JFK's American University and Civil Rights Speeches Hold Lessons for Obama and McCain

Robert Schlesinger

Forty-five years ago this week, John F. Kennedy gave two of the finest speeches of his eloquent, foreshortened presidency—and illustrated a history lesson from which Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain could learn.

One of the themes weaving itself through this electoral season concerns the power and purpose of rhetoric: John McCain (and previously Hillary Clinton) asserts that policy substance should trump Barack Obama's rhetorical stylings. I have substantive experience, goes the argument, while Obama has empty words.

The truth is that the bully pulpit is a key tool for a president but one of many. No chief executive can discard or dismiss the power of words, but neither can a president afford to underestimate its limits—context matters. JFK understood both sides of this equation.

While JFK is primarily remembered for his eloquence, he had a pragmatic view of the power of presidential words. In April 1963, when Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins visited Kennedy and encouraged him to push for a nuclear test ban treaty, the president said that he doubted whether it was a priority for the American people. He pointed out that on the White House's weekly mail report such a treaty ranked well below questions about daughter Caroline's pony.

But he decided the time was right for a speech reframing the Cold War and made it the topic of his June 10 commencement address at American University. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy's speechwriter, cut the bureaucracy out of the drafting, huddling with a small group of White House advisers on the address. The first time Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, learned of the speech's content, on June 8, Sorensen and the draft were already winging on their way to meet Kennedy, who was on the last leg of a trip around the country.

Speaking to the graduating students on June 10, JFK discussed "the most important topic on earth: world peace." He noted that some said pursuing peace was pointless until the Soviet leaders changed their attitudes. But, he said, both sides in the Cold War needed to re-examine their views of peace and each other. Too many people believed peace itself "is impossible. Too many think it 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."

He warned that Americans should not take "a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not . . . see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats."

"And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity," he told the graduates in his best-remembered line. "For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

It is hard to understand, 45 years later, how radical were such sentiments. It was almost "impossible for an American politician to make the sort of speech that Kennedy gave," historian Robert Dallek later wrote. "It was a tremendously bold address that carried substantial risks." The speech had little initial domestic impact. Of the 50,000 letters received at the White House in the week after Kennedy spoke, fewer than 900 pertained to the speech, while 28,000 focused on a freight rate bill ("That is why I tell people in Congress they're crazy if they take their mail seriously," JFK said).

But as a new course in U.S. foreign policy—with ideas that still ring true in the post-Cold War world—it was a powerful and eloquent signal to adversaries abroad and bureaucrats at home. JFK announced in the speech renewed negotiations with the Soviets on nuclear testing, and within months an agreement banning atmospheric testing was signed in Moscow.