Since its beginning in 1952, Promoting Enduring Peace has sought ways to "give the enemy a human face", facilitating many delegations of Americans to visit supposed enemy nations as citizen diplomats, bringing back the truth that peace is available if those who benefit from war can be moved aside.

Perhaps the greatest examples happened in 1986, when the possibility of nuclear holocaust seemed closer than at any time since 1961. It was in that year that a kind of "river cruise exchange" took place: a large number of Americans and Russians journeying down the Mississippi River together, through the heart of the South, and an equal number journeying together down the Volga River, through the heart of Mother Russia. Read more about it in the Time article here. Read Doug Mattern's article here. Read his article on the Volga Cruise here.

In the new century PEP maintains contacts with many groups and agencies that carry on this tradition, such as Pastors for Peace, Global Exchange, and others, inviting Americans to sign on for these frequent, adventuresome, fascinating, and peacemaking trips abroad.

The collapse of support for nuclear saber-rattling in both the US and the USSR in the mid-eighties is a tribute to the power of citizen diplomacy.

"As an activist with one of these exchange programs, the National Council for American-Soviet Friendship, I made many trips to the Soviet Union and hosted many Soviet groups in the U.S. It was during one of the people-to-people exchanges in 1986, a cruise down the Mississippi River by Soviet and U.S. peace activists (sponsored by Promoting Enduring Peace), that a joint U.S.-Soviet peace petition was drafted and signed: the People's Peace Appeal. Over the course of 1986-87, the People's Peace Appeal was signed by 500,000 Americans and millions of Soviets. ... A strong case can be made that the Nuclear Freeze Movement, the strong movement for peace in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries and the many initiatives for people-to-people diplomacy made the difference in the avoidance of a nuclear war during the 1980's and helped ensure that the demise of the Soviet empire was not bathed in blood. Gorbachev, who was greatly influenced by what he called "citizen diplomacy", stated later that "my credo was: We need radical reform without bloodshed, without violence." "
--From The American Peace Movements by David Adams

Monday, Aug. 1, 1986

On the Mississippi: Cruising Peaceful Waters

By Jay Carney

Georgi Grechko, the Soviet cosmonaut whose three trips into space have made him a national hero, was at it again. Grechko is a natural when it comes to pleasing a crowd, more than willing to press the flesh and fortified with a broad, kind smile that adds a human touch to his celebrity status. Here he was in fine form again, but on this humid summer evening, in spite of the cheers and waves, the crowd didn't know Grechko from any of the other people he was with. After all, this wasn't Red Square but Red Wing, Minn., and most of the well-wishers who surged forward to catch a glimpse of this space traveler had never before seen a "Russian" in the flesh. Read the rest...