Home › Features › Essays › The Presidency and the Peace

The Presidency and the Peace

By McGeorge Bundy
April 1964
Article Summary and Author Biography

It is with some sense of temerity that a member of the White House staff undertakes to comment on the large topic of the Presidency and the Peace. Loyalty and affection are so normal in such service that detachment is difficult. Nevertheless the importance of the topic and the enforced familiarity of close experience with the Presidential task may justify a set of comments whose underlying motive is to express a conviction that is as obvious as the daylight, in general, and as fresh as every sunrise, in particular: a conviction that the American Presidency, for better, not for worse, has now become the world's best hope of preventing the unexampled catastrophe of general nuclear war.

Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.

It is with some sense of temerity that a member of the White House staff undertakes to comment on the large topic of the Presidency and the Peace. Loyalty and affection are so normal in such service that detachment is difficult. Nevertheless the importance of the topic and the enforced familiarity of close experience with the Presidential task may justify a set of comments whose underlying motive is to express a conviction that is as obvious as the daylight, in general, and as fresh as every sunrise, in particular: a conviction that the American Presidency, for better, not for worse, has now become the world's best hope of preventing the unexampled catastrophe of general nuclear war.

Moreover, both charity and sorrow can be good lenses for perception, and it may therefore be possible to consider the subject without impropriety by focussing upon the years of John F. Kennedy. The tragedy which has moved his Administration from politics to history may allow to his critics and excuse in his friends some generosity in the assessment of his three years. His death revealed his greatness, and the grief of the world was less for his tragedy than for its own-in that he had shown his spreading grasp of his duty to mankind as Chief Executive for Peace.

To focus on the Kennedy years is not to forget those before, and still less the firm continuation after November 22. The Presidents of the nuclear age before Mr. Kennedy also made the service of peace the first of their purposes, and the determined commitment of President Johnson to this same end, matured in decades of direct knowledge of our nuclear world, has been made plain in his own words and actions already. Indeed one purpose of a retrospective assessment is to clarify purposes which are as important to the President today as to the President last year.

A President in search of Peace has many powers, but none is more relevant or more effective than his power as Commander-in-Chief. The President is keeping the peace as long as he keeps his own nuclear power in check, and with it the nuclear power of others. This most obvious of his powers, apparently so simple and so negative, can be used for peace in a number of ways.

This is a premium article

You must be a logged in Foreign Affairs subscriber to continue reading. If you wish to continue reading this article please subscribe , or activate your online account to get full online access.

Buy PDF

Buy a premium PDF reprint of this article.

Related

Essay, Apr 1967
The Anti-Ballistic Missile Debate
J. I. Coffey

One of the great problems in arms control is that advances in technology, and their application to military programs, tend to invalidate or render meaningless even the soundest arms-control proposals. Twice in the last decade this has occurred, once when the diffusion of nuclear technology and the production of large numbers of nuclear weapons rendered futile any hope of complete nuclear disarmament, and again when the advent of intercontinental missiles made necessary a rethinking of all the proposals for limiting or abolishing strategic strike forces. It may well be that we are about to witness a similar overtaking of current arms-control proposals because of the possibility of deploying highly effective ballistic missile defenses.

Read
Essay, Oct 1964
Japanese Security and American Policy
George F. Kennan

The provisions of the Japanese Constitution barring the resort to war as an instrument of Japanese policy, and effectively committing Japan not to maintain armed forces on a major scale, has long raised the question how Japan's security is to be assured in a world still replete with sources of international conflict. As late as 1948 it was still General MacArthur's view, if the writer of these lines understood him correctly, that it would not be essential for the United States to maintain armed forces on the Japanese archipelago permanently or for a protracted time either for its own security or for that of Japan; in his view, the most suitable status for Japan would be one of permanent demilitarization and neutralization under such general protection as might be afforded by the United Nations and by the friendly interest of the United States. He appeared to believe, as did this writer, that if such a status could be arranged with the concurrence of the Soviet Government, the likelihood of a Soviet attack on Japan would be minimal; and it was not easy to see from what other quarter Japan could be seriously threatened. This concept assumed, of course, an eventual agreement between the Soviet Union, the United States and other interested parties, on the terms of a Japanese peace settlement.

Read
Essay, Jul 1965
Risks of Nuclear Proliferation
William C. Foster

THREE and a half years ago when John J. McCloy gave an accounting in this journal of where we stood in efforts for disarmament the picture which he presented was understandably somber.[i] In the previous September there had been some progress in the negotiation of a "Joint Statement of Agreed Principles," an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union on certain criteria that would have to be met if progress was to be made on substantive measures. But that one hopeful development had to be balanced against a record of discouragingly little progress in any other negotiations, growing difficulties over Berlin culminating in the erection of the Wall, and the termination, also in September 1961, of the understanding on the nuclear-test cessation.

Read