JFK's 1962 speech at Rice.

George Bush is *not* the first President to have uttered the words "weapons of mass destruction".

There I was a week ago, watching the baseball game on TV. The first Rice - U Texas game, to be precise, in the College World Series. In the ninth inning, with Rice up by ten and threatening to score again, the commentator started talking about another Rice upset win over UT shown on ESPN, the football game in (about) 1994 where Rice broke a 28-season streak of losing to Texas. (A Sunday night game, he said, as the NFL was having a strike and ESPN was able to convince some number of colleges to move games to Sundays.) This commentator apparently covered that football game for ESPN, so he started telling - badly - about the clip they showed from JFK's speech at Rice where JFK asked "Why does Rice play Texas in football?" Naturally, the idiot commentator couldn't remember either the context (this was JFK's first public speech after he announced the goal of sending a man to the moon before the end of the decade, and why did we choose this goal?) or the answer ("We choose to do these things ... not because they are easy, but because they are hard ...").

I decided to send the commentator an email setting forth the context and the answer, so he'd have a better shot at the story if he told it again. This is more difficult than you might think, as ESPN doesn't have a way for civilians to send email to their on-air personalities. The ESPN website even states that the on-air talent "don't have email addresses." (Seems unlikely to me.) However, you can send an email to their customer service people who may or may not forward the email to the appropriate department.

I wanted to get correct quotes for my email, so I went to Google to find the speech. I suppose I shouldn't be shocked, but it's cached out on the web on a number of sites, including one at Rice's library's website. Interesting speech, well worth reading. And imagine hearing it instead of reading it, as I find it to be exceptionally well-crafted for being spoken aloud, with wonderfully resounding parallel phrases. This one comes early: "We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance." It makes me think we've lost the talent for oration. I cannot see any of the Presidents since Kennedy giving this speech well. (The Bushes are a lost cause; Reagan could do it, but only as an actor, and only if he had a good enough director; Clinton could give it but would over-emote; Ford and Carter would be too home-spun; Nixon's clipped tones would have taken too much away from the majesty of the text and he wouldn't have been sincere in any event; and LBJ couldn't have done it justice, either.)

At any rate, three paragraphs before the "Why does Rice play Texas?" question (and not, I'd point out, "in football"), JFK talks about the US leading the peaceful exploration of space: "We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding."

So, yes, it turns out that Bush wasn't the first president to use the phrase "weapons of mass destruction". (Of course, JFK was referring to real weapons of mass destruction, and not Bush's imagined weapons of mass-destruction-only-when-compared-with-rifles.) Sad to see, though, that our national policy has gone from not wanting to fill space with weapons of mass destruction to being the ones to put them there.

A few final asides:

You can listen to the speech. About a 17-minute speech, extremely worth that investment of time.

On eBay that evening, there were two separate auctions of copies of the official photo of JFK speaking at Rice. He's in the foreground, behind a podium with the Presidential seal; LBJ is behind him, and in the background is the press box at Rice Stadium.

The Rice-UT football game was on TV on that Sunday night not because of a football strike, but because of the baseball strike. That evening would have been the fourth game of the World Series - but that was the year without a World Series.

And finally, made clear from reading the speech, we are farther removed in time from this speech than this speech was from the mentioned Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic. (sigh)