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seized the opportunity opened by the crisis. In late 1962, they began an intensive exchange of letters on reviving the on-again, off-again negotiations on a nuclear test ban, an agreement made all the more urgent given the evident progress of China in acquiring nuclear weapons. On December 19, Khrushchev wrote Kennedy that the time had arrived to “put an end once and for all” to nuclear weapons testing. 10
    Old unsettled issues—about both Germany and arms control—would threaten an agreement once again, causing both sides to question the goodwill, resolve, and ability of the other side to keep hardliners in check. As the past failures of U.S.-Soviet negotiations had vividly shown, there could never be unity on either side about the way forward. Only leadership at the top would suffice. The next nine months would be a drama of the two protagonists, Kennedy and Khrushchev. Kennedy’s theory of peace and Khrushchev’s quest for peaceful coexistence would face their ultimate test.
    * Key members of his foreign policy team included McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser; Robert McNamara, secretary of defense; Dean Rusk, secretary of state; Averell Harriman, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and Kennedy’s assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs (November 1961–April 1963) and undersecretary of state for political affairs (April 1963–March 1965); Carl Kaysen, deputy special assistant for national security affairs; Roswell Gilpatric, deputy secretary of defense; and Paul Nitze, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

Chapter 4
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THE RHETORIC OF PEACE
    KENNEDY AIMED TO conjure peace through the spoken word. This is how he understood great leadership. This is how he would turn his own personal courage and skills to the service of humanity. As a senator, Kennedy had risen to national prominence with his Pulitzer Prize–winning book of 1957,
Profiles in Courage
, which highlighted acts of political courage by eight senators. 1 The book was, at the core, a compendium of bold oratory throughout U.S. Senate history, speeches by politicians of such piercing eloquence and truth that they outlasted their own age and inspired later generations. During the summer of 1963, Kennedy made a series of speeches on peace that would likewise move his contemporaries—including his adversaries—and later generations.
    In his efforts to rally public opinion to his side, Kennedy was acutely aware of one of the greatest foreign policy setbacks of the previous half century: President Woodrow Wilson’s failure in 1919 to sway public and senatorial opinion to the cause of the League of Nations. Kennedy thus sought to stir the public not with falsepromises but with hard realism, not with balm but with responsible talk about the great stakes of making peace. He would follow Churchill’s dictum of straight talk even if it was painful and politically dangerous. Kennedy would appeal to the people, so that peace would be a triumph of democracy itself.
The Power of Oratory

 
    Kennedy was of course no stranger to the power of oratory. He had studied it since his youth, relished it, championed it, and aspired to greatness in it. His lifelong role model, in this arena as in so many others, was Churchill, whose incomparable rhetoric had helped save a civilization. If it was true at the Battle of Britain that “never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” then it was also probably true that never in the course of human conflict had so few words inspired so many to act so valiantly. 2 Kennedy had been present for the speeches in the British House of Commons when war was declared in 1939, and had been deeply affected by them, particularly by Churchill’s words. Kennedy noted in April 1963 that Churchill “mobilized the English Language and sent it into battle.” 3 Churchill’s oratory influenced Kennedy in more ways than one. On the campaign trail in 1960, Kennedy