We miss JFK because we miss our better selves

By Chris Powell

To understand the feeling that lingers for John F. Kennedy on the 60th anniversary of his assassination, it may be best to go back to the poem Robert Frost wrote for the young president’s inauguration in January 1961.

Some poor fool has been saying in his heart

Glory is out of date in life and art.

Our venture in revolution and outlawry

Has justified itself in freedom’s story

Right down to now in glory upon glory.

Come fresh from an election like the last,

The greatest vote a people ever cast,

So close yet sure to be abided by,

It is no miracle our mood is high.

Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs

Better than all the stalemate an’s and ifs.

There was the book of profile tales declaring

For the emboldened politicians daring

To break with followers when in the wrong,

A healthy independence of the throng,

A democratic form of right divine

To rule first answerable to high design.

There is a call to life a little sterner

And braver for the earner, learner, yearner.

Less criticism of the field and court

And more preoccupation with the sport.

It makes the prophet in us all presage

The glory of a next Augustan age,

Of a power leading from its strength and pride,

Of young ambition eager to be tried,

Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,

In any game the nations want to play.

A golden age of poetry and power

Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.

Frost’s prophecy was not fulfilled. Kennedy’s assassination left America thinking of what might have been and bred a restorationism that still moves people.

Kennedy’s appeal today is generally that of the handsome martyr. But to those of his generation and to those whose political awareness began about the time of his election, his appeal is much more than that; it is a strange and powerful nostalgia.

That nostalgia must overlook much of Kennedy’s political record.

He was born to wealth and aristocracy, and as a member of Congress was cautious and undistinguished. While he and his brother Robert were to become liberal heroes, they first were friendly with Sen. Joseph McCarthy amid the second great Communist scare. Kennedy defeated the greatest liberals of his time, Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey, for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960 and contrived the “missile gap” in that campaign. He presided over the invasion of Cuba, an imperialist scheme utterly stupid in execution. He got the United States into what became the Vietnam War. He misled the country about his health and cavorted with women in the White House.

Kennedy is better remembered for being the youngest and the first Catholic president, for getting the Soviet Union’s missiles out of Cuba without war (even while inadvertently legitimizing the Soviet military presence there), for the treaty prohibiting testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere (the first really successful disarmament treaty), for preparing the United States to overtake the Soviet Union in the exploration of space, for establishing the Peace Corps, and for putting the federal government emphatically on the side of civil rights, thus increasing the presidency’s moral authority and deepening Americans’ love of their country.

Part of the nostalgia is for Kennedy’s style, humor, wit, glamour, and occasional candor, unusual not only for his time but even today. But Kennedy reminds more importantly of something else, something suggested in his inaugural address.

Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike that the torch has been passed to 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, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. …

To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. …

Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are — but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation” — a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, north and south, east and west, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?

In the long history of the world only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility; I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice we ask of you.

With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on Earth God’s work must truly be our own.

No American political leader had articulated such a grand vision and spoken like that since Franklin D. Roosevelt; no one has spoken that way in the six decades since. And America has gone from Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” to Ronald Reagan’s “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

For many people liberalism is little more than a device for getting or staying on the government payroll. Cowardice, weariness of the “long twilight struggle,” and narcissism masquerade as high-mindedness, and bluster, recklessness, and intimidation as courage.

Americans are seldom challenged and inspired by their leaders to be better or to try to understand difficult things; their leaders seldom tell them more than what it is thought they want to hear.

The Kennedys were far from the saints their martyrdom has made them to many, but, as Norman Mailer observed, they mixed some idealism with their “willingness to traffic with demons, ogres, and overloads of corruption.” The Kennedys “seemed magical,” Mailer wrote, “because they were a little better than they should have been, and so gave promise of making America a little better than it ought to be.”

That is, at the crucial moments of his short presidency John F. Kennedy appealed to the best in Americans. Only his words are left, but that has been more than enough. Auden explained why.

Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and innocent

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays its honors at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views

And will pardon Paul Claudel

Pardons him for writing well.

John F. Kennedy is not missed so because he was better than what has come after him, though he was, nor because his times were better, though in some ways they were. He is missed so because when he was president we were better, and because some brave and unselfish ambitions are remembered or, thank God, still live deep down inside us, waiting to be touched again.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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