The war-hero president and the pacifist By James Carroll

[YankeyMCC]

(snip)
Sorensen draws credit as Kennedy's soaring wordsmith. But perhaps that vigorous conscience was more to the point than rhetorical flair. Coming of age during the unquestioned World War II, the young Nebraskan took for granted that he would serve in the army, but the war ended when he was 17. The next year, registering for the draft, Sorensen applied for noncombatant service as a conscientious objector. He would serve his country in the military, as a medic perhaps, but, he explained to the draft board, "I could kill no man . . . I am what is called a pacifist."

Sorensen's application for conscientious objector status would be used against Kennedy, would feature in Sorensen's secret FBI file, and, eventually, would destroy his chances of becoming Jimmy Carter's CIA director in 1976. An underappreciated fact of history is that Kennedy, remembered as the paradigmatic cold warrior, so intimately depended on a man who boldly renounced any glorification of belligerence. No surprise, then, that the most important Kennedy-Sorensen collaboration is equally unappreciated - the resounding declaration of peace that Kennedy delivered as a commencement address at American University 45 years ago next week.

(snip)

(snip)
After staring into the abyss of nuclear war over Berlin and Cuba, Kennedy chose that June as the "time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and truth is too rarely perceived - yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace." That speech went beyond the reviled Neville Chamberlain ("peace for our time") by calling for "not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time." Instead of aiming, with Woodrow Wilson, to "make the world safe for democracy," the speech proposed to "make the world safe for diversity," a step back from triumphalist claims made for American democracy during the Cold War.
(snip)


In calling for new structures of international law and negotiations toward disarmament, and in declaring a moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing, the American University speech marked the end of JFK's rhetoric of toughness. "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."

The speech was heard loud and clear in the Soviet Union. Little more than a month later, the Partial Test Ban Treaty was agreed to, the beginning of the arms control regime that saved the world - what Kennedy called a shaft of light cutting into the darkness.


(snip)


http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/06/02/the_war_hero_president_and_the_pacifist/