War & Peace Quote by Theodore C. Sorensen

The line reads like a policy memo in street clothes: crisp, numbered, and designed to sound like common sense while smuggling in a moral indictment. Sorensen, Kennedy's longtime speechwriter and a lawyer trained to argue from principle to consequence, isn’t waxing poetic about peace. He’s making a case for prudence, aimed at a political culture that treats toughness as a substitute for strategy.

The intent is practical: talking to adversaries is not weakness, it’s risk management. The phrasing "smart to communicate and negotiate" reframes diplomacy as competence rather than sentiment. That’s a lawyer’s move: shift the debate from virtue-signaling to cost-benefit analysis, where the irrational party becomes the one reaching for explosives first.

The subtext bites harder. "Enemy" is left undefined, which is the point: it covers whoever the public has been trained to fear this season. And the escalation to "bombs and weapons of mass destruction" loads the sentence with post-Cold War anxiety and post-9/11 rhetoric, when "WMD" became a talismanic justification for preemptive violence. By pairing everyday "communicate" with the apocalyptic "mass destruction", Sorensen forces a stark contrast: one option is conversation, the other is catastrophe.

Contextually, this belongs to the Kennedy-era legacy of crisis management - the Cuban Missile Crisis lesson that backchannels and negotiation can avert annihilation - carried forward into a later era when war was frequently marketed as decisive clarity. Sorensen is arguing that real strength looks like restraint with a plan, not spectacle with a body count.