"A Strategy of Peace"

FOREIGN RELATIONS

The cold war, President Kennedy felt, was a stalemate. He sensed a deepening international discouragement about the possibility that real progress toward a settlement would ever be made. Accordingly, several months ago, he began thinking about a major foreign policy speech that would be "positive." Last week, while receiving an honorary doctor of civil law degree at Washington's American University, he delivered that speech. In it, he announced that

1) a new attempt toward an "early agreement on a comprehensive test-ban treaty" will be made in high-level talks between Great Britain, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in Moscow in July, and

2) the U.S. will not resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere "so long as other states do not do so."

The President's speech was carefully timed. It would, hopefully, stand in favorable contrast to the bomb-rattling talk that almost always accompanies major Communist conclaves; the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is meeting this week, and the Russians and Chinese Reds will get together next month to try to iron out their differences. And the President's proposals would surely add to the acclaim he receives on his imminent European trip.

Dangerous & Defeatist. The speech was also carefully--and eloquently-worded. Excerpts:

"Too many of us think peace is impossible. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable--that mankind is doomed--that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concepts of universal peace and good will. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams, but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.

"Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace--based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor--it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.

"No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find Communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements--in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage."

Hate & Oppression. "We have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.

"So let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. 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.

"This generation of Americans has already had enough--more than enough --of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace. Confident and unafraid, we labor on--not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace."

Kennedy's speech was widely applauded. Indeed, the liberal Manchester Guardian went so far as to call it "one of the great state papers of American history." It was hardly that, but it did represent a fresh and worthwhile effort to get long-stalled test ban talks off dead center. To represent the U.S. at next month's talks, the President named Old Moscow Hand Averell Harriman, who has never been noted for taking wooden nickels from the Russians. And even as the President made his speech, the U.S. was keeping its test labs tuned--just in case the order comes to crank up a new atmospheric test series.

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