How We Should Remember John F. Kennedy
To honor his memory, it's important to place him in his era of bold optimism and hard realism—and alongside other great leaders of that era.
Newton N. Minow
Nov 21 2013, 8:00 AM ET 6
President John F. Kennedy once described himself as an “idealist without illusions.” Now in my 88th year as one of the dwindling number of surviving members of Kennedy’s administration, I often think of him. As the nation marks the 50th anniversary of his death, we should remember not only the man himself, great as he was and could have been. More important is the exceptional era he embodied and championed, an era of both bold optimism and hard realism.
Kennedy described and also prescribed the time perfectly in his inaugural address when he spoke of “a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.”
Kennedy was not alone in his conviction, and as we reflect on his tragic death, we might think as well of four other transformational men and women who died in a six-year period between 1962 and 1968. Eleanor Roosevelt and Pope John XXIII died in 1962 and 1963, respectively, after long and productive lives. Six years later, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, like Jack Kennedy, died as young men at the hands of assassins. All five died having transformed the way we think about ourselves as citizens and as people. All changed my life profoundly, as they did the world at large, and I had the good fortune to know three of them.
None were perfect—they were all in some way flawed—but they were leaders of a kind we have not seen again, idealists without illusions. They could be skeptics, but never cynics, and they had steady faith in the future. They believed deeply in human rights and the process and the judgments of democracy. That all five died within such a short span, leaving the legacies they did, is what I think about on this anniversary.
Eleanor Roosevelt, godmother of the women’s struggle for equal rights, forever changed the role of the first lady, leaving a record of and invitation to public service that her successors would follow. During FDR’s presidency, she gave visibility to human-rights issues at home and abroad, emphasizing the rights of women and children, the poor and African-Americans when few others did. Like her husband, she was skilled at using mass media to promote her causes, particularly in her popular syndicated column, “My Day.”
After FDR’s death in 1945, Roosevelt told reporters she was leaving the public eye, but she never did. She served as chair of the United Nations’ Human Right Commission, and in that role forged consensus among disagreeing delegates to produce the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Eleanor Roosevelt with Nell, Mary, and Martha
Minow (Courtesy Newton Minow)I experienced first-hand Roosevelt’s powers of persuasion in her quest for equal rights. I was serving in the Kennedy Administration as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission when she called me about the Reverend Robert L. T. Smith, a black candidate for Congress in 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi. Smith was being denied the opportunity to buy television time on local station WLBT solely because of his race. We were able to help, and Smith became the first black candidate for Congress ever to buy commercials or appear on TV in Mississippi. Myrlie Evers, whose husband Medgar Evers was murdered in Jackson a year later, said that seeing Smith on television “was like the lifting of a giant curtain. He was saying things that had never before been said by a Negro to whites in Mississippi.”
WLBT eventually lost its FCC license for its failure to serve the public interest. Roosevelt visited my FCC office, and my wife brought our three daughters, Nell, Martha, and Mary, to meet this great woman, who coaxed our three-year-old, Mary, to smile. Roosevelt died not long after her visit. When she died, Adlai Stevenson said, “She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world.”
Pope John XXIII, elected to the papacy in 1958 at the age of 77, was expected to be a caretaker pope, but during his five-year term he transformed the Catholic Church for the modern age. He held passionate views on human dignity and equality. The Second Vatican Council, which he convened in 1962, changed the face of Catholicism to the world, to promote ecumenism and kindness.
As a young nuncio in France, the Pope had been instrumental in saving refugees, most of them Jews, from the Nazis. As pope, John XXIII put to rest the idea that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, apologizing for the Church’s “many centuries of blindness.” Later this year, John XXIII is on course to be canonized along with John Paul II. His work and his leadership also affected me personally. At an international conference in 1961, the president of Notre Dame, Father Theodore Hesburgh, and I served together as members of the American delegation. After I left government service, Father Ted (now 96, and coincidentally born the same week as President Kennedy), invited me to become the first Jewish trustee of Notre Dame. I still serve today as a life trustee, after almost 50 years.
Martin Luther King was a newly arrived 26-year-old pastor of a Montgomery, Alabama, Baptist church in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus. The 382-day bus boycott that followed propelled him to national attention. He became a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, went on to champion the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins that swept the South, to confront the infamous Bull Connor, and in 1963 to lead the March on Washington, at the time the largest protest ever assembled there. A year later King won the Nobel Peace Prize and saw President Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, sign into law the Civil Rights Act. Four years after that he would be shot dead in Memphis.
When King came home from prison, he told his wife that despite being a Southern Baptist with a history of prejudice against Catholics, he would vote for a Catholic in 1960.King made no claim to being perfect. Some years after his death, I was seated next to his widow at a small dinner in Chicago. I told Coretta Scott King that I was with President Kennedy at O’Hare Airport in the 1960 campaign when he called her to offer help while her husband was in jail. She smiled and told me that when her husband came home from prison, they sat down in the kitchen to talk and he told her that as a Southern Baptist with a long history of prejudice against Catholics, this would be the first time in his life that he would vote for a Catholic for president. Sadly, the civil-rights movement in our own country has never again had a leader so visionary, strong, and effective.
I got to know Robert Kennedy before I met his brother. I met Bob in 1956 when we worked together as members of Stevenson’s presidential campaign staff. Bob and I were the same age and had children with similar ages. We quickly became good friends, and sometimes were roommates on campaign trips. As a young lawyer on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Bob resigned his job in protest of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigative tactics. In 1966, he famously told a group of South African students that “each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and … those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
When Kennedy ran for president in 1968, he ran to end the Vietnam War, which he had originally supported but came to believe was morally wrong. Sirhan Sirhan’s bullet killed that promise on June 5 of that year, and with Robert Kennedy’s life went the optimism and the promise of the era.
I will always remember the 1956 Stevenson campaign when we traveled to Springfield, Illinois. Bob asked if we could play hooky and visit Abraham Lincoln’s home and get back in time to board the campaign plane. The two of us walked to Lincoln’s home, talking about our children on the way. Bob said that when he was young there were three great influences on a child—the home, school, the church—but that he now saw a fourth great influence: television. This was the beginning of a conversation that four years later led to President Kennedy appointing me as chairman of the FCC, and to my lifelong work to promote quality children’s television and public-interest media.
Americans today remember John F. Kennedy as one of our most beloved presidents, along with Abraham Lincoln. Like King, he had been a mostly unfocused young man with moments of brilliance—his undergraduate thesis, Why England Slept, was published and sold 80,000 copies. He was a hero of World War II and of the generation that returned from the war determined to work for peace. Jack Kennedy first won a seat in Congress in 1946, a year in which Republicans won both houses, which gave him instant stature within the Democratic Party.
Six years later he moved to the Senate, and eight years after that he became the youngest man elected to the presidency and the first born in the 20th century. Kennedy was also the first president of the television age, and an early master of the medium. He told me more than once that he would not have been elected but for his four televised debates with then-Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960.
I went to Washington in 1961 to work in his administration, believing then as I do now that his election signaled a historic moment, a call to duty. I still believe that had he lived our country would have avoided some of the worst political and social turmoil of the 1960s, and that it would never have suffered the prolonged tragedy of Vietnam. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once wrote of Kennedy’s death that it was “as if Lincoln had been killed six months after Gettysburg or Franklin Roosevelt at the end of 1935 or Truman before the Marshall Plan.”
Historians most often remember Kennedy for his foreign-policy achievements, especially his handling of the Cuban missile crisis, but also the creation of the Peace Corps and the 1963 Limited Nuclear Test Ban treaty with Great Britain and the Soviet Union. During the Cuban crisis he gave me a challenging assignment: Voice of America’s broadcast signals to Cuba had been blocked by the Russians, and my job was to find a different way to get his speech on the crisis heard in Cuba. We succeeded, and the president later invited the American broadcasters who helped make it happen, together with me, to the White House to thank them for their unprecedented service to the country.
But Kennedy’s unfinished legacy was civil rights here at home. In November 1962, he sent federal marshals to Oxford, Mississippi, to confront a governor and an institution, the University of Mississippi, dead set against the matriculation of James Meredith. After the 1963 March on Washington, in one of the last acts of his presidency, Kennedy sent the bill to Congress that became the 1964 Civil Rights Act, one of the most important pieces of legislation in the 20th century.
The Minow family visits John Kennedy in the Oval Office on May 29, 1963. Newton Minow is second from right. (Courtesy of Newton Minow)
When we were leaving Washington to return home, Kennedy invited my family to the Oval Office to say goodbye. My wife and our three daughters visited the president on May 29, 1963—his last birthday. A picture of us with him is one of our most cherished memories. A few short months later he was killed. Like all Americans, we were shattered and still are as we relive that awful day in our hearts.
When President Kennedy was shot that November day in 1963, our daughter Martha, then 8 years old, wrote a poem to Jackie Kennedy:
Slowly but surely a willow branch fell down,
While rain spread ‘round the town.
A sad day it was for me
For the willow is my favorite tree….
But if I take the branch right in,
The roots might then begin.
By spring I will know whether it will grow.
My little tree will grow again
I guess that’s the same way with men.
I have always shared Martha’s optimism. And I believe idealism without illusions will grow again.
__
I thank Associate Dean Craig LaMay of the Medill School at Northwestern University for his research and help on this essay.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Alan Brinkley on the Legacy of JFK
The Legacy of John F. Kennedy
Historians tend to rate JFK as a good president, not a great one. But Americans consistently give him the highest approval rating of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Why?
Alan Brinkley
Sep 18 2013, 8:24 PM ET 10
Among the many monuments to John F. Kennedy, perhaps the most striking is the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, in the building that was once the Texas School Book Depository. Every year, nearly 350,000 people visit the place where Lee Harvey Oswald waited on November 22, 1963, to shoot at the president’s motorcade. The museum itself is an oddity because of its physical connection to the event it illuminates; the most memorable—and eeriest—moment of a visit to the sixth floor is when you turn a corner and face the window through which Oswald fired his rifle as Kennedy’s open car snaked through Dealey Plaza’s broad spaces below. The windows are cluttered once again with cardboard boxes, just as they had been on that sunny afternoon when Oswald hid there.
Visitors from all over the world have signed their names in the memory books, and many have written tributes: “Our greatest President.” “Oh how we miss him!” “The greatest man since Jesus Christ.” At least as many visitors write about the possible conspiracies that led to JFK’s assassination. The contradictory realities of Kennedy’s life don’t match his global reputation. But in the eyes of the world, this reticent man became a charismatic leader who, in his life and in his death, served as a symbol of purpose and hope.
President Kennedy spent less than three years in the White House. His first year was a disaster, as he himself acknowledged. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Communist Cuba was only the first in a series of failed efforts to undo Fidel Castro’s regime. His 1961 summit meeting in Vienna with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was a humiliating experience. Most of his legislative proposals died on Capitol Hill.
Yet he was also responsible for some extraordinary accomplishments. The most important, and most famous, was his adept management of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, widely considered the most perilous moment since World War II. Most of his military advisers—and they were not alone—believed the United States should bomb the missile pads that the Soviet Union was stationing in Cuba. Kennedy, aware of the danger of escalating the crisis, instead ordered a blockade of Soviet ships. In the end, a peaceful agreement was reached. Afterward, both Kennedy and Khrushchev began to soften the relationship between Washington and Moscow.
Kennedy, during his short presidency, proposed many important steps forward. In an address at American University in 1963, he spoke kindly of the Soviet Union, thereby easing the Cold War. The following day, after almost two years of mostly avoiding the issue of civil rights, he delivered a speech of exceptional elegance, and launched a drive for a civil-rights bill that he hoped would end racial segregation. He also proposed a voting-rights bill and federal programs to provide health care to the elderly and the poor. Few of these proposals became law in his lifetime—a great disappointment to Kennedy, who was never very successful with Congress. But most of these bills became law after his death—in part because of his successor’s political skill, but also because they seemed like a monument to a martyred president.
Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected to the presidency, succeeding the man who, at the time, was the oldest. He symbolized—as he well realized—a new generation and its coming-of-age. He was the first president born in the 20th century, the first young veteran of World War II to reach the White House. John Hersey’s powerful account of Kennedy’s wartime bravery, published in The New Yorker in 1944, helped him launch his political career.
In shaping his legend, Kennedy’s personal charm helped. A witty and articulate speaker, he seemed built for the age of television. To watch him on film today is to be struck by the power of his presence and the wit and elegance of his oratory. His celebrated inaugural address was filled with phrases that seemed designed to be carved in stone, as many of them have been. Borrowing a motto from his prep-school days, putting your country in place of Choate, he exhorted Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
Another contributor to the Kennedy legend, something deeper than his personal attractiveness, is the image of what many came to call grace. He not only had grace, in the sense of performing and acting gracefully; he was also a man who seemed to receive grace. He was handsome and looked athletic. He was wealthy. He had a captivating wife and children, a photogenic family. A friend of his, the journalist Ben Bradlee, wrote a 1964 book about Kennedy called That Special Grace.
The Kennedys lit up the White House with writers, artists, and intellectuals: the famous cellist Pablo Casals, the poet Robert Frost, the French intellectual André Malraux. Kennedy had graduated from Harvard, and stocked his administration with the school’s professors. He sprinkled his public remarks with quotations from poets and philosophers.
The Kennedy family helped create his career and, later, his legacy. He could never have reached the presidency without his father’s help. Joseph Kennedy, one of the wealthiest and most ruthless men in America, had counted on his first son, Joe Jr., to enter politics. When Joe died in the war, his father’s ambitions turned to the next-oldest son. He paid for all of John’s—Jack’s—campaigns and used his millions to bring in supporters. He prevailed on his friend Arthur Krock, of The New York Times, to help Jack publish his first book, Why England Slept. Years later, when Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage with the help of his aide Theodore Sorensen, Krock lobbied successfully for the book to win a Pulitzer Prize.
The Kennedy legacy has a darker side as well. Prior to his presidency, many of JFK’s political colleagues considered him merely a playboy whose wealthy father had bankrolled his campaigns. Many critics saw recklessness, impatience, impetuosity. Nigel Hamilton, the author of JFK: Reckless Youth, a generally admiring study of Kennedy’s early years, summed up after nearly 800 pages:
He had the brains, the courage, a shy charisma, good looks, idealism, money … Yet, as always, there was something missing—a certain depth or seriousness of purpose … Once the voters or the women were won, there was a certain vacuousness on Jack’s part, a failure to turn conquest into anything very meaningful or profound.
I. F. Stone, the distinguished liberal writer, observed in 1973: “By now he is simply an optical illusion.”
Kennedy’s image of youth and vitality is, to some degree, a myth. He spent much of his life in hospitals, battling a variety of ills. His ability to serve as president was itself a profile in courage.
Much has been written about Kennedy’s covert private life. Like his father, he was obsessed with the ritual of sexual conquest—before and during his marriage, before and during his presidency. While he was alive, the many women, the Secret Service agents, and the others who knew of his philandering kept it a secret. Still, now that the stories of his sexual activities are widely known, they have done little to tarnish his reputation.
Half a century after his presidency, the endurance of Kennedy’s appeal is not simply the result of a crafted image and personal charm. It also reflects the historical moment in which he emerged. In the early 1960s, much of the American public was willing, even eager, to believe that he was the man who would “get the country moving again,” at a time when much of the country was ready to move. Action and dynamism were central to Kennedy’s appeal. During his 1960 presidential campaign, he kept sniping at the Republicans for eight years of stagnation: “I have premised my campaign for the presidency on the single assumption that the American people are uneasy at the present drift in our national course … and that they have the will and the strength to start the United States moving again.” As the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s friend and adviser, later wrote, “The capital city, somnolent in the Eisenhower years, had suddenly come alive … [with] the release of energy which occurs when men with ideas have a chance to put them into practice.”
“He had the brains, the courage, a shy charisma, good looks, idealism, money … Yet, as always, there was something missing.”Kennedy helped give urgency to the idea of pursuing a national purpose—a great American mission. In the 15 years since World War II, ideological momentum had been slowly building in the United States, fueled by anxieties about the rivalry with the Soviet Union and by optimism about the dynamic performance of the American economy.
When Kennedy won the presidency, the desire for change was still tentative, as his agonizingly thin margin over Richard Nixon suggests. But it was growing, and Kennedy seized the moment to provide a mission—or at least he grasped the need for one—even though it was not entirely clear what the mission was. Early in his tenure, a Defense Department official wrote a policy paper that expressed a curious mix of urgent purpose and vague goals:
The United States needs a Grand Objective … We behave as if our real objective is to sit by our pools contemplating the spare tires around our middles … The key consideration is not that the Grand Objective be exactly right, it is that we have one and that we start moving toward it.
This reflected John Kennedy’s worldview, one of commitment, action, movement. Those who knew him realized, however, that he was more cautious than his speeches suggested.
John F. Kennedy was a good president but not a great one, most scholars concur. A poll of historians in 1982 ranked him 13th out of the 36 presidents included in the survey. Thirteen such polls from 1982 to 2011 put him, on average, 12th. Richard Neustadt, the prominent presidential scholar, revered Kennedy during his lifetime and was revered by Kennedy in turn. Yet in the 1970s, he remarked: “He will be just a flicker, forever clouded by the record of his successors. I don’t think history will have much space for John Kennedy.”
But 50 years after his death, Kennedy is far from “just a flicker.” He remains a powerful symbol of a lost moment, of a soaring idealism and hopefulness that subsequent generations still try to recover. His allure—the romantic, almost mystic, associations his name evokes—not only survives but flourishes. The journalist and historian Theodore White, who was close to Kennedy, published a famous interview for Life magazine with Jackie Kennedy shortly after her husband’s assassination, in which she said:
At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.
And thus a lyric became the lasting image of his presidency.
White, in his memoirs, recalled the reverence Kennedy had inspired among his friends:
I still have difficulty seeing John F. Kennedy clear. The image of him that comes back to me … is so clean and graceful—almost as if I can still see him skip up the steps of his airplane in that half lope, and then turn, flinging out his arm in farewell to the crowd, before disappearing inside. It was a ballet movement.
Friends were not the only ones enchanted by the Kennedy mystique. He was becoming a magnetic figure even during his presidency. By the middle of 1963, 59 percent of Americans surveyed claimed that they had voted for him in 1960, although only 49.7 percent of voters had actually done so. After his death, his landslide grew to 65 percent. In Gallup’s public-opinion polls, he consistently has the highest approval rating of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The circumstances of Kennedy’s death turned him into a national obsession. A vast number of books have been published about his assassination, most of them rejecting the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. After the assassination, even Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, spent hours—perhaps days—phoning people to ask whether there had been a conspiracy, until he realized that his inquiries could damage his own career. To this day, about 60 percent of Americans believe that Kennedy fell victim to a conspiracy.
“There was a heroic grandeur to John F. Kennedy’s administration that had nothing to do with the mists of Camelot,” David Talbot, the founder of Salon, wrote several years ago. His book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, more serious than most Kennedy conspiracy theories, suggested that the president’s bold, progressive goals—and the dangers he posed to entrenched interests—inspired a plot to take his life.
There are many reasons to question the official version of Kennedy’s murder. But there is little concrete evidence to prove any of the theories—that the Mafia, the FBI, the CIA, or even Lyndon B. Johnson was involved. Some people say his death was a result of Washington’s covert efforts to kill Castro. For many Americans, it stretches credulity to accept that an event so epochal can be explained as the act of a still-mysterious loner.
His allure—the romantic, almost mystic, associations his name evokes—not only survives but flourishes.Well before the public began feasting on conspiracy theories, Kennedy’s murder reached mythic proportions. In his 1965 book, A Thousand Days, Schlesinger used words so effusive that they seem unctuous today, though at the time they were not thought excessive or mawkish: “It was all gone now,” he wrote of the assassination: “the life-affirming, life-enhancing zest, the brilliance, the wit, the cool commitment, the steady purpose.”
Like all presidents, Kennedy had successes and failures. His administration was dominated by a remarkable number of problems and crises—in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam; and in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Some of these, he managed adroitly and, at times, courageously. Many, he could not resolve. He was a reserved, pragmatic man who almost never revealed passion.
Yet many people saw him—and still do—as an idealistic and, yes, passionate president who would have transformed the nation and the world, had he lived. His legacy has only grown in the 50 years since his death. That he still embodies a rare moment of public activism explains much of his continuing appeal: He reminds many Americans of an age when it was possible to believe that politics could speak to society’s moral yearnings and be harnessed to its highest aspirations. More than anything, perhaps, Kennedy reminds us of a time when the nation’s capacities looked limitless, when its future seemed unbounded, when Americans believed that they could solve hard problems and accomplish bold deeds.
Alan Brinkley, a professor of American history at Columbia University, is the author of John F. Kennedy (2012) and Liberalism and Its Discontents (1998), which served as sources for this article.
Historians tend to rate JFK as a good president, not a great one. But Americans consistently give him the highest approval rating of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Why?
Alan Brinkley
Sep 18 2013, 8:24 PM ET 10
Among the many monuments to John F. Kennedy, perhaps the most striking is the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, in the building that was once the Texas School Book Depository. Every year, nearly 350,000 people visit the place where Lee Harvey Oswald waited on November 22, 1963, to shoot at the president’s motorcade. The museum itself is an oddity because of its physical connection to the event it illuminates; the most memorable—and eeriest—moment of a visit to the sixth floor is when you turn a corner and face the window through which Oswald fired his rifle as Kennedy’s open car snaked through Dealey Plaza’s broad spaces below. The windows are cluttered once again with cardboard boxes, just as they had been on that sunny afternoon when Oswald hid there.
Visitors from all over the world have signed their names in the memory books, and many have written tributes: “Our greatest President.” “Oh how we miss him!” “The greatest man since Jesus Christ.” At least as many visitors write about the possible conspiracies that led to JFK’s assassination. The contradictory realities of Kennedy’s life don’t match his global reputation. But in the eyes of the world, this reticent man became a charismatic leader who, in his life and in his death, served as a symbol of purpose and hope.
President Kennedy spent less than three years in the White House. His first year was a disaster, as he himself acknowledged. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Communist Cuba was only the first in a series of failed efforts to undo Fidel Castro’s regime. His 1961 summit meeting in Vienna with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was a humiliating experience. Most of his legislative proposals died on Capitol Hill.
Yet he was also responsible for some extraordinary accomplishments. The most important, and most famous, was his adept management of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, widely considered the most perilous moment since World War II. Most of his military advisers—and they were not alone—believed the United States should bomb the missile pads that the Soviet Union was stationing in Cuba. Kennedy, aware of the danger of escalating the crisis, instead ordered a blockade of Soviet ships. In the end, a peaceful agreement was reached. Afterward, both Kennedy and Khrushchev began to soften the relationship between Washington and Moscow.
Kennedy, during his short presidency, proposed many important steps forward. In an address at American University in 1963, he spoke kindly of the Soviet Union, thereby easing the Cold War. The following day, after almost two years of mostly avoiding the issue of civil rights, he delivered a speech of exceptional elegance, and launched a drive for a civil-rights bill that he hoped would end racial segregation. He also proposed a voting-rights bill and federal programs to provide health care to the elderly and the poor. Few of these proposals became law in his lifetime—a great disappointment to Kennedy, who was never very successful with Congress. But most of these bills became law after his death—in part because of his successor’s political skill, but also because they seemed like a monument to a martyred president.
Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected to the presidency, succeeding the man who, at the time, was the oldest. He symbolized—as he well realized—a new generation and its coming-of-age. He was the first president born in the 20th century, the first young veteran of World War II to reach the White House. John Hersey’s powerful account of Kennedy’s wartime bravery, published in The New Yorker in 1944, helped him launch his political career.
In shaping his legend, Kennedy’s personal charm helped. A witty and articulate speaker, he seemed built for the age of television. To watch him on film today is to be struck by the power of his presence and the wit and elegance of his oratory. His celebrated inaugural address was filled with phrases that seemed designed to be carved in stone, as many of them have been. Borrowing a motto from his prep-school days, putting your country in place of Choate, he exhorted Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
Another contributor to the Kennedy legend, something deeper than his personal attractiveness, is the image of what many came to call grace. He not only had grace, in the sense of performing and acting gracefully; he was also a man who seemed to receive grace. He was handsome and looked athletic. He was wealthy. He had a captivating wife and children, a photogenic family. A friend of his, the journalist Ben Bradlee, wrote a 1964 book about Kennedy called That Special Grace.
The Kennedys lit up the White House with writers, artists, and intellectuals: the famous cellist Pablo Casals, the poet Robert Frost, the French intellectual André Malraux. Kennedy had graduated from Harvard, and stocked his administration with the school’s professors. He sprinkled his public remarks with quotations from poets and philosophers.
The Kennedy family helped create his career and, later, his legacy. He could never have reached the presidency without his father’s help. Joseph Kennedy, one of the wealthiest and most ruthless men in America, had counted on his first son, Joe Jr., to enter politics. When Joe died in the war, his father’s ambitions turned to the next-oldest son. He paid for all of John’s—Jack’s—campaigns and used his millions to bring in supporters. He prevailed on his friend Arthur Krock, of The New York Times, to help Jack publish his first book, Why England Slept. Years later, when Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage with the help of his aide Theodore Sorensen, Krock lobbied successfully for the book to win a Pulitzer Prize.
The Kennedy legacy has a darker side as well. Prior to his presidency, many of JFK’s political colleagues considered him merely a playboy whose wealthy father had bankrolled his campaigns. Many critics saw recklessness, impatience, impetuosity. Nigel Hamilton, the author of JFK: Reckless Youth, a generally admiring study of Kennedy’s early years, summed up after nearly 800 pages:
He had the brains, the courage, a shy charisma, good looks, idealism, money … Yet, as always, there was something missing—a certain depth or seriousness of purpose … Once the voters or the women were won, there was a certain vacuousness on Jack’s part, a failure to turn conquest into anything very meaningful or profound.
I. F. Stone, the distinguished liberal writer, observed in 1973: “By now he is simply an optical illusion.”
Kennedy’s image of youth and vitality is, to some degree, a myth. He spent much of his life in hospitals, battling a variety of ills. His ability to serve as president was itself a profile in courage.
Much has been written about Kennedy’s covert private life. Like his father, he was obsessed with the ritual of sexual conquest—before and during his marriage, before and during his presidency. While he was alive, the many women, the Secret Service agents, and the others who knew of his philandering kept it a secret. Still, now that the stories of his sexual activities are widely known, they have done little to tarnish his reputation.
Half a century after his presidency, the endurance of Kennedy’s appeal is not simply the result of a crafted image and personal charm. It also reflects the historical moment in which he emerged. In the early 1960s, much of the American public was willing, even eager, to believe that he was the man who would “get the country moving again,” at a time when much of the country was ready to move. Action and dynamism were central to Kennedy’s appeal. During his 1960 presidential campaign, he kept sniping at the Republicans for eight years of stagnation: “I have premised my campaign for the presidency on the single assumption that the American people are uneasy at the present drift in our national course … and that they have the will and the strength to start the United States moving again.” As the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s friend and adviser, later wrote, “The capital city, somnolent in the Eisenhower years, had suddenly come alive … [with] the release of energy which occurs when men with ideas have a chance to put them into practice.”
“He had the brains, the courage, a shy charisma, good looks, idealism, money … Yet, as always, there was something missing.”Kennedy helped give urgency to the idea of pursuing a national purpose—a great American mission. In the 15 years since World War II, ideological momentum had been slowly building in the United States, fueled by anxieties about the rivalry with the Soviet Union and by optimism about the dynamic performance of the American economy.
When Kennedy won the presidency, the desire for change was still tentative, as his agonizingly thin margin over Richard Nixon suggests. But it was growing, and Kennedy seized the moment to provide a mission—or at least he grasped the need for one—even though it was not entirely clear what the mission was. Early in his tenure, a Defense Department official wrote a policy paper that expressed a curious mix of urgent purpose and vague goals:
The United States needs a Grand Objective … We behave as if our real objective is to sit by our pools contemplating the spare tires around our middles … The key consideration is not that the Grand Objective be exactly right, it is that we have one and that we start moving toward it.
This reflected John Kennedy’s worldview, one of commitment, action, movement. Those who knew him realized, however, that he was more cautious than his speeches suggested.
John F. Kennedy was a good president but not a great one, most scholars concur. A poll of historians in 1982 ranked him 13th out of the 36 presidents included in the survey. Thirteen such polls from 1982 to 2011 put him, on average, 12th. Richard Neustadt, the prominent presidential scholar, revered Kennedy during his lifetime and was revered by Kennedy in turn. Yet in the 1970s, he remarked: “He will be just a flicker, forever clouded by the record of his successors. I don’t think history will have much space for John Kennedy.”
But 50 years after his death, Kennedy is far from “just a flicker.” He remains a powerful symbol of a lost moment, of a soaring idealism and hopefulness that subsequent generations still try to recover. His allure—the romantic, almost mystic, associations his name evokes—not only survives but flourishes. The journalist and historian Theodore White, who was close to Kennedy, published a famous interview for Life magazine with Jackie Kennedy shortly after her husband’s assassination, in which she said:
At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.
And thus a lyric became the lasting image of his presidency.
White, in his memoirs, recalled the reverence Kennedy had inspired among his friends:
I still have difficulty seeing John F. Kennedy clear. The image of him that comes back to me … is so clean and graceful—almost as if I can still see him skip up the steps of his airplane in that half lope, and then turn, flinging out his arm in farewell to the crowd, before disappearing inside. It was a ballet movement.
Friends were not the only ones enchanted by the Kennedy mystique. He was becoming a magnetic figure even during his presidency. By the middle of 1963, 59 percent of Americans surveyed claimed that they had voted for him in 1960, although only 49.7 percent of voters had actually done so. After his death, his landslide grew to 65 percent. In Gallup’s public-opinion polls, he consistently has the highest approval rating of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The circumstances of Kennedy’s death turned him into a national obsession. A vast number of books have been published about his assassination, most of them rejecting the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. After the assassination, even Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, spent hours—perhaps days—phoning people to ask whether there had been a conspiracy, until he realized that his inquiries could damage his own career. To this day, about 60 percent of Americans believe that Kennedy fell victim to a conspiracy.
“There was a heroic grandeur to John F. Kennedy’s administration that had nothing to do with the mists of Camelot,” David Talbot, the founder of Salon, wrote several years ago. His book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, more serious than most Kennedy conspiracy theories, suggested that the president’s bold, progressive goals—and the dangers he posed to entrenched interests—inspired a plot to take his life.
There are many reasons to question the official version of Kennedy’s murder. But there is little concrete evidence to prove any of the theories—that the Mafia, the FBI, the CIA, or even Lyndon B. Johnson was involved. Some people say his death was a result of Washington’s covert efforts to kill Castro. For many Americans, it stretches credulity to accept that an event so epochal can be explained as the act of a still-mysterious loner.
His allure—the romantic, almost mystic, associations his name evokes—not only survives but flourishes.Well before the public began feasting on conspiracy theories, Kennedy’s murder reached mythic proportions. In his 1965 book, A Thousand Days, Schlesinger used words so effusive that they seem unctuous today, though at the time they were not thought excessive or mawkish: “It was all gone now,” he wrote of the assassination: “the life-affirming, life-enhancing zest, the brilliance, the wit, the cool commitment, the steady purpose.”
Like all presidents, Kennedy had successes and failures. His administration was dominated by a remarkable number of problems and crises—in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam; and in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Some of these, he managed adroitly and, at times, courageously. Many, he could not resolve. He was a reserved, pragmatic man who almost never revealed passion.
Yet many people saw him—and still do—as an idealistic and, yes, passionate president who would have transformed the nation and the world, had he lived. His legacy has only grown in the 50 years since his death. That he still embodies a rare moment of public activism explains much of his continuing appeal: He reminds many Americans of an age when it was possible to believe that politics could speak to society’s moral yearnings and be harnessed to its highest aspirations. More than anything, perhaps, Kennedy reminds us of a time when the nation’s capacities looked limitless, when its future seemed unbounded, when Americans believed that they could solve hard problems and accomplish bold deeds.
Alan Brinkley, a professor of American history at Columbia University, is the author of John F. Kennedy (2012) and Liberalism and Its Discontents (1998), which served as sources for this article.
Friday, November 22, 2013
50 Years
The road from Dallas to 2013 leads thru Selma and Birmingham. It leads to a dozen what ifs and dozens of bogus conspiracy theories.The road from Dallas to 2013 leads thru Selma and Birmingham. It detours thru the Ho Chi Minh Highway and the Mekong Delta. It leads to a dozen what ifs and dozens of bogus conspiracy theories. It leads to a 50 years going back to 1963 and a world that doesn't exist anymore. The road from Dallas leads to the minds & hearts of those alive on 11/22/63 and our personal thoughts. Johnny will not come marching home again.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
The State of Obamacare
by Paul Krugman
November 20, 2013, 11:02 am 13 Comments
The State of Obamacare
I haven’t been writing about the healthcare.gov thing, for the simple reason that I have nothing to say. What’s going on isn’t a policy question: we know from the states with working exchanges (including California) that the underlying structure of the law is workable. Instead, it’s about an implementation botch, which is an incredible mess, and reflects very badly on Obama. But the future of the reform depends not on policy per se but on whether the IT issues can be fixed well enough soon enough, a subject on which I have zero expertise.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped other people from breathlessly commenting on every twist and turn in the polls, every meaningless vote in the House, and so on. Hey, it’s a living.
But at this point there’s enough information coming in to make semi-educated guesses — and it looks to me as if this thing is probably going to stumble through to the finish line. State-run enrollments are mostly going pretty well; Medicaid expansion is going very well (and it’s expanding even in states that have rejected the expansion, because more people are learning they’re eligible.) And healthcare.gov, while still pretty bad, is starting to look as if it will be good enough in a few weeks for large numbers of people to sign up, either through the exchanges or directly with insurers.
If all this is right, by the time open enrollment ends in March, millions of previously uninsured Americans will in fact have received coverage under the law, and reform will be irreversible. Obama personally may never recover his reputation; Democratic hopes of a wave election in 2014 are probably gone, although you never know. But anyone counting on Obamacare to collapse is probably making a very bad bet.
November 20, 2013, 11:02 am 13 Comments
The State of Obamacare
I haven’t been writing about the healthcare.gov thing, for the simple reason that I have nothing to say. What’s going on isn’t a policy question: we know from the states with working exchanges (including California) that the underlying structure of the law is workable. Instead, it’s about an implementation botch, which is an incredible mess, and reflects very badly on Obama. But the future of the reform depends not on policy per se but on whether the IT issues can be fixed well enough soon enough, a subject on which I have zero expertise.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped other people from breathlessly commenting on every twist and turn in the polls, every meaningless vote in the House, and so on. Hey, it’s a living.
But at this point there’s enough information coming in to make semi-educated guesses — and it looks to me as if this thing is probably going to stumble through to the finish line. State-run enrollments are mostly going pretty well; Medicaid expansion is going very well (and it’s expanding even in states that have rejected the expansion, because more people are learning they’re eligible.) And healthcare.gov, while still pretty bad, is starting to look as if it will be good enough in a few weeks for large numbers of people to sign up, either through the exchanges or directly with insurers.
If all this is right, by the time open enrollment ends in March, millions of previously uninsured Americans will in fact have received coverage under the law, and reform will be irreversible. Obama personally may never recover his reputation; Democratic hopes of a wave election in 2014 are probably gone, although you never know. But anyone counting on Obamacare to collapse is probably making a very bad bet.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Gettyburg Anniversary
This is the 150th anniversary of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. I get chills every time I read it. The precision of the language summarizing the American experiment is exhilarating. Lincoln said more in 3 minutes than today's politicians could say in 3 hours. As Mark Twain said, few people get saved after the first 20 minutes of the sermon. Eric Foner, our best contemporary Lincoln scholar, will be in town Thursday night and I plan to attend his talk on Lincoln's legacy. I wish I could walk in wearing a stovepipe hat.
Monday, November 18, 2013
HS Reunion
Fred Hudson will be going to his high school reunion next month. We're talking about 45 years ago when he received his HS diploma. Panic will soon set in. Will he recognize anyone at the reunion? Will anyone recognize/remember him? Name tags anyone? Should he do anything special to prepare? It's too late for a facelift. Senior moments are uncontrollable. It's not too late to start making up some lies, but what's the point? There's nothing wrong with having lived a life of obscurity and mediocrity, is there? I've never served time. I'm not dealing with a probation officer. I'm not in witness protection. Hey---give credit where credit is due.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
JFK
The books and the online postings are almost overwhelming. It's hard to keep up with it all. I am not much interested in assassination speculation because speculation is all it is. I am mostly interested in his presidency, its relevance to today, and JFK's place and rating in history.
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