Kennedy's American University address — delivered just five months before his assassination — is widely considered one of the greatest speeches of the Cold War era. He chose a commencement to announce a dramatic pivot toward peace, including a unilateral halt to atmospheric nuclear testing and high-level negotiations with the Soviet Union. But the speech's power lay not in its policy announcements but in its philosophical argument against fatalism. 'Too many of us think peace is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable — that mankind is doomed — that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.' Kennedy rejected this view completely. His insistence that 'man can be as big as he wants' was not naive optimism but a reasoned argument: since human beings had created the Cold War, human beings could end it.