Free To Move the World by Jeffrey D. Sachs

historic shift, though only the success of the forthcoming negotiations could confirm the speech’s significance. The final verdict would have to wait.
    The Washington Post
editorialized that the speech “was much more than an appeal for a ban on nuclear testing. It was, indeed, another bid for an end to the cold war.” 1 But the paper cautioned: “Many similar gestures on the part of former President Eisenhower as well as President Kennedy have brought only meager responses from the Communist bloc.” The announcement of new test ban negotiations “must be read in the light of many failures of similar attempts in the past.”
    The New York Times
noted that the “most important plea in President Kennedy’s eloquent address” was his call to “re-examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union.” 2 The editorial concluded with a strong endorsement of Kennedy’s attempt at peace. “The search must be to find a truce so the world can live in peace while the arms race is halted. If the meeting in Moscow makes a start in that direction it will be a great moment for mankind.”
    Walter Lippmann, the most redoubtable political commentator of the era, gave his support as well:
    We on our part and the Russians on their part have raised higher than the iron curtain an impenetrable fog of suspicion … The President’s address is more than a talk. It is a wise and shrewd action intended primarily to improve the climate of East-West relations. 3
    Lippmann rightly pointed out that for Kennedy and Khrushchev, the idea that one side can “bury the other” (as Khrushchev had famously proclaimed) had become “nonsensical.” “In the age of nuclear parity,” he wrote, echoing both Kennedy and Khrushchev, “there is no alternative to coexistence.”
    There was also plenty of critical U.S. press. Columnist Roscoe Drummond of
The Christian Science Monitor
, for example, dismissed Kennedy’s hope of making the world safe for diversity. “This is not the Soviet objective,” he wrote. “Undoubtedly the Kremlin wants to avoid nuclear war, but short of nuclear war to make the world unsafe for diversity.” There was little to do to ease tensions because “the Soviet determination to impose its political will and economy system on others” was “basic Communist doctrine.” 4
    The international press reaction was almost universally positive, with two notable and predictable exceptions: China and France. Both planned to build their own nuclear arsenals, as they viewed nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantor of national power and independence, and did not trust their nuclear-armed allies to defend them. Indeed, by 1963, the Soviet Union and China were essentially antagonists rather than allies. China, in addition to its own nuclear aspirations, had long harangued the Soviet Union for any hints of rapprochement or détente with the United States. The French press expressed skepticism that any effective agreement would emerge from the coming negotiations. The U.S. Information Agency report on international reactions to the speech (coincidentally written by USIA deputy director Thomas Sorensen, Ted’s brother) noted that “[s]ome [French] papers suggested that both Macmillan and the President need a foreign success for domestic reasons, and thus may be prepared to make some concessions—especially at France’s expense. They also emphasized that a test ban treaty would not bind France or Communist China.” 5 For the rest of the world, though, the speech raised hopes, albeit hopes tempered by the long history of diplomatic dead ends.
    The greatest enthusiasm was in the United Kingdom, which was to be the third signatory of the pending treaty. Among the allies, Prime Minister Macmillan had been the strongest and most persistent proponent of reopening negotiations, and he hadworked closely with Kennedy to achieve it. The
Daily Mail
called the American University address Kennedy’s “greatest speech.” The
Evening