JFK’s Peace Speech and a World BEYOND War
David Swanson / JFK Peace Speech Committee
Remarks following airing of President John Kennedy’s speech at American University.

Click HERE to Register for the Feb. 10, 7PM EST Event.

Community Church of Boston (February 10, 2025) — It’s an honor to be asked to speak following a great speech, probably the greatest speech ever by a U.S. president while they were the U.S. president. Many U.S. presidents, possibly all of them, made speeches against war prior to becoming president. Some issued hypocritical warnings included in bad speeches on their last day in office. Some spoke and even worked for peace long after having been president.

This was a speech by a current president of a sort unimaginable today. Most presidents since Kennedy would have enthusiastically denounced much of this speech. The current president might say inarticulate weirdly motivated stuff that overlaps with some of the best points here, as he recently did in a video call to Davos, combined in a disorienting jumble with the most offensive, mass-murderous hate speech you can imagine.

But it’s difficult to know what to say after a great speech. Especially because I know that some of you have heard and read this Kennedy speech many times and also heard many other people try to follow it, and some of you have even set parts of it to music and sung it. I’ve written about this speech before to try to get people to read or listen to it. But you’ve already just done that. I can try perhaps to give the speech a little context.

Like almost everything, the caricature of history as the work of a few great individuals is not entirely wrong, but is largely wrong. Kennedy and his speech writer Sorensen and his other advisors came up with a great speech because of who they were and personal choices they made. But they were pressed hard to do so by movements and cultures made up by the actions of many.

The beautiful thing about nonviolent activism is that, while risking no harm, it has the potential to do good in ways small and large that ripple out from it in directions we cannot track or measure. An activist and author named Lawrence Wittner participated in his first political demonstration in 1961, two years before this speech. The USSR was withdrawing from a moratorium on nuclear testing.  A protest at the White House urged President Kennedy not to follow suit. Wittner wrote later:
“Picking up what I considered a very clever sign (‘Kennedy, Don’t Mimic the Russians!’), I joined the others (supplemented by a second busload of students from a Quaker college in the Midwest) circling around a couple of trees outside the White House.  Mike and I — as new and zealous recruits — circled all day without taking a lunch or a dinner break. For decades I looked back on this venture as a trifle ridiculous. After all, we and other small bands of protesters couldn’t have had any impact on U.S. policy, could we? Then in the mid-1990s, while doing research at the Kennedy Library on the history of the world nuclear disarmament movement, I stumbled onto an oral history interview with Adrian Fisher, deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was explaining why Kennedy delayed resuming atmospheric nuclear tests until April 1962. Kennedy personally wanted to resume such tests, Fisher recalled, ‘but he also recognized that there were a lot of people that were going to be deeply offended by the United States resuming atmospheric testing. We had people picketing the White House, and there was a lot of excitement about it — just because the Russians do it, why do we have to do it?'”

Kennedy delayed a horrible action.  He didn’t, at that time, block it permanently.  But if the picketers in 1961 had had the slightest notion that Kennedy was being influenced by them, their numbers would have multiplied 10-fold, as would the delay in nuclear testing have correspondingly lengthened.

Yes, our government was more responsive to public opinion in the 1960s than now, but part of the reason for that is that more people were active then.  And another reason is that government officials are doing a better job now of hiding any responsiveness to public sentiment, which helps convince the public it has no impact, which reduces activism further. We also focus far too much on the most difficult individuals to move, such as presidents. But Kennedy was moved. And when he proposed negotiated and unilateral steps on testing and disarmament in this speech, he had known for years that people were demanding that of him and watching him to see if he would do it.

Between that 1961 protest and this 1963 speech lay, among other things, the Cuban Missile Crisis. When President Kennedy made a secret deal with the Soviet Union to remove missiles from Cuba, it was a deal to also remove U.S. missiles from Turkey and Italy. But Kennedy did not tell the U.S. public that. Instead he claimed that he had thumped his chest and talked tough, and that the weak Soviets had backed down. And so that is what people in the United States believe happened. That is probably what Donald Trump and Marco Rubio believe happened.

That entire incident, and not just its fictionalized resolution, has left a mark to this day on the imagined personification of the U.S. government, which Congress Members and presidents seem to treat as suffering PTSD as a result of Cuba placing the missiles of a U.S. rival on soil that the U.S. government believed and still believes was rightfully its own.

And so the suffering Uncle Sam repeats the cycle. He recreates the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse in Eastern Europe without an apparent care in the world. He has no idea whatsoever that putting missile bases next to Russia might scare anyone in Russia. He’s too busy still being scared of Cuba. Some U.S. politicians may realize what Russians think of bases next to Russia, but they can still imagine the personification of the U.S. nation not realizing it.

Kennedy and his staff experienced the horror of having nearly destroyed life on Earth out of their own machismo, and they knew what had actually resolved the crisis. Kennedy understood the necessary and wise and difficult thing to be peace-making, not strutting like a rooster, selling weapons, or promising to ethnically cleanse Gaza as a certain fascist buffoon imagines.

The bar has been lowered dramatically on presidential speeches. At this point, I can admire Kennedy’s speech for not demonizing, blaming, or threatening any groups. A speech that violates no laws is an accomplishment these days. In fact, Kennedy explicitly rejects blaming and lawlessness. But he does better than just that in many ways.

For one thing, this is a speech that calls for public service, not meaning private greed, and not meaning participation in the death machine. This same Kennedy had written in a private letter prior to the presidency:
“War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

This same Kennedy had admonished at his inauguration:
“Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

This was good advice when Kennedy was calling for participation in the Peace Corps and a National Service Corps, and it remains good advice even when what a country needs most is massive nonviolent disruption until it radically changes course.

President Kennedy was speaking at a time when, like now, Russia and the United States had enough nuclear weapons ready to fire at each other on a moment’s notice to destroy the Earth for human life many times over. At that time, however, in 1963, there were only three nations, not the current nine, with nuclear weapons, and many fewer than now with nuclear energy. NATO was far removed from Russia’s borders.

The United States and Russia were not at war in Ukraine. The United States wasn’t organizing military exercises and placing missiles in the nations bordering Russia’s west. Nor was it manufacturing smaller nukes that it described as “more usable.”

The work of managing U.S. nuclear weapons was then deemed prestigious in the U.S. military, not a dumping ground for drunks and misfits — but, then again, that now seems also to describe the office of the so-called Secretary of Defense.

Hostility between Russia and the United States was high in 1963, but the nuclear danger was widely known about in the United States, in contrast to the current vast ignorance (even if available scientific knowledge of what is being risked has increased). Some voices of sanity and restraint were permitted in the U.S. media and even in the White House back then. Kennedy was using peace activist Norman Cousins as a messenger to Nikita Khrushchev, whom he never described, as Hillary Clinton described Vladimir Putin, as “Hitler.” Even the U.S. and Soviet militaries were communicating with each other.

Can you imagine using a peace activist, rather than a billionaire, for anything? Norman Cousins was also responsible for part of this speech. Cousins had traveled twice to Moscow for Kennedy prior to this speech to meet with Khruschev, who had already proposed to Kennedy everything Kennedy proposed in this speech and more, who had proposed complete disarmament publicly at the United Nations.

Khruschev was frustrated with Kennedy’s lack of action for peace, and Cousins proposed to Kennedy that he give a speech, and wrote the first draft of it for him. Kennedy’s speech writer Ted Sorenson and Kennedy and others took it from there, without asking the CIA or State Department or the Joint Chiefs of Staff for any help.

Kennedy framed his speech as a remedy for ignorance, specifically the ignorant view that war is inevitable. This is the opposite of what President Barack Obama said in Prague and Oslo and Hiroshima. Kennedy renounced the idea of a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” a statement that today would earn him accusations of working for a foreign government. Kennedy went so far as to profess to care about 100% rather than 4% of humanity, a notion that today might lead to questioning of his sanity. Kennedy rejected military deterrence as nonsensical, a statement that today might lead to impeachment, and which was of course rejected in some quarters at the time.

Kennedy went after the money — and not on his last day in office, like Eisenhower before him. Kennedy went after the excitement and glamor of war. I can picture a number of U.S. senators today fainting at Kennedy’s words.

Kennedy did say that Soviet leaders needed a more enlightened attitude, but not without saying in the same breath that the same was true of people in the United States. This was dramatically different from the blaming of the Soviets that is to be found in Eisenhower’s military industrial complex speech. Kennedy claimed that Soviet propaganda on U.S. imperialism was false, but only to warn in the same breath against believing U.S. propaganda about the Soviets. Kennedy praised the people of the Soviet Union, drew comparisons between them and people of the United States, and included as common ground a desire for peace. He even indicated where Russian fears might originate and cited the suffering involved in winning World War II — something done chiefly by the Soviets, although U.S. movies were then claiming the credit for the United States.

Kennedy urged, outrageously by the standards of some, that the United States tolerate other nations pursuing their own visions, free to do so independently. And he issued a famous warning that sounds simultaneously like the most obvious common sense and like the most outlandish heresy in the halls of U.S. power. He said that 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 also proposed some specific steps. He proposed a hotline between Washington and Moscow. It was created. He proposed a treaty banning nuclear tests. And he announced a unilateral halt to atmospheric tests. A treaty banning tests except for underground soon followed. Later President George H.W. Bush in 1991 would unilaterally remove certain types of nuclear weapons from foreign deployment, and the Soviet Union would quickly follow suit. When you’re dealing with weapons that can never be used and the entire argument for which is to possess them and threaten to use them precisely in order to never use them, there is nothing risked in removing them. In fact, unilateral disarmament is a very credible form of negotiation in an age of distrust.

But Kennedy went further than that in this speech. He proposed something so amazing that most readers and listeners to his speech cannot believe it is there and so do not believe it is there. And yet, there it is in plain English. He proposed “the elimination of war and arms” and “general and complete disarmament.” Within five years, the United States and the Russian Federation had joined the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons which uses the same phrase that Kennedy did (“general and complete disarmament”) in the following line:

“Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

Notice that the general and complete disarmament is in addition to nuclear disarmament. The United Nations office currently known as United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs is explicitly dedicated to the same goal of “general and complete disarmament” which it defines as including nuclear and also so-called conventional weapons.

Notice that immediately after saying he wanted general and complete disarmament, Kennedy claimed that the U.S. government had been working toward that goal since the 1920s. Did you hear him say that? You could make a strong case that that’s laughably false, and that the Congressional hearings of the 1930s on the merchants of death made that case. But here’s my key point: there were no nuclear weapons in the 1920s.

And yet commentators seem to either avoid this bit of Kennedy’s speech or to claim that he only meant nuclear disarmament. Now, I am not claiming to know what John F. Kennedy meant in his heart of hearts, what was sincere, what was for show, what was a compromise with interested parties, what was pure hypocrisy. But the speech pretty clearly calls for the disarmament of all armaments. After all, you cannot end war without that. And you cannot even abolish nuclear weapons while threatening and waging devastating wars with non-nuclear weapons against nations that imagine that nuclear weapons can protect them.

The early accomplishments of this speech, the improved relations with the Russian government and Russians in general — Khruschev had the speech translated and published — the hotline, the testing ban, etc., have been followed by decades of people just like us taking inspiration from this same speech.

I’ve heard many better speeches from peace activists. Which is not to say that this speech isn’t brilliantly crafted. But what I celebrate in it is that a U.S. president said it.

Kennedy planned more. He continued to do and say warlike things, but he also planned disarmament negotiations and a visit to Russia. Those things never happened. There is a cloud hanging over any claim that a U.S. president can make such a speech and live to tell the tale. Less than six months later, Kennedy was killed. Whether you think Kennedy’s steps toward peace, notably including this speech, contributed to his assassination or not, the key damage exists in the fact that many in Washington have suspected it did. Kennedy of course made steps toward war as well as steps toward peace. But the worry that the warmongers may have killed him doesn’t rely on the proposition that he was ideally peaceful, only that he was too peaceful for them.

Many have believed for the better part of a century that too much opposition to the military industrial secret-unaccountable-agency complex would get you killed or at least unelected through dirty tricks. More evidence has accumulated. Nixon blocked Johnson from ending the war in Vietnam. Carter followed Kennedy with CIA firings and got himself an October surprise. Even Generalissimo Trump got himself Russiagated. Presidents have reportedly commented, as have Congress Members, that they do not want to be the “next Kennedy.”

While many a massive criminal governmental enterprise is virtually unknown to the U.S. public, the majority of the U.S. public apparently believes Kennedy was killed by some combination of the CIA, the mafia, the Cubans, the Israelis, and/or the weapons dealers. The illegal ongoing hiding of Kennedy assassination documents by the U.S. government strikes many as suspicious. On January 23, Trump ordered the creation by last Friday of a “plan” for someday releasing the documents, possibly with lots of redactions.

Whether that will happen is anyone’s guess. Trump made similar promises and gestures the first time he was president. Whether the documents will ever reveal anything interesting is anyone’s guess. My assumption is that Trump wishes to be seen as an outsider and believes that any revelation of lawless evil by the U.S. government in decades gone by would only serve to normalize the same now, rather than generating outrage and public rebellion. May he be mistaken!

Or maybe keeping the Kennedy assassination documents secret has itself been intended to put the fear of the military and CIA into people, while the documents themselves contain nothing incriminating.

I would not be at all surprised if members of the U.S. government were involved in killing Kennedy. We’re talking about people, starting with Allen Dulles, trained and employed and lauded by the U.S. government for assassinating, torturing, imprisoning, overthrowing, waging war, and massacring people around the world. Killing the wrong sort of person may strike you as a great leap in moral depravity, but in practice it’s rather a tiny step from murdering one kind of people to murdering some other kind of people.

What can we do now, looking back from the afterlife beyond the spiritual death that Dr King warned us against, and struggling to look forward to a different world? How can we advance general and complete disarmament in a time when the fact that the U.S. is party to a treaty requiring it is literally unbelievable and not believed?

As we are all feeling gratitude and admiration, if not awe, for John F. Kennedy, my first recommendation may seem odd. It is to strip the U.S. presidency of royal powers. It is to clear the money out of Congress and the powers out of Congress’s executive. It is to move powers to the people, to advance not only representation but also actual democracy. It is to shift power to regions, states, and localities, and to universal international institutions. We don’t need the right kind of nations nearly as much as we need less nationalism.

Now is a moment in the United States for state and local actions. The state legislature here in Virginia is advancing legislation to prevent the so-called National Guard being sent from here to any illegal and undeclared wars. States and localities, especially those with lots of elected Democrats, will do useful things whenever a Republican is on the throne in Washington. They will ban militarized police. They will divest from weapons dealers. They will block the Guard from being used in distant wars/genocides. They will publish resolutions making appropriate demands of the U.S. government. Seize this opportunity!

At World BEYOND War and at RootsAction, places I work, we promote educational and activist steps. Now is a moment of openness to education on issues of war and militarism, because the Alpha Ape in charge is extraordinarily open about his evil intentions. He announces ethnic cleansings; he doesn’t just do them under cover of humanitarian pretense. Of course he also scares people, which makes it more important than ever that we not only inspire courage through educational events but that we join in protecting those most threatened domestically and abroad.

We need to advance the vision of abolition of war that can be found in Kennedy’s speech and do the activist work that moves us in that direction, including through nonviolent protest, blockading, disrupting, and impeding business as usual.

One angle many of us are working on at the moment is that of closing military bases. A coalition of peace groups is planning something on February 23, inspired by resistance movements in Latin America but organized on every continent of the Earth. We are calling it a Global Day of Action to Close Bases, a day of opposition to all military bases everywhere, foreign and domestic. At the website DayToCloseBases.org you can see all the actions that have been planned and how easy it is to plan one and add it to the map.

The Earth is increasingly coated in military bases, spreading like a pandemic: part of a growing and disastrous global increase in spending on wars and preparations for wars that makes wars more, not less, likely. And prime targets in wars are bases and anything near them.

Bases are many of the worst environmental disaster sites, polluting air, soil, and water, and generating horrific noise pollution. This is true for domestic bases as well as foreign, including for U.S. bases within the United States.

Foreign bases are often mini-apartheid states with second-class status for locals and criminal immunity for militaries — a situation that can often be traced back to stolen land and other injustices.

It’s not enough for us to protest each new war once it’s underway. We have to put an end to the preparations for wars, to the imposition of militaries that militarize police and prop up unpopular governments, that create lawless prisons eroding the rule of law, that poison air, soil, and water in secret — unaccountable to those whose land was stolen long ago, and that bring in weaponry and training in terror and torture, and that create conditions from which people try to flee to the heart of the empire which blames the victims and elects leaders who demonize them.

On February 23rd people all over the world will be drawing on the lengthy catalog of anti-base actions that have been used over the years.

These actions overlap with another necessary goal of the peace movement, which is building a culture of peace. Part of that is remembering and memorializing and setting to music and celebrating great speeches of the past. So, I thank you for making this happen.