WASHINGTON —
These days it is hard to imagine a single presidential speech changing history.
But two speeches, given back to back by President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago this week, are now viewed as critical turning points on the transcendent issues of the last century.
The speeches took political risks. They sought to shift the nation’s thinking on the “inevitability” of war with the Soviet Union and to make urgent the “moral crisis” of civil rights. Beyond their considerable impact on American minds, these two speeches had something in common that oratory now often misses. They both led quickly and directly to important changes.
On Monday, June 10, 1963, Kennedy announced new talks to try to curb nuclear tests, signaling a decrease in tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. Speaking at American University’s morning commencement, he urged new approaches to the Cold War, saying, “And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”
“In the final analysis,” he continued, “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.”
The next evening, Kennedy gave an address on national television, sketching out a strong civil rights bill he promised to send to Congress. For the first time, a president made a moral case against segregation. He had previously argued publicly for obedience to court orders and had condemned violence, but not the underlying system.
“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution,” Kennedy said. “The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”
Action followed. An agreement to establish a hot line between Washington and Moscow came in a few days, and a limited nuclear test ban treaty in four months. In just over a year, the 1964 Civil Rights Act became the most important American law of the 20th century, though Kennedy did not live to see it.
Contrast in speeches
Robert Dallek, Kennedy’s leading biographer, said the two speeches were “not just two of his best speeches, but two of the better presidential speeches of the 20th century.”
Though Theodore C. Sorensen, the president’s main speechwriter, was the principal writer of both speeches, they were prepared in very different ways.
The American University speech was a month in the making, growing out of Kennedy’s sense that if some progress on controlling arms was to be made, it had to happen in 1963, not in the election year of 1964, and from signals from the Kremlin that new talks might be productive. But it was kept secret from the Pentagon, because of fears that generals might object to any steps toward conciliation.
In contrast, the civil rights speech was written in a few hours and was almost not given.
Dallek said the American University speech reflected Kennedy’s “real passion” about his presidency, the goal of building “not merely peace in our time but peace for all time,” as Kennedy put it that morning.
To achieve it, Kennedy said, it was necessary to “examine our attitude toward peace itself.”
He said that while it was “sad” to read Soviet propaganda insisting that the United States was planning many wars so it could dominate the world, “it is also a warning — 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.”
Trouble in Alabama
On June 11, Kennedy had planned to speak about civil rights if there was trouble in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where Gov. George Wallace had vowed to stand in the way to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama. But Wallace simply made a statement and then stepped aside, and the process went smoothly. The speech seemed unnecessary.
Sorensen, who had labored over the Monday speech, went home, only to be summoned back at midafternoon when the president’s brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy persuaded Kennedy to go ahead. Sorensen finished his draft with only minutes to spare, and Kennedy ad-libbed concluding paragraphs.
The president had come to the civil rights issue only “grudgingly,” as Dallek put it. He thought segregation wrong and the Southerners who defended it “hopeless.” But for more than two years in the White House, he had treated the issue as a distraction from not only foreign policy but also tough domestic issues like a tax cut to spur the economy.
Moreover, Dallek said, Kennedy and his brother thought the issue would cost him the Southern states he won in 1960 and could bring his defeat in 1964.
In between the two speeches, another critical issue arose. At a busy intersection in South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire. That set off the political developments that led to the ouster and murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem just three weeks before Kennedy’s own assassination.
