Andrew Cohen, a journalist and professor, is author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours that Made History.
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It was no coincidence that Barack Obama chose American University this week to deliver a staunch defence of the nuclear agreement with Iran, the U.S. President's defining achievement in foreign policy.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy chose the same stage on June 10, 1963, to discuss war and peace. Eight months earlier, in the Cuban missile crisis, the world had nearly destroyed itself. An impassioned Mr. Kennedy spoke of the Russians, the bomb and the urgency of understanding the United States' most implacable enemy.
The commencement address was called "A Strategy of Peace," and no president had spoken with this generosity; so unorthodox was his message that the speech was written in near secret. Today, in seminars and search engines, it is known as the Peace Speech.
As Mr. Obama tries to persuade Congress to approve the multiparty agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, he invokes the parallel between then and now. Channelling Mr. Kennedy, he is embracing the legacy of a president willing to take a chance on peace, which JFK called "the most important topic on Earth."
Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Kennedy was grappling with nuclear arms, as well as racial equality, which he would address in a second lyrical address on June 11, proposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964; on those two days, he would pivot on the two biggest issues of his generation. Fifty-two years later, they have an eerie resonance.
Mr. Obama wants to prevent a rogue regional power from going nuclear. Congress is balking. So, like his predecessors with pressing international questions – Woodrow Wilson on the League of Nations, Franklin Roosevelt on lend-lease – Mr. Obama is seizing the bully pulpit.
At American University, he offered a sharp, forensic rebuttal of the criticism. Point by point, he challenged the reservations about the deal with Iran – that it will not assure reliable verification, that it will expire in 15 years, that Iran would sponsor terrorism.
He asked the critics: What's the alternative? Going to war? And how did that work out in Iraq?
His challenge was not Mr. Kennedy's in 1963, when the superpowers were bristling with nuclear weapons, threatening to destroy each other as they had for the previous 18 years. At American University, Mr. Kennedy declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, which was poisoning the atmosphere, and invited the Soviets to do the same.
More dramatically, he humanized the Russians. He recalled their staggering losses in the Second World War ("no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more") and their achievements in the arts and science.
This was not the stock rhetoric of gulags and treachery. Mr. Kennedy was asking Americans to see the Communists differently. Having authorized the largest military buildup in U.S. peacetime history, this cold warrior now wanted to make "the world safe for diversity."
"[W]e all inhabit this small planet," he told the class of 1963, words that graduates recite with poignancy today. "We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal."
Mr. Obama did not humanize the Iranians in his own speech. He noted, however, that Mr. Kennedy had warned that "the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war. But it's so very important. It is surely the pursuit of peace that is most needed in this world so full of strife."
Mr. Kennedy was able to reconcile with the Soviets, Mr. Obama said, "when they were threatening our allies, arming proxies against us, proclaiming their commitment to destroy our way of life and had nuclear weapons pointed at all our major cities, a genuine existential threat."
Mr. Kennedy had warned Americans, Mr. Obama said, "not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible and communication as nothing more than the exchange of threats. It is time to apply such wisdom."
When then-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev read Mr. Kennedy's speech, he stopped jamming the Russian-language broadcasts of Voice of America so Russians could hear it. The "wisdom" of the Peace Speech led to the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the first of the arms-control treaties of the Cold War. Limited as it was, contentious as it was in the U.S. Senate, the treaty was a beginning; Mr. Kennedy proposed co-operating with the Soviets in space and hoped to visit Moscow in 1964.
Suddenly, impossibly, he was thinking less of winning the Cold War than ending it.
Today, Mr. Obama is not trying to change the zeitgeist or disarm an existential threat. At American University, he showed again how history speaks to us today, and how, like JFK, he sees diplomacy as the way to security.