Both Kennedy and Eisenhower remarked the importance of individuals citizens in the maintenance of peace. Eisenhower states that the only way to maintain peace is that the military industry, which has become permanent in the course of the century, stays that way. But only "an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" can mesh the maintenance of such military industry with the goal and methods of peace, "so that security and liberty may prosper together". World peace is long far to be reached, but war has been avoided, and the citizenry is the one to strive for the goal of peace with justice.
Kennedy, on the other hand, insists that in the hand of the citizens relies the outcome of this new world order in which both the United States and the Soviet Union are the most powerful countries and shall avoid at all costs to engage in another war and work together to "formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms--and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations", to "join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved."
In hands of the citizens of America and of the world rests "the final success or failure of our course". The trumpet summons them again "to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, [...] a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself". So he asks his fellow citizens to ask themselves "not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country."
