We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth-but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.
Full text here.
What a nicely made phrase. Who wrote it?
Looks like maybe Ted Sorensen?
I would just add that although I was familiar with the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite the fact that I was but a toddler as it occurred, the first time I ever saw that speech was in the mid 1980s. When Kennedy says " any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union," even decades after the fact, it sent chills up my spine.
“Like Dead Sea fruits, that tempt the eye,
But turn to ashes on the lips!”
Thomas More
or Byron
“But Life will suit Itself to Sorrow’s most detested fruit, Like to the apples on the Dead Sea’s shore, All ashes to the taste”
My guess would be Ted Sorensen as he was JFK’s goto guy for the more poetic stuff.