The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [458]
Stevenson’s presence rankled Kennedy so much that it may have affected policy decisions and his attitude toward disarmament. In 1963 the president told Bobby that this was the one area in which he wished he had done more. “It was personal again—if Stevenson brought it up, it irritated him,” Bobby said. “To shock him and give him something he’d talk to his girls about, he’d say that disarmament was just a lot of public relations stuff.”
Kennedy believed that peace in the nuclear age would be won by hard men speaking tough truths, not by what he considered gushy overwrought men of public virtue. In June 1963, the president finally made the issue of peace his own, and he did so at American University in one of the seminal speeches of his time. The graduating seniors heard an eloquent address that pandered neither to the American people nor to the Russians. Kennedy took a bold step forward, announcing that the United States would unilaterally not “conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so.”
Kennedy described peace as “a process—a way of solving problems.” It was a process in which he wanted to involve his nation, the Soviet Union, and the world. The president talked about the nature of Soviet communism, but beneath that he expressed an underlying belief in the commonality of humankind and the hope that the threat of nuclear weapons might in the end draw the world’s people closer, not further apart.
The young people in that audience were living at a time when many Americans feared that the world’s problems were overwhelming and intractable, with the shadow of nuclear war hovering over everything they did. Giving in to despair, however, was not what Kennedy had been brought up to do, and as much as his speech was about a strategy of peace leading toward nuclear disarmament, it was equally about the spiritual armament and strength that would be required in this world.
“Our problems are man-made,” Kennedy told the students. “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.”
No one listened to the president’s words more attentively, and analyzed them more closely, than the Russians, who had their own goal of “peaceful coexistence.” In late July, Khrushchev announced that he would agree to a limited ban on nuclear testing, ending all but underground tests that could not be verified by off-site testing. This was just a way station to a broader peace, but it was a way station that was reached in part because Kennedy had made such a deep, brave speech.
While President Kennedy sought peace in the world, the Reverend Martin Luther King sought freedom at home. During the spring of 1963, the civil rights leader staged a series of demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama. He was continuing his politics of moral witness, seeking to confront evil segregation with the olive branch of nonviolence. The television cameramen and newspaper photographers were often the unwitting carriers of King’s messages, and when they capped their cameras, his voice was not heard. It was not heard beyond Birmingham until May 2, when King sent one thousand children marching out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to confront segregation by their presence in the restaurants and lunch counters where they were not allowed.
Sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor sent out the bearers of his message too—dogs and fire hoses. The animals bared their teeth, and the sheer force of the water drove the protesters back, seemingly washed away into the streaming gutters. And while this one-sided confrontation went on, the television cameras rolled and the cameras clicked. Within a day the nation and much of the world knew Bull Connor’s name and bore witness to his deeds. With those images blanketing the world, Birmingham,