Courage is the virtue that President Kennedy most admired. He sought out those people who had demonstrated in some way, whether it was on a battlefield or a baseball diamond, in a speech or fighting for a cause, that they had courage, that they would stand up, that they could be counted on.
That is why this book so fitted his personality, his beliefs. It is a study of men who, at risk to themselves, their futures, even the well-being of their children, stood fast for principle. It was toward that ideal that he modeled his life. And this in time gave heart to others.
As Andrew Jackson said, “One man with courage makes a majority.” That is the effect President Kennedy had on others.
President Kennedy would have been forty-seven in May of 1964. At least one half of the days that he spent on this earth were days of intense physical pain. He had scarlet fever when he was very young, and serious back trouble when he was older. In between he had almost every other conceivable ailment. When we were growing up together we used to laugh about the great risk a mosquito took in biting Jack Kennedy—with some of his blood the mosquito was almost sure to die. He was in Chelsea Naval Hospital for an extended period of time after the war, had a major and painful operation on his back in 1955, campaigned on crutches in 1958. In 1951 on a trip we took around the world he became ill. We flew to the military hospital in Okinawa and he had a temperature of over 106 degrees. They didn’t think he would live.
But during all this time, I never heard him complain. I never heard him say anything that would indicate that he felt God had dealt with him unjustly. Those who knew him well would know he was suffering only because his face was a little whiter, the lines around his eyes were a little deeper, his words a little sharper. Those who did not know him well detected nothing.
He didn’t complain about his problem, so why should I complain about mine—that is how one always felt.
When he battled against illness, when he fought in the war, when he ran for the Senate, when he stood up against powerful interests in Massachusetts to fight for the St. Lawrence Seaway, when he fought for a labor reform act in 1959, when he entered the West Virginia primary in 1960, when he debated Lyndon Johnson at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles with no advance notice, when he took the blame completely on himself for the failure at the Bay of Pigs, when he fought the steel companies, when he stood up at Berlin in 1961 and then again in 1962 for the freedom of that city, when he forced the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba, when he spoke and fought for equal rights for all our citizens, and hundreds of other things both big and small, he was reflecting what is the best in the human being.
He was demonstrating conviction, courage, a desire to help others who needed help, and true and genuine love for his country.
Because of his efforts, the mentally retarded and the mentally ill will have a better chance, the young a greater opportunity to be educated and live with dignity and self-respect, the ill to be cared for, the world to live in peace.
President Kennedy had only a thousand days in the White House instead of three thousand days, yet so much was accomplished. Still so much needs to be done.
This book tells the stories of men who in their own time recognized what needed to be done—and did it. President Kennedy was fond of quoting Dante that “the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
If there is a lesson from the lives of the men John Kennedy depicts in this book, if there is a lesson from his life and from his death, it is that in this world of ours none of us can afford to be lookers-on, the critics standing on the sidelines.
Thomas Carlyle wrote, “The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently but to live manfully.”
On the morning of his death, President Kennedy called former Vice President John Nance Garner to pay his respects. It was Mr. Garner’s ninety-fifth birthday. When Mr. Garner first came to Washington the total federal budget was less than 500 million dollars. President Kennedy was administering a budget of just under 100 billion dollars.
President Kennedy’s grandmother was living in Boston when President Kennedy was assassinated. She was also alive the year President Lincoln was shot.
We are a young country. We are growing and expanding until it appears that this planet will no longer contain us. We have problems now that people fifty, even ten years ago, would not have dreamed would have to be faced.
The energies and talents of all of us are needed to meet the challenges—the internal ones of our cities, our farms, ourselves—to be successful in the fight for freedom around the globe, in the battles against illiteracy, hunger and disease. Pleasantries, self-satisfied mediocrity will serve us badly. We need the best of many—not of just a few. We must strive for excellence.
Lord Tweedsmuir, one of the President’s favorite authors, wrote in his autobiography: “Public life is the crown of a career, and to young men it is the worthiest ambition. Politics is still the greatest and most honorable adventure.”
It has been fashionable in many places to look down on politics, on those in Government. President Kennedy, I think, changed that and altered the public conception of Government. He certainly did for those who participated. But, however we feel about politics, the arena of Government is where the decisions will be made which will affect not only all our destinies but the future of our children born and unborn.
At the time of the Cuban missile crisis last year, we discussed the possibility of war, a nuclear exchange, and talked about being killed—the latter at that time seemed so unimportant, almost frivolous. The one matter which really was of concern to him and truly had meaning and made that time much more fearful than it would otherwise have been was the specter of the death of the children of this country and around the world—the young people who had no part and knew nothing of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else’s. They would never have been given a chance to make a decision, to vote in an election, to run for office, to lead a revolution, to determine their own destinies.
We, our generation, had. And the great tragedy was that if we erred, we erred not just for ourselves, our futures, our homes, our country, but for the lives, futures, homes and countries of those who never had been given an opportunity to play a role, to vote “aye” or “nay,” to make themselves felt.
Bonar Law said, “There is no such thing as inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom.”
It is true. It is human wisdom that is needed not just on our side but on all sides. I might add that if wisdom had not been demonstrated by the American President and also by Premier Khrushchev, then the world as we know it would have been destroyed.
But there will be future Cubas. There will be future crises. We have the problems of the hungry, the neglected, the poor and the downtrodden. They must receive more help. And just as solutions had to be found in October of 1962, answers must be found for these other problems that still face us. So that wisdom is needed still.
John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Sam Houston, Thomas Hart Benton, Edmund G. Ross, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, George Norris and Robert Taft imparted a heritage to us. They came, they left their mark, and this country was not the same because these men had lived. By how much the good of what they did and deeded to us was cherished, nurtured and encouraged, by so much did the country and all of us gain.
And so it is also for John F. Kennedy. Like these others, his life had an import, meant something to the country while he was alive. More significant, however, is what we do with what is left, with what has been started. It was his conviction, like Plato’s, that the definition of citizenship in a democracy is participation in Government and that, as Francis Bacon wrote, it is “left only to God and to the angels to be lookers on.” It was his conviction that a democracy with this effort by its people must and can face its problems, that it must show patience, restraint, compassion, as well as wisdom and strength and courage, in the struggle for solutions which are very rarely easy to find.
It was his conviction that we should do so successfully because the courage of those who went before us in this land exists in the present generation of Americans.
“We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. 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.”
This book is not just the stories of the past but a book of hope and confidence for the future. What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us.
—ROBERT F. KENNEDY
December 18, 1963