With a signed JFK visiting card
KENNEDY, John F. [ed. Nevins, Allan]. The Strategy of Peace. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1960.
8vo. Original black cloth boards with title lettering in red and orange to spine; illustrated dust jacket with photograph of the author on the front cover; pp. [xviii], 233, [7]; marginal tear repaired from the inside of dust jacket; minor scuff to upper outer corner of the fold of the jacket; light toning to endpapers as usual; otherwise near fine.
First edition with Alistair Cooke's ownership signature on the front free endpaper "Alistair Cooke NYC '60" and his book plate to inside front cover. Additionally, stapled to the volume is one of John F. Kennedy's U.S. Senate visiting cards, signed in ink as "Jack Kennedy".
This powerful book begins with an appropriate introductory quote from Abraham Lincoln, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequete to the stormy present … As our case is new, so we must think and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves".
Alistair Cooke (1908-2004), eminent North America correspondent for the BBC, owned this copy of Senator John F. Kennedy's foreign policy speeches and statements regarding defence, peace and national security including his own annotations and an interview with John Fischer. Cooke's Letters from America radio programmes remain the longest-running speech broadcast hosted by an individual, the duration of which he covered eleven presidents from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush. In many ways, he can be considered the very first podcaster.
The book's publication year saw a historically tight election campaign that will be remembered for its increasingly pressuring Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. On 8 November 1960, John F. Kennedy, the front-running Democratic candidate, was elected president, making the book's message ever more prescient.
The book's title, The Strategy of Peace was a later lecture in 1963 at the American University in Washington D.C. It is considered by many one of the most important speeches Kennedy delivered, with his declaration to resist nuclear arms in an unprecedented peaceful outreach to the Soviet Union during the very height of the Cold War.
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