these elements inform Kennedy’s speech: to a great extent, they define it. Instead of demonizing the Soviet Union, Kennedy’s speech, in its most moving passages, profoundly humanizes the Russian people, and in so doing transformed them into a people with whom an active cooperation would become possible. Should have become possible.
The achievements of Kennedy’s speech are remarkable. No less remarkable is the extent to which those insights have been completely repudiated by subsequent generations of Americans and their political leaders. The hypocrisies and double-standards that have been used to justify that repudiation must be the subject of other essays. At its root, as I have argued elsewhere, is the modern rejection, first of all by the United States itself, of philosophical and historical truth.
Paul Grenier is president and co-founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy
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Ressourcement, Not Revolution: President John F. Kennedy’s Commencement Address at American University, 1963
—Matthew Dal Santo
On June 10, 1963, Kennedy addressed the graduating class at American University, Washington, D.C. More than the usual exhortation to altruism addressed to idealistic young men and women at the beginning of their professional and civic lives, the speech that Kennedy delivered that day was addressed to the world. And its subject was nothing less than a proposal for the foundations of a lasting and durable world peace delivered only nine months after strategic competition between the United States and Soviet Union had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1961. Four months after delivering the speech, Kennedy was dead, and the vision for world peace – for a peace between the United States and the Soviet Union – died with him.
In that setting, Kennedy’s speech remains one of the great “what ifs” of the Cold War. For the symbolically minded – those interested in the spiritual meaning and ideational causality of history – it may even represent a turning point, a tantalizing and, indeed, tragic, path not taken. How might the history of the twentieth century worked out differently if Kennedy’s vision – and not that of the neo-Trotskyite student revolutionaries of the late 1960s – had provided the blueprint for the West’s cultural development? For the point is that Kennedy wasn’t heeded. He died, having been mysteriously murdered before any of the profounder elements of his call to peace with the Soviet Union could be put into practice.
What I want to argue here is that, if Kennedy had not died but served out his full term and perhaps a second as president, and if America, the Soviet Union, and the world had heeded his message and sought to build the foundations for world peace as he outlined them, then it is possible that the Cold War might have ended very differently and much earlier than it did. As it was, the fall, in 1989, of the Berlin Wall and collapse two years later of the Soviet Union were interpreted as vindications of “Westernism”, a system of ideas and practices very much more radically secular than the historical, Christian civilization it is clear that Kennedy saw himself as speaking on behalf of. After the collapse of Communism, the by now radically secular West expected Russia to imitate its secularism and become modern on the West’s radical – indeed, revolutionary – terms. But this did not happen. Instead, when Russia repudiated Marxism, it repudiated with it the philosophical foundations of the West’s own secularism (which in the wake of the triumph of the Frankfurt School had become far more fundamentally Marxist in the decades since Kennedy’s speech than most Western people beyond the university-based intelligentsia cared to recognize) and in doing so the seeds for a new hostility, which have lately borne their poisoned fruit, were planted. But this is to anticipate. Let us return to 1963.
Sixty years after Kennedy’s American University speech, it is difficult for us to recapture the centrality of religion to public life in Western civilization in the early 1960s. Kennedy was, of course, the first Catholic to hold presidential office in the United States, a post he had succeeded in being elected to in 1961 only by emphasizing the separation of his private Catholic faith from the secular duties of public office. And yet much had changed in the two years since. When Kennedy delivered his commencement speech in that summer of 1963, not only had the world come within a hair’s breadth of thermonuclear self-destruction in the Cuban Missile Crisis just nine short months before, but the very week the Crisis had unfolded in the waters of the Caribbean, on the other side of the Atlantic, in Rome, the ancient center of Western civilization, Pope John XXIII had opened the Second Vatican Council.[4]
Its public sessions broadcast on television, the Second Vatican Council captured the whole world’s imagination, and at no point more profoundly, perhaps, than in its opening phases when at the end of its first session in December 1962, the Council Fathers had defied the Roman Curia (the Catholic Church’s central administration, its “bureaucracy”) by voting down a text that the Curia had prepared in advance on Holy Scripture for approval by the Council. Unexpectedly, John XXIII sided not with the Curia but with the Council and at the beginning of 1963, the Council Fathers began preparation of a document that would finally be approved as a dogmatic constitution, Dei Verbum, a dogmatic constitution on Scripture and revelation, i.e. the Bible.
For centuries, the Bible had been a book that lay Catholics were not much encouraged to read or meditate on directly. With Dei Verbum, that changed; the Bible as the Word of God was restored to the center of Catholic life “as the support and energy of the Church, the strength of faith for her sons, the food of the soul, the pure and everlasting source of spiritual life” (Dei Verbum, §21). As the Council gathered momentum, this renewal of the Church’s message, witness, and teaching, through a return to the ancient sources of her faith was the cause that John XXIII identified himself with. Those sources included the works and thought of the Greek Fathers, venerated particularly until that time by the Eastern Orthodox Churches (the major part of whose members were under Soviet domination in the USSR and Eastern bloc). On the grounds of this ressourcement, it was hoped in Rome, the Church’s ancient divisions (Catholic vs. Orthodox vs. Protestant) were to be healed, and the Church as whole and reunited speak with the love of a Mother to a world which, under the banner of Communism, was becoming increasingly hostile in its atheism. And then – exactly one week before Kennedy’s American University speech – John XXIII – a spiritual father, not just of Catholics but, as he had come to be viewed, of the whole world – died. The global outpouring of grief was profound and genuine.
This must have weighed heavily on Kennedy, a Catholic, particularly. Since the end of 1962, when the opening of the Second Vatican Council and the Cuban Missile Crisis had unfolded almost simultaneously, Kennedy and John XXIII had formed a warm and respectful relationship. On April 11 1963 (two months, less a day, exactly before Kennedy’s speech), John XXIII dedicated his most famous and searching encyclical – Pacem in Terris – to world peace. At the American University, Kennedy was among other things presenting himself as an obedient listener to, and now guardian of, the late pope’s message of peace through a return to the sources of our common humanity and the obligation laid by God himself upon us all precisely as human beings to work for peace.
Considered in this setting – of the Second Vatican Council, of Dei Verbum and Pacem in Terris - striking indeed in Kennedy’s speech are the biblical citations and references. This is not because of their number. Of the former there are only two and of the latter only clearly one. Rather, it is where words and ideas from the Bible appear in Kennedy’s speech that makes them significant and, relatedly, the end to which Kennedy employs them. With the first citation (“The wicked flee when no man pursueth”: Prov. 28.1), Kennedy allows his own people, America, to be included in a rebuke he has just publicly delivered to the leadership of the Soviet Union.
With the second citation (“When a man’s ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him”, Prov. 16.7), Kennedy definitively elevates his stated cause – world peace, “the most important topic on earth” – from the level of the merely transactional or political in a Machiavellian sense to a moral and spiritual level that implies a metaphysical appreciation for man’s final end. It is not so much that Kennedy uses the Word of God as that Kennedy makes himself available to be used by the Word of God. Peace, ceasing to be something convenient for self-interested men to make among themselves, becomes (precisely as the late pope had seen it) a duty laid upon mankind by its Creator in his divine Wisdom.
If this is significant, it is not just because Western civilization is still in need of heeding the rebuke that Kennedy delivered to leaders of the USSR. Indeed, is it not true that the war raging in Ukraine has come about because since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western governments and their peoples, have, in expanding NATO, fled precisely when “no man pursueth”? As regards Russia, have we not for at least a generation fallen into precisely that trap that Kennedy identified and pointed out to us, that of seeing “only a distorted and desperate view of the other side”, of seeing “conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats”? Thirty-four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the agents of Western foreign policy can congratulate themselves on having produced by their own actions precisely the danger that they claimed all along to be guarding us against.
Similarly, among all those with responsibility for formulating Western foreign policy, who cares for a moment whether his or her ways “please the Lord”? Perhaps as late as twenty years ago, during the presidency of George W. Bush, it would have been possible to hear an American president speak that way. And yet even this would have been different from what Kennedy was doing at American University in invoking the God of the Christian Tradition as a source of moral authority over our private and public lives.
For Bush, God often seemed to exist to exalt America above other nations and exempt her from their common laws. For Kennedy, by contrast, in 1963, the point in citing or alluding to the Bible was the opposite: to identify a source of super-human authority to which all nations, including America, had to submit. But today words such as Kennedy used in quoting the Bible – and in invoking God for a political cause – as Kennedy did in 1963 would be impossible. Our society is far too secular for that. Indeed, even churchmen, zealous converts themselves to secularism, would likely call it blasphemous.
In this sense, the real significance of Kennedy’s speech lies in the reminder it offers us today of the degree of our secularization. And in the fact that such words could still be spoken in 1963 is eloquent testimony to the cultural transformation – indeed, the revolution – that has overtaken us since, that of secularization. And this leaves us with a question: isn’t our patent failure in the war in Ukraine to avert “those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war” precisely that “evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy--or of a collective death-wish for the world” that Kennedy feared? And, still more, is not this bankruptcy, this death wish, a function, spiritually and ideationally, of our own secularization?
A secularized society is defined by its denial of the existence of that Creator that Kennedy saw as being the source of an objective duty laid as it were externally upon mankind to seek peace. For ourselves, of course, peace on our own terms is something we consider not our duty but our right. Hence, the heedless, drôle de guerre character of life in Europe today, where our leaders rush to prosecute a proxy war with a nuclear power without considering for a moment the risks to the lives of their own peoples in doing so. After all, hasn’t “twenty-first-century Europe” earnt a right to the end of history, and hence, to peace?
The hard reality is that it has not. As John XXIII put it, “Peace on Earth—which man throughout the ages has so longed for and sought after—can never be established, never guaranteed, except by the diligent observance of the divinely established order” (Pacem in Terris, §1). Seventy years later, order, especially divine order, is not at all to our liking. The idea itself offends us. Isn’t the whole point of secularization to be free, emancipated once and for all from the oppressive demands of order? By contrast, a peace built on the end of history (on a “sudden revolution in human nature” not a “gradual evolution in human institutions”) is a peace built on a utopia, utopia is one of the chief diagnostic features of revolutionary thinking, and at the bottom of revolutionary thought in Western civilization is atheism, an atheism that received its definitive articulation – its definitive instrumentalization as a political program and theory – in Marx and Marxism.
In this sense, the failure of Western foreign policy to view peace with Russia as a goal worth pursuing at the expense of the increase of Western power and influence in Eastern Europe is a symptom of that inability to recognize limits that revolutionary thought as a form of atheism makes characteristically its own. The world – even the miners and factory workers of the Donbass! – must inhabit the same secularized reality we do, emancipated from all objective spiritual disciplines and obligations, for to countenance the possibility of not doing so is implicitly to recognize the historical contingency of our secularization has been reached. So dear to us is this revolutionary emancipation of ourselves from the sacred, that we will risk even nuclear self-destruction to defend its unlimited claims.
Symbolized in the May 1968 Students Riots in Paris and the Hippy Movement in the United States, this line of revolutionary thought became characteristic of Western elite opinion – the university-educated intelligentsia, with its inspiration in the sublated Marxism of the Frankfurt School – in the decade after Kennedy’s assassination. And vindicated, apparently, by Western “victory” over the Soviet Union in 1989-91, gradually and by degrees, it became characteristic of Western society as a whole in the decades thereafter, to such an extent that hostility towards historically traditional interpretations of the Word of God has now been virtually institutionalized in Western society.
Over against this development, however, Kennedy’s speech offers us a vision not of revolutionary rupture with the Tradition but of what the French call ressourcement, or renewal, in it. Russia claims, with some justification, to have undergone such a ressourcement since its own repudiation of revolutionary Marxism in 1991. Russia’s ressourcement is far from complete. (And nothing in this essay should be interpreted as meaning that either Kennedy or John XXIII would approve of today’s Russia or its behavior.) But the development and responsibility we are following is the West’s. How much more secure – “more practical, more attainable” – would world peace be today if ressourcement in the moral and spiritual discipline of the Tradition and its objective obligations, and not revolutionary break with it, had been our goal, too?
“World peace does not require that each man love his neighbor,” said Kennedy, unwilling to allow peace to be held hostage to the imperfectability, without the assistance of divine grace, of human nature: “it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.” And yet it is precisely this capacity for tolerance that the modern West has lost: all the world must bear its image. Once again, it seems, as Iraq and Kosovo, Libya and Afghanistan recede from view, we are in Ukraine preparing ourselves to congratulate ourselves for imposing the kind of false peace Kennedy warned to avoid, a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”
Symbolically, then, Kennedy’s American University commencement speech was precisely the moment when this alternative future of ressourcement and not revolution was offered us – and we turned it away. Secularization was not inevitable. But it is what we have chosen. What we have not yet fully comprehended is the destructiveness of the revolutionary path to which, in our euphoria at having apparently succeeded in emancipating ourselves from the objective, external authority of our Creator, it has committed us. Well, then, might we say in our age of secularization, as we dance once again on the rim of nuclear catastrophe, God help us!
Matthew Dal Santo, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Dogmatics and Church History, St Patrick’s Seminary University, Menlo Park and the author of Teokratia: Sergei Bulgakov, Nicholas II, and a Russian political theology (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). He is a co-founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.
NOTES
[Carden]
[1] Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Transaction, 2004, pp. 540-41
[2] Kennedy famously described his desire to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”
[Grenier]
[3] See James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (New York: Touchstone, 2008), 337 – 392.
[Dal Santo]
[4]A gathering (the largest in history) of 2,600 Catholic bishops from the whole world and Eastern Orthodox and Protestant observers, the Second Vatican Council had met with the intention of renewing the teachings and practices of Western civilization’s most ancient and formative institution in a way that would allow her to speak with fresh authority and understanding to modernity.