I cease from my song for thee
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, …
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
— Walt Whitman
JOHN KENNEDY was president of the United States for two years and ten months. Had their terms been similarly truncated, Franklin Roosevelt would be remembered as an inspiring failure; Woodrow Wilson as an accidental interlude in decades of Republican rule and American isolationism; Abraham Lincoln as the man who allowed a peaceful separation to become a bloody dismemberment of the Union.
One cannot apply customary canons of historical judgment to so abbreviated a span; although many have done so — pedantically balancing achievements and failures, Cold War militance with peace-protecting acts. John Kennedy’s presidency was not an artifact, a fixed construction of goals and deeds frozen in ice or preserved in amber, but a metamorphosis. The John Kennedy of 1963 was not the John Kennedy who took office in January of 1961. The man was the same but the intensities, the conduct, the destinations were not the same. If this is so — and it was so — one must grant him the capacity to change, to revise settled conceptions under the tutelage of external events and inner experience. It may seem a minor tribute, until one reflects how few among the world’s leaders have possessed it, how few of us, in our own lives, combine the strength of mind and ego to question and revise the settled convictions of maturity.
It does not detract from my admiration to acknowledge that the private Kennedy was flawed, his admirable strengths mingled with less commendable fragilities. That only tells us that he was a man like the rest of us. I could, were that my purpose, try to describe his inner contradictions, attempt to find their source in the manifold pains and rejections that were so carefully concealed, and partially overcome, by a carefully cultivated charm and a very real yearning to understand and grasp the possibilities of life. But such revelations are not part of my story. John Kennedy was a public man, a leader of men, and, as such, must be judged by his public acts and the consequences of his leadership.
I am not among those whose own lives were so fused with his that they are compelled to act as guardians of his memory. He trusted me. Within limits. He often exposed his private thoughts and intentions in my presence. Again, within limits. He valued my services and rewarded them with large responsibilities, yet he was willing to allow, to author, my separation from the luminous center when he felt it necessary to other, higher, imperatives of power. Nor did my understanding of his reasons eliminate a certain personal resentment, a feeling of mistreated loyalties. Yet I never lost the belief that he was an extraordinary leader; that his death was an immense, perhaps irretrievable, loss.
Historians and others have criticized his militant response to the challenges of Soviet power, his cautious reluctance to assault racial injustice, the moderation of his efforts to help the deprived and helpless. Some of these criticisms are just. But it must also be remembered that the Cold War was real, that the Soviet Union had proclaimed its intention to “bury” America and extend its power to the third world through “wars of national liberation.” While within America the conservatism of the Eisenhower years was still dominant. For the most part Kennedy’s efforts to attack the most blatant inequities of American life — through Medicare, relief for depressed areas — languished in Congress, and failed to win a significant popular constituency. A president does not run America. He leads it, and cannot compel it in directions it is unwilling to take — not without forfeiting his ability to lead at all. Perhaps he could have acted more forcefully. I thought so at the time. But the judgment was his.
I do believe that by 1963, John Kennedy had begun to alter the direction of his leadership and was intent on a process of accommodation that might end the Cold War; that he had recognized the urgency of black aspirations and was prepared to use his office toward their fulfillment; had decided to assault the obscene persistence of poverty in a country that, under his leadership, had entered the largest sustained economic boom of its history. Nor are these beliefs based on faith alone. He had already begun.
One can debate the magnitude of his concrete accomplishments, debate the wisdom or courage of his actions, argue about his future intentions, speculate on the extent of his commitment to combat in Vietnam. (Would he have …?) But the largest question — what he meant to the country he governed, and what he has come to mean — cannot be answered or argued with the sterile platitudes of rational discussion. It is not an issue of reason.
Shortly after the assassination, one of Kennedy’s closest friends lamented that his brief rule would soon be forgotten, eclipsed by the ascendant Johnson, his memory consigned to the abyss of semi-oblivion occupied by most American presidents. “He’ll be remembered,” I reassured her, speaking more out of a desire to comfort than any historical foresight. Yet today, a quarter century later, he is remembered far more vividly than many of his successors. My children’s grammar school classmates know his name, think of him — obscurely, vaguely — as among the somewhat arbitrary pantheon of our history’s more heroic leaders. His voice and figure reappear with amazing frequency on televised documentaries and docudramas. And the mention of his name can still arouse emotions, stir debate among those who lived while he governed.
One can multiply justifying nouns: youth, energy, critical intelligence, rationality, glamour, charisma, and more. But one does not understand a man, explain the force of his leadership, by reducing him to component attributes. Still less do they tell us why his memory endures.
I have often reflected on the source of Kennedy’s impression on the country he led and on the historical memory of the country which has survived him. I think — without being at all certain — it is that he seemed to embody the idea of America. Not the nation itself. That would be presumption. But the idea by which we have defined America, and, by extension, ourselves as Americans.
The assertion requires some elaboration. A country is more than a place, an organized society through which we derive wealth and power. It is also an idea, and it is that idea which forms the most decisive bond between its citizens, which makes it possible to speak of the American “community.” And for each nation the idea is different. Frenchmen, for example, can be sustained and elevated by the invocation of glory. “Ye sons of freedom awake to glory,” exhorts the first line of the “Marseillaise”; while in modern France de Gaulle rose to power on the same appeal. But Americans are not moved by a call to glory; that call being too intangible, too dependent on the inspiration of a legendary past.
Conscious of a long and dazzling rise to sovereignty and then to empire, the English have been linked by their responsibility to a brilliant heritage. “… we must speak / That if tonight our greatness were struck dead / There might be left some record of the things we said,” wrote Tennyson in 1852; his exhortation echoed almost a century later when Winston Churchill inspired his war-torn nation to act so that future millennia would look back and say, “This was their finest hour.” Americans are more likely to be vitalized by more immediate goals — “Beat the Japs”; “Put a man on the moon” — than by the quest for a place of honor in the chronicles of history.
This does not mean that the American idea is a practical one. In many respects it has been the most romantic of all; given its unique form and force by the unique circumstances of our birth and growth. To be French or British, Chinese or Egyptian is to be part of a cluster of events and beliefs transmitted across centuries. Such comforting continuity was not possible to Americans. The wilderness had sheltered no Roman legion, no Peter and Constantine, no Renaissance or Elizabethan Age. We could not reflect on that interminable procession of rulers and artists which provides a Frenchman with his proudest moments. Nor could we anchor ourselves in a fixed territory and population — a place occupied by a people of shared origins. We moved from our colonial fringes to occupy a continent, our population constantly changing its composition; individuals and families always moving on.
Thus we formed — could only form — a stabilizing continuity, an idea of what it meant to be American, from a common belief in the purpose and direction of a nation. We were William Bradford’s “city on a hill,” Washington’s “great experiment,” Jefferson’s “chosen country,” Lincoln’s “favored land,” and from there, in a direct line, to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, and John Kennedy’s declamation that “the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the world.… We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution.”
This American idea differed from that of others in a crucial quality. It had to be constantly renewed, always contemporary. It could not be sustained — could not sustain us — by recalling that we had once been a land of opportunity, that we had once possessed a great purpose, that there had been a time when we stood for the freedom of man. “Justice,” “freedom,” “opportunity,” “model and exemplar to the world” are either present realities or the idea is dead. Indeed, discontinuity, freedom from ties of the past, was expressed as a moral principle by men like Jefferson, who said that no generation should be allowed to bind the next; informed Lincoln’s claim that “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” Each generation must measure and adapt its own performance against the changing requirements of the American idea — that we were a nation constantly moving toward some large and worthy future purpose; not in search of some safe harbor or final resting place, but adventurers with a cause, each achievement only a prelude to those still grander and more noble destinations that lay beyond a constantly receding horizon.
This idea contains no claim of moral superiority. Still less does it encompass the realities of American history and modern life. Our behavior has often contradicted faith, belief, and principle. But it is the American idea; forced upon us by history and certain moments of illuminating vision. It has provided us with a sense of shared worth and social purpose. Even our most unholy departures have sought justification in that idea. We may have had warlike majorities, destructive majorities, or greedy majorities, but we have never had a majority of cynics. At least until now.
John Kennedy expressed — in words, in action, in manner — his own belief in America’s possibilities; that we were a nation with a large purpose, a mission, perhaps dangerous, certainly difficult but within our powers. It all sounded so fresh and contemporary, but it was a reaffirmation of the idea that was the nation — that had come on the Mayflower, was thriving before the first settlers crossed the Alleghenies, had been bred into every generation. Many citizens disagreed with Kennedy’s policies, his actions, his direction. But his presence helped to revitalize our belief in ourselves — as individuals and as Americans. Some would join the Peace Corps. Others would march on Washington. He was cheered, and he was denounced. But he would be remembered, because he made others remember — what we were as a people, how strong we could be, how proud. Call it “style,” disdainfully if you will. But style is the archway through which power enters into historical memory: the judicious, dignified Washington, the poetic Lincoln, the ebullient Franklin Roosevelt. Kennedy has not yet won a place in that company, but if he does it won’t be because of the space program or the missile crisis. It will be because what he was helped remind us of what we could be.
John Kennedy was not the sixties. But he fueled the smoldering embers, and, for a brief while, was the exemplar who led others to discover their own strength and resurgent energy; their own passion, love, and capacity for hate.
As for the man himself, he remains, in part, a mystery. My own efforts at understanding and explanation are incomplete. The recognition of history, which he so badly wanted, is still undetermined. Yet …
The man Flammonde, from God knows where,
With firm address and foreign air
With news of nations in his talk
And something royal in his walk
With glint of iron in his eyes,
But never doubt, nor yet surprise,
Appeared, and stayed, and held his head
As one by kings accredited
…
He never told us what he was.
…
To play the Prince of castaways.
Meanwhile he played surpassing well
A part, for most, unplayable;
In fine, one pauses, half afraid
To say for certain that he played
…
What was he, when we came to sift
His meaning, and to note the drift
…
Why was it that his charm revealed
Somehow the surface of a shield.
…
Rarely at once will nature give
The power to be Flammonde and live.
We cannot know how much we learn
From those who never will return,
Until a flash of unforeseen
Remembrance falls on what has been.
We’ve each a darkening hill to climb;
And this is why, from time to time
In Tilbury Town, we look beyond
Horizons for the man Flammonde.