Jeffrey Sachs on John F. Kennedy and his Quest For Peace

good evening and what a wonderful room, I understand it's an autopsy room so let's at least delve into the story a little bit and I'm very grateful that you came tonight and I think we'll start with a short series of clips about the speech i will be talking about, mainly a speech given 50 years ago by president

john

f

kennedy

on june 10, 1963, it was the commencement speech at the american university in washington d.c and join me to watch a little bit, you will immediately be mesmerized and then we'll talk about it and what it means and I'll give you a hint.

I think it is the best speech any American president has given in modern history and I hope that by the end of the talk you will agree with me thank you that speech changed history 50 years ago the world was teetering on the very edge of survival 51 years ago We came as close as humanity can come to complete self-destruction in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy was speaking at a time when the world seemed discolored by war and when the clash between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed necessarily be a clash that could only end in war, in destruction, in the military defeat of one by the other. and what you were seeing was a remarkable and fundamentally successful act of leadership not only in this speech but in the months before and in the few months left in Kennedy's life after this speech to convince the Americans and convince the world. that there was the possibility of a completely different approach and, more fundamentally, the possibility of

peace

between two superpowers that seemed inevitably on the brink of war and disaster and Kennedy in those excerpts is exhorting Americans to consider the positive possibility as something that en It's hard for us to imagine right now, but it was a speech overwhelmingly capable of overcoming the sense of widespread pessimism, as Kennedy said in the speech.

Many of us think that

peace

is unreal. Many think it is impossible. Many believe that we are trapped by forces. we can't control, we don't need to accept that point of view and then he says that humanity often solves what seems unsolvable and we believe they can do it again and I fell in love with this speech about 10 years ago when I first discovered it. Of course, it's a very well-known speech, but not as well-known as Kennedy's other great speeches, and in fact, this was a speech on June 10 and the next day it's an equally wonderful speech the next night on civil rights, for which will be repeated in two days. that uh

kennedy

reached the highest level not only of eloquence but also of leadership grace that one can imagine pressed by the events in both cases in the second case, the desegregation of the university of mississippi and the violence that surrounded it kennedy appeared in national television to say that We are faced with an issue that is as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution and for the first time that an American president has done so, at least since Abraham Lincoln, made basic moral arguments in favor of civil rights and was a turning point.

The turning point for his administration was a turning point for the United States and it came a day after this speech, so they were loaded days, they were very heavy days and you also saw in this video the president saying, as he made many, many times that we could not find peace internationally unless we also found peace at home we could not represent our views internationally unless we lived morally and with dignity at home so hearing this , of course, I fell in love with it and several thousand listens later probably started reflecting on it. and I was very lucky to be in this city six years ago to give short talks to the BBC and to present this speech as a centerpiece of my attempt to understand what leadership means at a time when there is such cynicism and doubt generalized on fundamental issues and it was actually a very funny thing for me at the corona conferences now that I look back on it.

I gave the first of the crown lectures not at the royal institution but at the Royal Society, another incredible historical venue that also has the burden of having Isaac Newton looking down on it. while speaking, which is not easy to achieve and I gave a speech about the need and possibility of finding a way to end poverty and fight climate change together to achieve sustainable development and I finished the speech thinking that it was good Boy, I was convincing and then there was a chorus of denials for an hour that surprised me and still surprises me because I was at the center of, perhaps, the very center of the birth of rational thought in the world, with Isaac Newton and with science. modern that owes its life to bacon and Newton in this country and when I got to the third conference, which was actually at Columbia University, the speech was kind of a reminder to me that there is some hope, uh, that even when you feel the inexorability of conflict or the inevitability of failure, it is possible to bridge that and, in fact, I think that this period that I will describe from October 1962 until the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963 was something of a miracle of leadership.

He wasn't a great president the first two years. He was a wonderful man, a man full of charisma, a man full of eloquence, but he became a great president for one year after two difficult years at the beginning and showed us something about what leadership is. and how it is possible to turn into reality a dream that is fundamentally based on a moral spirit and that is the period that I want to share with you today, what makes this episode, this attempt to find peace between the United States and the Soviet Union , be so remarkable. are, of course, the background of the previous years: the cold war in 1963 had been going on for a generation since 1945, things had gone from first difficult to painful, to multiple crises and then, in October 1962, to the very brink of devastation and this was a burden of Therefore, an entire generation that Kennedy bored and tried to confront to find a way out of the abyss, it is probably useful to start with the beginning of the Cold War, although this It is a story that we think we know and understand to be a A complicated and difficult period is one in which mistakes were made on both sides and mistakes on one side triggered an escalation of mistakes on the other until there came to be a dominant view on both sides of the iron curtain that each faced a problem. implacable enemy on the other side, and of course that kind of fear of an implacable enemy creates fear and creates hardline thoughts and attitudes that validate those fears on the other side, it is probably correct that from 1945 to 1953 the worsening of relations What had been the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom was destined to largely fall apart.

Stalin was a murderer, he was paranoid and he had a very harsh and crushing way of trying to pursue Soviet interests, so no matter how you analyze the various actions that were taken on both sides and Truman made his share of aggressive moves and his share of errors. I think it's probably fair to say in the short time we have to discuss these issues that until Stalin's death there was probably little hope for uh. a calming of the cold war and since the United States had begun the nuclear era in August 1945 and the Soviet Union was able to continue with its own nuclear weapons in 1949 there was not only the clash of these two powers in Europe centered on Germany But there was also the nuclear arms race running alongside it, unprecedented and soon to be uncontrolled, so this was a period like many in modern history, unprecedented for its participants, there were no roadmaps, there was no roadmap ready to use. plan of action and that's like us on other issues today in climate change or in energy or in some of the other challenges that we face, there is nothing available that can tell us what to do each generation faces its unique challenges and has to find your unique way through them, well, the late 40s were, of course, an extraordinarily difficult period because of the onset of the cold war, the onset of nuclear weapons, the Berlin crisis, which highlighted a key and central fact to understand, which is that the nature of postwar Germany remained throughout the period until 1963 the central issue that separated the United States and the USSR, although this was often misunderstood, Russia was afraid of a resurgent Germany , the West was afraid of Soviet troops in the middle of Europe and so, while the West feared Soviet aggression and saw the Soviet con

quest

and domination of Eastern and Central Europe up to the division between Eastern and Western Germany as proof of Soviet intentions of domination over Europe The Soviet Union saw its actions but through Stalin's paranoid lens as a way to protect the Soviet Union from a third resurgence of Germany after the two devastating wars, but the two sides could not agree due to these differences. perspectives on what Germany's destiny should be and in 1945 there was a brief period in which both sides agreed that Germany should remain deindustrialized and repressed for fear of what a resurgent industrial power might mean.

The United States had a so-called Morgenthau plan, named after the Treasury secretary of the time and the Soviets were more or less along those lines, but as the situation quickly began to harden in the early episodes of the Cold War, especially due to the brutal Soviet domination over Poland and other Eastern European countries (the United States, the United Kingdom and France), when the three occupying powers began to feel that the western occupation zones really were implicitly and soon would be explicitly the barrier line to prevent further Soviet incursions into Europe and very soon a dynamic took place that was incredibly destructive, on the one hand the Soviets feared a resurgent Germany more than anything and on the other hand, the West feared a powerful Soviet Union.

Union and an aggressive and closed society and obviously a cruelly run society and therefore I felt that the construction of Germany in at least three of the four occupation zones was of central importance after the Second World War and, indeed, from 1947, Germany began. to be rebuilt came the marshall plan which created an even more extreme division and then the three western occupying powers decided that not only would their areas recover economically but that this would be a new western germany there was never a treaty never an agreement never a shared vision on as a result, the future of germany and there would not be until 1989 until gorbachev made the end of the cold war possible, but until then germany remained the centerpiece of this race phenomenally destabilized and amplified by the nuclear arms race, which was a technological race that went hand in hand, but in some ways was different from the political issues that underpinned the cold war itself.

In the early 1950s, the Soviet doctrine was that the United States and its allies were rebuilding Germany to invade again. Soviet Union and there were not a few Americans. The generals loved the idea and, in fact, the United States had a huge nuclear advantage. This was another point of typical mass and mutually defeating confusion. The Soviets had boots on the ground in the Red Army spread across Eastern and Central Europe. The United States responded by building. its nuclear arsenal and so the idea was that the United States could not win a conventional war against the Soviet Union but would retaliate with what was called massive retaliation through a nuclear force for the United States and the Western side, this was defense for the Soviet side, this was It is a pure offense that this was an attempt to gain such great superiority in nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union would be attacked in a first strike by the West and, as I said, it doesn't help that several people have enjoyed the idea they wrote about it. he studied it, lectured on it, and believed it was exactly the right thing to do, and in such a circumstance, of course, both sides shortened the fuse of the weaponry for fear that the other side would launch a first strike and eliminate the other's capability. side to retaliate or survive and so the weapons systems became more and more with very short fuses and the shorter the fuse, of course, the more hot heads on both sides would say we better leave now because they are about to strike and whenever When a crisis comes, you almost rush into the self-fulfilling prophecy that you must act first and you must act now and anyone who delays is threatening the vital security of their side of the conflict and therefore which game theorists and nuclear strategists sometimes described as a balance of terror or whatwhich was appropriately called by its acronym crazy mutual assured destruction was anything but an equilibrium, it was an unstable, extraordinarily dangerous, ever-shifting, psychological battle line, filled first with hundreds and then thousands of nuclear weapons on each side in 1953 Stalin had the good sense to die or someone may have had the good sense to kill him, we don't know, but a monster of the 20th century died and there was a possibility of at least a thaw, of relief. arrests and Eisenhower gave a speech almost exactly 10 years before Kennedy's speech, which is an important speech to consider partly because of what he said and partly because of the difference between how Eisenhower approached the issue and how Kennedy would approach the issue 10 years later . he was excited he thought this was an opportunity to make a breakthrough many of his aides were much less excited the american doctrine was that the soviet union was a communist monolith seeking global domination that would stop at nothing less and that any attempt to making a thaw or making peace was nonsense and the then Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, whom I remembered yesterday while walking through the Churchill Museum, was described by Winston Churchill as the most boring of the Dole dollar and a very apt description from Mr.

Dulles. he was a hardliner, a rigid thinker, and a constant drag on Eisenhower's best instincts. Eisenhower had good instincts despite being a great general, he was a decent person and he believed in peace and he believed that there could be a path to peace, but he was not, ironically, a strong leader as president and he deferred to his colleagues, he deferred Dulles' brother, Alan Dulles, in the CIA, if there was an adjective beyond boring, it would be Allen to refer to a true creep in American history who headed the creepiest institution. of modern American history, the CIA, and it did an enormous amount of damage over the years, but Eisenhower gave a speech called Opportunities for Peace in 1953 and he said some very moving things that he actually said: for every plane that we built here is the number of hospitals we could build for each ship we built this is the number of schools we could said we are wasting our time our money our human ingenuity in an arms race when we should be solving our problems wonderfully then proceeded like Normally any leader would and said here are the 10 things the Soviet Union must do if we want to find peace and provided a list of what the other side had to do if it was to be considered a worthy partner for peace.

In the end it accomplished nothing, partly because a power struggle was still going on in Moscow after uh, since Stalin's death, it would be two more years before Khrushchev became the sole leader and the Soviet side was not ready. to be an interlocutor, but also the approach was not an approach that could work and said that the other side had to make a lot of concessions. Here is a list of them then we will begin to talk and throughout the 1950s the fundamental problem of Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe the unresolved crisis of Germany the increasing number of nuclear weapons and of course in the 1950s thermonuclear weapons each containing more explosive power than all the bombs that had been dropped in World War II had meant that, as horrible as atomic bombs were, thermonuclear bombs were an unprecedented, unmanageable scale of destruction. , unthinkable, that Eisenhower expected during the remaining years of his administration, which ended on January 20, 1961 when Kennedy took an oath that he would be able to find a path to peace with the Soviet Union, of course he never achieved it and it is notable how the last of these episodes failed because in 1958 in 1959 there was Another attempt with Khrushchev now proposing a doctrine of peaceful coexistence and very interested in diverting resources from the army in the Soviet Union to try to help restart or rescue a civilian economy in great stress .

Eisenhower thought there was a chance that John Foster Dulles would die and that opened another opportunity because now that the rift with Eisenhower had lifted a bit and by 1960 it looked like there might be a thaw in the Cold War, two fundamental things prevented it: one it was Germany's shaky state of what to do and a rather misguided misunderstanding. by eisenhower a lack of awareness and sensitivity that according to the great historian mark trachtenberg I think convincingly describes the underlying political weakness of eisenhower's last years in power eisenhower began to flirt with the idea of ​​what was called nuclear energy sharing that Because of the heavy burdens that the United States had troops in Germany and that Eisenhower was a fiscal conservative who wanted to cut the military budget and bring the boys home he began to explore the idea that perhaps Western Europe and especially Germany could have their own nuclear deterrent, thus alleviating the need for the United States to be on the front line against the Soviet Union.

You can imagine how this was received in Moscow, a war that had claimed 20 million deaths at the hands of Germany and where the Soviets had borne a burden unprecedented in all of human history to defeat it. The German military was suddenly confronted with the possibility that all of this was tainted by a nuclear Germany. Germany's chancellor at the time, Conrad Adenauer, also longed for this, which did not help create much discomfort and many headaches, but he said that Germany should have a nuclear deterrent or at least be part of NATO's nuclear deterrent. in a much more tactical and short-term way.

There was another decisive event that is important to understand against the backdrop of 1963. And it was that Eisenhower and Khrushchev aspired to a summit. in which some of these issues could be resolved, even the German issues perhaps, and that was to take place in Paris in the mid-1960s. Just before the summit of the second CIA summit, another individual came from the CIA room. American infamy, Richard Bissell. to the oval office to whisper good news in the president's ear and say that maybe right before we go to the summit meeting we should do one more spy flight over russia just to get the most up-to-date data.

Eisenhower thought it was a good time. possibly provocative bad idea was an illegal intrusion into soviet airspace and mr bissell as the cia has done repeatedly for over 50 years lied directly to the president said the soviet union had no chance of detecting this flight did not know about the u2 and in any case the u-2 was designed to disintegrate if it was hit in an attack and if by any chance the pilot survived the pilot carried a poisonous hypodermic needle to take his life so that there would be no chance of capture, of course, The CIA knew that the previous spy flight had been detected by Soviet radar and the MiGs had been scrambled, but they had only been able to reach about 50,000 feet, not the 70,000 feet that the U2 flew at, and that little fact was not known.

I said to Eisenhower, so Eisenhower went ahead with the flight, uh, and many of you will remember the inevitable result of that: the plane was shot down, it didn't disintegrate, it broke into two pieces, the pilot didn't commit suicide, he was ejected safely and landed. and was quickly captured by the Soviet Union, none of which, of course, was revealed when the Soviet Union announced to the world that the United States had been sending spy flights over the Soviet Union and, of course, the United States completely rejected that propaganda, at which time the soviet union announced that the government announced that we had shot down a plane, at which time the United States said it is a blatant lie, this is a weather plane parked in Turkey that was diverted, at which time there was a wonderful press conference in which they brought the cameras. to inspect the wreckage of the U2 and meet Mr.

Gary Powers, who was first revealed to have survived the flight and firefight, at which point the summit was torpedoed and Eisenhower's remaining hopes of finding some kind of path to peace is gone. Kennedy took office on January 20, 1961 and, of course, he gave a very remarkable speech that in many ways accurately captured his intentions as president and one of the most famous lines, of course, was his line that was really based on Churchill Let. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. Kennedy announced that he intended to enter into negotiations to find a path to peace.

He said poignantly and I think powerfully and uniquely at that moment, humanity has it in our mortal hands. the ability to end all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life, so he raised the stakes and explained that we are on a knife's edge with our technological wonders, we could solve deep human problems, this is our lesson fundamental to this day, but with our technological magic we can also destroy the planet we could destroy it by nuclear weapons in Kennedy's time or even our own we could destroy it by climate change and our absolute determination to neglect the realities of science uh as It is told in this room uh throughout history uh as another way to destroy human life Kennedy said that he intended to negotiate, but that he also intended to negotiate without strength and he also intended not to have the intention. .

He also had a profound inexperience as the youngest man ever elected president of the United States and that's why when his administration opened the The first thing he did was start an arms buildup and this in Kennedy's mind, of course, was to position the United States United for future negotiations and in the Soviet mind, of course, was to position the United States for the next first strike and this is the nature of international negotiations. diplomacy or international strategic action it can be said that if one does not think about how the counterpart understands signals and actions, the chances of disaster are very high, but even more than that, of course, mr bissell had a double act, two grand slams. in a year and that was his second appearance in the Oval Office and he informed President Kennedy about a plan that had been devised in the last year of Eisenhower's presidency to support the Cuban exiles in the invasion of Cuba and here the inexperience of Kennedy showed a complete uh in total, terrible result, first Kennedy didn't know what to do, how do you reject the CIA, how do you reject his military advisors, especially as a young and untested president, always afraid of being accused of being soft on communism for being an appeaser and he was also very afraid of directly contradicting military plans.

On the other hand, he understood the same thing that Eisenhower had understood the previous year, that it is quite provocative to invade Cuba in just three months of administration, so who did one pretty stupid thing, actually did two pretty stupid things first. He said we will do it, but there are no American footprints on it, there is no air cover, if you are going to do it you can do it and succeed, in my opinion it is not a great idea, but doing it almost guarantees that it will fail is a worse idea and Kennedy. he went ahead he gave the green light to the invasion and of course it was a complete debacle the ships sank as they entered the bay all the exiles were killed or captured in a short number of hours it was a complete total disaster and Khrushchev I wrote a surprising note to Kennedy because already in April 1961 they had acquired a very important habit that played a role in the salvation of the world and that was that they wrote private correspondence with each other, correspondence that was not circulated by the government and in which they had remarkably coincided with each other.

I will never use them for the media or for propaganda purposes, they will remain for us only Kennedy described the few people who would see them, he told Khrushchev that these are the only people who will see his correspondence and there began about a hundred letters back and forth ,uh. until Kennedy's death were absolutely remarkable, but after two months of bonami and joy and looking forward to a summit, an agitated letter arrived from Khrushchev: What are you doing? American piracy on the high seas. Your country is illegally attacking the island of Cuba. I know, Mr. President.

You shouldn't, I'm sure you have nothing to do with this, but you should know what's happening. Kennedy did something really stupid to make all of this worse. He told us that we have nothing to do with this. These are the Cuban exiles. This is not the United States Khrushchev responded with an explosive note Mr. President Are you kidding me What are you telling me These are your planes These are your ships These are your weapons This is the CIA This is your training Never write me such lies very powerful and From the Khrushchev's point of view, two direct and blatant lies from American presidents in less than a year,at a time when the two sides were apparently seeking peaceful coexistence;

Shortly after, Kennedy's summit with Khrushchev took place in Vienna and you can imagine the consequences, it was a terrible event. From Kennedy's point of view, Khrushchev berated him, pressured him, blustered, and did something absolutely horrible from Kennedy's point of view, and that is, since there had been no resolution on Germany for the previous 16 years, the Union Soviet Union was going to unilaterally recognize In the GDR, that would be the end and eliminate Western rights over West Berlin, so Kennedy was told in Vienna that what had been the flashpoint and possibly the trigger for the war on the bridge Berlin air raid in the late 1940s would be his first massive crisis Kennedy explained to Khrushchev that this was a fundamental, uh, fundamental interest of the West, the West would never peacefully cede its access to West Germany that what Khrushchev was proposing would fundamentally change the status quo in a way that was completely unacceptable to the United States and to the West and that could lead to war and Khrushchev just shrugged his shoulders and said so be it, this is what we're going to do and left Kennedy sputtering and horrified.

Because of what he had just experienced, he left the summit exhausted, depressed and wondering how things had gone so wrong and so fast in the first months of the presidency. In the end, ironically, what stopped the Berlin action was none other than the Berlin Wall. Part of the reason for Khrushchev's agitation in Vienna was not only the unresolved problem of Berlin, not only the unresolved problem of Germany, and not only the talks on sharing nuclear energy that continued up to that point, but also the massive rush of Germans. Easterners who were leaving East Germany through West Berlin through West Berlin, which was still an open route.

The border and the wall went up suddenly in August 1961 and Kennedy intuitively understood from the first moment, don't

quest

ion it, it is on the Soviet side and ironically perhaps it will avoid war because it will eliminate some of the turmoil that was leading to the unilateral demands. about a German agreement and, sure enough, Khrushchev essentially abandoned those demands, but the German question remained withering, but Khrushchev was looking for a way back and, of course, the way back turned out to be just about the ultimate disaster he ever thought of. Fall of '61 and he came up with his plan, the worst imaginable and that was to put intermediate range offensive weapons in Cuba and do it in the face of explicit and repeated promises that the Soviet Union would never do that and it is remarkable to see Khrushchev describe this idea to Their Soviet counterparts in the memoirs of the Soviet side Khrushchev tells Grimeko to the Foreign Minister.

We have this great idea. We are going to even the score. The United States has its missiles in Turkey. We are going to have ours in Cuba. The United States is going to try to invade Cuba. again we are going to have our nuclear weapons there we will provide complete protection against an invasion all we have to do is place these missiles and grimiko basically says and I'm paraphrasing are you crazy? Do you want war and Khrushchev? And I think it's very important for us to understand how these things work. happens let's say of course I don't want war war this has nothing to do with war this is the minister of politics this is not about war it's about equalizing the balance it's about restoring some strategic balance on the Soviet side no war way nothing about the war and he goes to the politburo and says the same thing and they let him go ahead and of course Khrushchev in no way wanted war, it was the last thing on his mind and human beings are capable of doing such stupid things as Incredibly stupid things.

It's probably not true, although it seems that the higher you go, the more stupid, but it is true that the higher you go, the more dangerous, your stupidity probably equals stupidity in every way, but Khrushchev's idea was absolutely disastrous and Kennedy I was on his side. was constantly fighting hardliners who said that the soviet union was going to build a military base in cuba and was going to place nuclear weapons that would threaten the united states and kennedy said we will never let that happen and as long as I'm president, this It's American policy and it won't happen because the Soviet Union has promised us over and over again that it will never happen and Khrushchev thought he was somehow going to introduce those missiles and reveal them after the 1962 midterm elections and create a whole new fader. and of course it's a little silly to think that we're going to have huge convoys of ships secretly carrying huge cargoes and no one is going to ask the questions and of course in October the president was alerted that this time the cia got it right , but don't take it as a vindication of the cia please, the record is so bad that they could get it right several times and not even come close to vindication, but they found the missiles uh and uh kennedy uh Of course, I faced the crisis more serious thing that the world had suddenly and unexpectedly faced in October 1962 and, as you all know, Kennedy created an executive committee.

Xcom. We have the Xcom tapes. An absolutely remarkable historical record to listen to the deliberations. more than 13 days and it is surprising, of course, impressive 50 years later 51 years later how close the world came to complete destruction on the first day almost everyone, including Kennedy, thought that war was imminent and that the United States would soon launch a first attack to eliminate the missiles and kennedy was leaning in that direction on the first day at the end of the day robert kennedy said we better wait this is not American to launch a surprise attack and kennedy had deep and correct instincts that told him to buy time and one of His favorite military and strategic theorist, Lydell Hart, whose book he had reviewed the previous year, the great British war theorist emphasized again and again, take your time, don't act rashly, don't act suddenly, build the space for decision making and Kennedy grabbed it and came back. to that and from there he began to raise the idea of ​​a quarantine that would give the Soviet Union time to decide what to do when its ships reached a new naval quarantine line that the United States was establishing.

In this period, most of the advisors are saying we have to shoot we have to go we should take out the uh we should take out the missiles now uh maybe they're about to be launched maybe they're not ready yet so we have to take them out before they're ready if they're ready we have to take them out in a surprise attack, we dare not wait, a general, air force chief curtis lemay, i will add him to my least favorite list. He longed for war and murmured throughout this period almost insubordinately, perhaps. one could say insubordinately about Kennedy's appeasement, about how the quarantine was nothing more than appeasement, about how Kennedy was essentially unfit to lead.

You know the story and the story was that Khrushchev did not want war and was horrified by what he had created and how quickly it had happened. He came to the very edge of survival, it had nothing to do with what he wanted and he decided from the beginning that he too had to retreat and later, when they asked him if you were afraid, he said: are you crazy? He was terrified, how could you? to be a human being and not be terrified at this prospect and Khrushchev was very much a very down to earth human being uh very funny very decent in some ways but capable of stupidity uh and this had been one of them and he was shocked by what had happened quickly As you know, it happened that there was a famous exchange of these private letters during this period and first Khrushchev said that if you guarantee that there will be no invasion of Cuba, we will withdraw the weapons and Kennedy accepted that then came a second letter that said that he joined what was at stake saying and you take away the Turkish weapons, uh, the American ones in Turkey, all the advisors said no, you shouldn't do this, you can't back down, etc.

Kennedy thought it was a good deal actually and Kennedy secretly sent Robert on the famous Soviet mission. see anatoly dobrynian and tell dobrynian that Kennedy agreed to remove the Turkish missiles on the condition that this was not a quid pro quo and that it was kept secret, uh, and that it would happen in a matter of months because it had to be a NATO. decision, these were NATO missiles, not American missiles, and he could not be negotiated publicly, but he agreed to eliminate them according to Soviet accounts. Robert Kennedy also conveyed something that the American side has never acknowledged and that was his brother's fear, according to the Soviet recipient of the message that Kennedy risked facing a military coup or fundamental loss of power if there was no quick resolution. , who was under such incredible pressure from the generals to act and who feared war was imminent, no human being before Khrushchev. and Kennedy had ever experienced that responsibility and my sense is to think about it, read about it, try to understand these events, that Kennedy and Khrushchev were men transformed after this, the following year was a miraculous year, as much as the years before They had been years of clumsiness and boasting.

Both sides came to understand that there were no more games and they also came to understand that many of their worst enemies were their own colleagues, that basically both sides were full of wildly divergent and often dangerous points of view, and that collegial government like Eisenhower and Kennedy They came to See was impossible and I think this is a basic point about leadership. The only way forward that Kennedy ever understood was if he led and that meant leading in the face of opposition, it meant leading in the face of strident opponents in the other party, strident opponents.

In his own party in the southern United States, strong opponents, including his strident Air Force secretary, skeptics on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, skeptics on the CIA Kennedy decided he would have to find a way back from the abyss and also said in On some occasions, in notable ways, his counterparts in the discussion realized that his and Khrushchev's situation were essentially the same and that they needed each other and were actually more partners in finding a way to rebuild than adversaries and They both had to find a way through a political thicket to get there, so Kennedy began searching for this path.

In the spring of 1963, the most notable Pope of modern times, John 23, who was dying that spring, helped him remarkably. Of course, I was in the middle of the Vatican Council, but Pope John, on the 23rd, after the Cuban missile crisis, said he felt like he needed to do something and he knew he was dying, but he said this is the last act. that I can. What I did was try to help find a way to make peace and Kennedy, of course, was a Roman Catholic and Khrushchev, very interesting, was extremely interested in the Pope and very interested in what the Pope had to say and the Pope issued an encyclical. uh, in April 1963 called pochem on the terrace peace on earth is a remarkable document, it is basically a document that says that international affairs are not simply a question, they cannot afford to be simply a question of strategy, they must be a question of morality and the essential message of the encyclical is that we must infuse a moral dimension into our international relations, something almost unimaginable, of course, but Kennedy picked up the message.

Khrushchev collected the encyclical and the Russian translation. I think they were both moved, and Kennedy decided in the spring of 1963 that he had to do it. It shocked American opinion and had to achieve a breakthrough also with the Soviet side and in this it is notable that Harold Macmillan played an enormously salutary role and the British ambassador in Washington, David Ormsby Gore, who was a childhood friend of the president kennedy, played an enormously healthy role. They were cheering him on. He was filled with great political concern. Can I survive this? What will the right say? Is there any chance of passing a treaty through a recalcitrant Senate where I need a two-thirds vote and Mcmillan and the ambassador were both the press and Kennedy do the right thing and Kennedy because of this extraordinary period and all the forces at play psychologically, encouragement also from the Vatican, I'm sure, and the recognition of how dangerous the world had become decided to move forward decisively and The speech of June 10, 1963 is the result of Kennedy being so concerned that his own team would oppose either this or stop such a speech that he only had a few White House aides working on it and of course he worked on it very closely with his wonderful alter ego his advisor his speechwriter ted sorensen who was a wonderful man and one of my gifts in life was getting to know ted sorensen as a neighbor and having the opportunity to talk to him many times about kennedy and thisspeech that he considered his favorite speech, so kennedy and sorenson talked a lot and ken and sorenson wrote a remarkable draft, by the way, uh and uh, claire bolger, my research assistant here, who reviewed the kennedy library archives, found the first draft and it's almost a complete and perfect version, not in Word, by the way, I don't know how it's done, uh, how it's done on a typewriter, but he made an almost perfect version.

There were a couple of sloppy lines that got cut at the end, but it's great. document from the beginning and circulated it to some white house aides, carl kazen mcgeorge bundy and a few others, and then last weekend, at the defense department, the state department got the green light, it flew back from a meeting in Hawaii and he was dragged by the white house and I went to give this extraordinary speech and the main point of the speech was heard some of his remarkable eloquence, but the main point was to convince the American people and, of course, the Soviets , that he knew they would listen to him with interest, that peace was possible and what he said was so important and unique and I have never heard it from an American president again uh and I will only read the few lines that seem so amazing to me kennedy says that some say that it is useless to talk about peace or world law or world disarmament and that it will be useless until the leaders of the soviet union adopt a more enlightened attitude.

I hope they do. I believe we can help them do this, but I also believe we must reexamine our own attitudes as individuals and as a nation, our attitude is as essential as theirs. When does a president tell us to reexamine our own attitudes? peace they have virtue they are brave they are brave they do not want war they suffered a magnitude of war unprecedented in the history of humanity and kennedy describes how the losses of the soviet union and the second world war would be equivalent to the complete destruction of the entire united states to the east of chicago and the mississippi river, so the whole speech is to tell the american people, unlike eisenhower telling the soviets, he is telling the american people that we can make peace because we have common interests with the other side, They are humans, we inhabit this. small planet together you will remember he said that we all breathe the same air we all value the future of our children and we are all mortal when kennedy gave this speech krushchev heard it immediately called the united states envoy april harriman kennedy's envoy in moscow told harriman this It is the best speech by an American president since Franklin Roosevelt I want to make peace with this man seven weeks later the nuclear test ban treaty was signed in Moscow on July 25, 1963 so in a few days the 50th anniversary will be celebrated like this how fast was it able to go a couple of key decisions were made because both sides wanted to achieve success one was to leave aside a thorny issue of underground testing this was a limitation on atmospheric oceans and space testing not underground testing because the Americans They demanded many on-site inspections the Soviets said that the on-site inspections were to prepare for a first attack, first attack, both sides were right in their own strange way and therefore there could be no agreement later on on-site inspections , so they agreed on the so-called three environments. treaty where the tests could be monitored from afar, second Kennedy came to understand something that Eisenhower had never understood or had never accepted, which was that Germany should not obtain nuclear weapons and Kennedy made it perfectly clear to Germany that they would not obtain nuclear weapons and would archived everything else.

The discussion about the nuclear exchange and one of the purposes of Kennedy's notable speeches in Berlin a few days after the June 10 speech was to win the hearts and minds of the German people in part so he could tell their Adenauer leader not to , kennedy was playing internal german politics somehow and winning adenauer fell from power a few months later erhard became the next chancellor and erhard had no interest in nuclear weapons and germany of course Leaving aside forever, we hope any aspiration to nuclear weapons, so with these two issues clarified, the treaty was signed. The last point I will mention is that Kennedy, of course, was first and foremost a politician, a politician who had become a great statesman through these actions, but he was a politician and he knew that none of this mattered if he didn't get two thirds of the votes in the Senate and he didn't know it and was actually deeply pessimistic about getting this vote and that was not just a position that There was fear, and the fear also resonated because of the example of 20th century idealism in the United States United States, Woodrow Wilson, who had gone to Europe to negotiate the League of Nations as part of the Treaty of Versailles and had returned only to be defeated in the Senate, so Kennedy also participated in a domestic campaign that was astonishing in its fluidity, by his fluidity, by not missing a step, he made concessions, he was flexible, but he did everything he could to make sure that the treaty was approved and he firmly won the support of the American people. overwhelmingly in the polls and in the end the vote was 81-19 in favor of the treaty.

He spent the remaining weeks of his life touring the country beginning his 1964 campaign and what he found as he toured the country was enormous public support, an impressive vote of Confidence in the peace initiative and, finally, the world as a whole was jubilant. Within days of the signing of the three-nation treaty because it was the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union that were the three signatories, more than 90 countries had signed in, basically, a couple. of us for a few weeks and I will end with Kennedy's speech to the UN general assembly. For me, it's very moving.

I have spent the last 13 years working at the United Nations. I consider it a vital institution, of course, little understood. and american presidents with little support go to the un, but they don't have the same support as kennedy and of course that was a different era, plus kennedy was the last to mention the united nations in his inaugural address and that's also a telling sign of what is at stake and the waning political support that the United Nations sometimes receives, but he went and gave another and his last truly miraculous peace speech to the UN on September 20, 1963 and I will just read to you the end.

In that speech two years ago I told this body that the United Nations that the United States had proposed and was willing to sign a limited nuclear test ban treaty today that treaty has been signed it will not end the war it will not eliminate conflicts It will not guarantee freedom for all, but it can be a lever and it is said that Archimedes, when explaining the principles of the lever, declared to his friends: "Give me a place where I can be and I will move the world, my fellow inhabitants of this planet ". Let us take our stand here in this assembly of nations and see if in our time we can lead the world toward a just and lasting peace.

Thank you very much, many, many thanks for sharing the evening and I know that I have some time, about 20 minutes, for some questions, discussions or reflections on what all this could mean for the current day, so I would appreciate the comments and I think there are mobile microphones so if you want to make a comment please raise your hand someone will find it thank you very much it's great learning all that I don't think I learned most of that in American history class I'm glad I was updated um how Now that you've learned all this and you've studied it and now it seems like you have a fantastic understanding of it.

How applicable is it in the world we live in today, where we don't have two superpowers at odds with each other? assured destruction but rather a superpower um and what seems to be a hornet's nest of problems maybe if I had to choose one I would say the problems in the Middle East and global terrorism and is there a way that all those things that we have learned in The past can help us deal with these issues today. I think there are two themes here that are deeply significant. One is the strange idea, as it sounds like an infusion of morality into the core of governance.

I think we've lost her. It is not like this. we believed and it is our great failure, ultimately, it was Kennedy's moral statement in this speech and his moral approach to peace that made it possible that they were not technical agreements, many technical aspects were ignored by both leaders in the end we want to make the peace and it was fundamentally the humanization of the other side by Kennedy, that was the determining element that we completely missed this today no American president talks about meeting with the head of Iran we put conditions we make demands we do not have a sense of the humanity of our counterparts they don't They don't meet, they don't discuss things seriously, even talking is considered a weakness and we end up making one mistake after another assuming the worst of our counterparts, so this is part of it, the second part is the ability to do things.

It happened through leadership, this was not an easy achievement, in fact, Kennedy didn't really know how he was going to get this passed in the Senate, much less negotiate with his counterparts. A tremendous act of imagination was required when Kennedy embarked on the European tour shortly thereafter. the speech and it's 10 extraordinary days in Europe and he goes to the Irish doll and gives her another wonderful speech. He quotes the famous George Bernard Shaw when he says, speaking as an Irishman about the Irish temperament, that some people see things as they are and ask why. I dream things that never were and I ask why not and of course that became the emblem of Robert Kennedy's campaign in 1968 and part of Teddy Kennedy's eulogy for Robert in that moving eulogy after Robert's assassination, but the ability to dream things that are not is also part of leadership and we don't have that at the moment our leaders are not leaders they are followers our political mode is the focus group it is to discover what the predominant opinion is and then stay firmly within it there is no guts and political advisors with apologies to everyone in the room uh political advisors play a horrible role uh in our countries right now because their job is to protect their leader their job is to get their leader re-elected I don't know about you, I couldn't I care less about who is re-elected what matters to me is what they do and if they don't lead we don't solve the problems and I don't believe that leadership emerges from the predominant spirit, leadership takes advantage of the spirit of the country but rather the spirit of the Americans who supported Kennedy's initiative It didn't exist until he created it, that's leadership, I talked, I've talked to American presidents, why not this or that, no, no, we can't do that, that's politically impossible, that's a horrible approach, it's shocking, of course.

In fact, to hear it from a president, I hate to hear it, your job is to make it politically possible, your job is to ask what is the right thing to do, not what is politically possible but what is the right thing to do, and your job is then to find a way to make it happen. or get closer and closer to whatever it is. as close as possible to making it happen and Kennedy said something wonderful in this speech. I considered it the best management advice. I know what he said when talking about peace: by defining our goal more clearly, making it seem more manageable and less remote, we help all people achieve it.

See it to draw hope from it and move irresistibly towards it. I love that idea. Define your goal more clearly. Make it seem more manageable and less remote. Then people will draw hope from it and move irresistibly towards it. That is the job of a leader and that is fully manifested here there are so many problems in this world that are deep, they are different from the cold war, but the problems between Europe and the United States on the one hand and the Islamic world are a deep crisis and deep and it is an increasingly deep crisis. crisis of misunderstanding and it is a lack of imagination and a lack of ability to see humanity on the other side and you say the word terror and anyone will do anything, even give away all your rights to your privacy and everything else idiots and we face a equally big challenge about the destruction of the physical earth itself we have reached 400 parts per million co2 the highest level in three million years we are recklessly destroying the planet where are our leaders?

They're nowhere to be found it's too long it's too hard for them To deal with them they're worried about the next day next week next month but we should worry about human survival and that's their job or it should be their job and we have We have to make our political systems work better, but in the American system. only the president can make the system work and i know president obama's advisors i think they are doing the united states no favors because they are cautious to the point of endangering our country and the world because they will not take the risks for peace and solving big problems, mr sacks, inFirst of all, thank you very much for this afternoon.

My question is how did the hawks in the Kennedy administration who previously had access to him react to the marginalization and how did they mobilize opposition to him? I think everyone This period was quite shocking. First, Kennedy fired Alan Dulles, which was an important move and gained some control over the CIA, although of course some people speculate that the control was not perfect and that CIA agents may have had something to do with it. with his assassination, a completely unstable issue and may never be resolved, but he gained some control over the CIA, he had to negotiate with the military and he negotiated with the joint chiefs and he negotiated flexibly, not perfectly, by the way, from the point of view that he would like, but he gained their support for this somewhat grudgingly, but they supported it not only as the military supporting the civilian leadership, but also as a valid political initiative that would not jeopardize the security of the United States and for win that. agreed to five safeguards with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the United States would be willing to resume testing if the other side was freed from this, that the United States would continue underground testing, which it did, and other safeguards that would ensure capability and science of nuclear weapons. continue and so on, this did not end the nuclear arms race because of the way it managed to stop nuclear testing in all three environments, eventually in all environments and, most importantly, I must make it clear that Kennedy exposed both in 1961 and in 1963 how I expected a test.

The ban treaty would evolve toward more general cooperation and, ultimately, disarmament. Well, we obviously haven't achieved disarmament, but the next crucial step that Kennedy foresaw was the nonproliferation treaty that was agreed to in 1968. I think it's fair to say that without it it's not fair to say that it's fair to say that without the treaty. of a test ban there would be no possibility of a non-proliferation treaty in the early 1960s Kennedy and his advisors McNamara and others estimated that there would be between 30 and 40 nuclear powers within a couple of years. decades, this is clearly the number of countries that had that capability and therefore stopping proliferation was also considered one of the essential objectives of this particular treaty, so the essence of it is that Kennedy took on the negotiated challenge and it was reflected in the fact that Woodrow Wilson had been extraordinarily stubborn, he had not allowed the Senate any prerogatives in the Treaty of Versailles, to vote even on things that would not have required a renegotiation of the treaty, so Wilson was his own worst enemy in 1919. and paid the maximum price for both. treaty and of his life so Kennedy was determined to be flexible, smart and agile and get this passed, of course there were many strident calls from the right who opposed this, they lost the vote and Kennedy was eager to run against Barry Goldwater in 1964. completely convinced that he was going to defeat him overwhelmingly and would have been very grateful.