Assignment 8- Presidency

Shylene Mejia

Class: POL 166

Professor: Barry Murdaco

Lehman College

Assignment 8- Presidency

     The assigned reading for the week of 11/14/15 were John F Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural Address, Kennedy’s 1963 American University Commencement Address, Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural Address & 1984’s State of the Union Address, Barack Obama’s 2004’s Keynote speech, Obama’s 2008 Speech on a Race: A More Perfect Union, Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day Speech, Obama’s 2008 Victory speech and lastly Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address. In this discussion, I will discuss an excerpt of Kennedy’s 1963 American University Commencement Address, he states:

           “I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in 

           an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear

           forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an

           age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force 

          delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age

           when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind

          and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”

        I am in agreement with President Kennedy as nuclear war fare is something to be feared and be worrisome about. One may not recognize the dangers that are possible through nuclear war fare. In 1945, the United States was the first and still the only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima (History.com, 2009). This ignited the nuclear arms race, this is the content in which President Kennedy is speaking in. The USA atomic bombing occurrence has been cited as the end of world war 2, and the beginning of the cold war by many historians (History.com, 2009). The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed approx. 80,000 people and caused catastrophic secondary effects to survivors and near by villages (History.com, 2009).

       I choose this passage to speak about previous occurrence surrounding Kennedy’s speech. I think if one does not know the history of nuclear weapons his speech can be less understood for what it is meant to be. I think the occurrence of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was a terrible act, that put those living in the USA in great danger as the world knows what happen and it was not that long ago. I believe this is why our federal government works hard to keep the USA as a leader in foreign negotiations because there is great fear of the unknown. 

Reference

Kennedy, J. (1963, June 10). American University Commencement Address. Retrieved Nov 14, 2015        from http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkamericanuniversityaddress.html

History.com Staff (2009). August 06, 1945 : Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima

     Publisher A+E Networks. Access Date Novemeber 16, 2015 Retrieved from URL        http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/atomic-bomb-dropped-on-hiroshima.