The JFK we had and the memory that lives
By ,
What he was, he was:
What he is fated to become
Depends on us.
— W.H. Auden, “Elegy for JFK” (1964)
BOSTON
He has become fodder for an interpretation industry toiling to make his life malleable enough to soothe the sensitivities and serve the agendas of the interpreters. The quantity of writing about him is inversely proportional to the brevity of his presidency.
He did not have history-shaping effects comparable to those of his immediate predecessor or successor. Dwight Eisenhower was one of three Americans (with George Washington and Ulysses Grant) who were world-historic figures before becoming president, and Lyndon Johnson was second only to Franklin Roosevelt as a maker of the modern welfare state and second to none in using law to ameliorate America’s racial dilemma.
The New York Times’ executive editor calls Kennedy “the elusive president”; The Post calls him “the most enigmatic” president. Most libidinous, certainly; most charming, perhaps. But enigmatic and elusive? Many who call him difficult to understand seem eager to not understand him. They present as puzzling or uncharacteristic aspects of his politics about which he was consistent and unambiguous. For them, his conservative dimension is an inconvenient truth. Ira Stoll, in “JFK, Conservative,” tries to prove too much but assembles sufficient evidence that his book’s title is not merely provocative.
A Look magazine headline in June 1946 read: “A Kennedy Runs for Congress: The Boston-bred scion of a former ambassador is a fighting-Irish conservative.” Neither his Cold War anti-communism, which was congruent with President Harry Truman’s, nor his fiscal conservatism changed dramatically during his remaining 17 years.
Visitors to the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum here, on the salt water across which his ancestors came as immigrants and on which he sailed his yacht, watch Kennedy press conferences, such as that of Sept. 12, 1963, when, responding to a question about Vietnam, he said his policy was to “win the war there”: “That is why some 25,000 Americans have traveled 10,000 miles to participate in that struggle.” He added: “But we are not there to see a war lost.” His answer was consistent with a 1956 speech calling Vietnam “the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike,” adding: “This is our offspring — we cannot abandon it.”
A few years later, with the war going badly, several Kennedy aides claimed that he had been planning to liquidate the intervention. But five months after the assassination, Robert Kennedy told an oral-history interviewer that his brother “had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam.”
Interviewer: “There was never any consideration given to pulling out?”
RFK: “No.”
Interviewer: “. . . the president was convinced that we had to keep, had to stay in there . . .”
RFK: “Yes.”
Interviewer: “. . . And couldn’t lose it.”
RFK: “Yes.”
As president, JFK chose as Treasury secretary a Republican Wall Street banker, C. Douglas Dillon, who 30 years after the assassination remembered Kennedy as “financially conservative.” Kennedy’s fiscal policy provided an example and ample rhetoric for Ronald Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts. Kennedy endorsed “a creative tax cut creating more jobs and income and eventually more revenue.” In December 1962, he said:
“The federal government’s most useful role is . . . to expand the incentives and opportunities for private expenditures. . . . [I]t is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”
John Kenneth Galbraith — Harvard economist, liberal polemicist and Kennedy’s ambassador to India — called this “the most Republican speech since McKinley.” It was one of many. On the day he was killed, Kennedy was being driven to the Dallas Trade Mart to propose “cutting personal and corporate income taxes.” Kennedy changed less during his life than liberalism did after his death.
The Kennedy library here where he lived draws substantially fewer visitors than does Dallas’s Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, where he was murdered. This is emblematic of a melancholy fact: How he died looms larger in the nation’s mind than how he lived. His truncated life remains an unfinished book and hence tempts writers who would complete it as they wish it had been written. This month, let it suffice to say what Stephen Spender did in “The Truly Great” (1932):
“Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun.
“And left the vivid air signed with their honour.”
Read more from George F. Will’s archive
***
Alan: Whereas George Will engages the Republican rhetorical process of focusing the trees to the exclusion of the forest, E.J. Dionne points primarily to the forest itself; Kennedy's presidency inspired people to believe in "the public process and the public project." (Emblematically, Ronald Reagan, in an act of treachery if not treason, assured Americans that "Government is the problem.")
Whenever we reflect on the horror of Nov. 22, 1963, we mourn not only the murder of a graceful and inspiring leader but also a steady ebbing in the years thereafter of our faith in what we could achieve through public life and common endeavor.
It tells us a great deal about the meaning of John F. Kennedy in our history that liberalsand conservatives alike are eager to pronounce him as one of their own.
The evidence points to a man who began his political career as something of a conservative and ended it as more of a liberal — cautious, skeptical and pragmatic but a liberal nonetheless. His important speeches late in his presidency about civil rights and nuclear disarmament remain lodestars for American progressives, and the philosophical trajectories of his brothers Robert and Ted no doubt further shape assessments of Kennedy’s legacy.
But more important than settling the question of who has a fair claim on JFK is the reason why all sides want to get right with him: He has come to represent a time of widespread national confidence in our country’s possibilities. The year 1963 dawned, as Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center has noted, with 82 percent of the country believing that the power of the United States would increase.
Kennedy, for all his cool, ironic detachment, showed a genuine passion for public service and, yes, for politics itself. It is a passion we have never again experienced in quite the same way.
His 1960 campaign was premised on impatience with the quiet satisfactions of the Dwight Eisenhower years. Kennedy’s emphasis on the “vigor” of a new generation ready for responsibility set the tone for social upheavals and generational conflicts later in the decade that would probably have surprised him. For all his emphasis on change and departures, Kennedy was speaking for a deep consensus in the country (Ike was part of it) about the meaning of our triumph in World War II and our success in overcoming the damage done by the Great Depression.
As Robert Reich has written, these were large social undertakings in which all Americans felt they had a stake. As a result, “society was not seen as composed of us and them ; it was the realm of we .” A nation inspired by this capacious understanding of “we” could not escape its rendezvous with civil rights and social justice. After Kennedy’s death, Lyndon Johnson harnessed his formidable political skills to a tide that was with him.
Back then, we were, as always, critical of politicians, but we were at least open to the idea that politics could be ennobling. Compare the hardheaded vision of politics in the Mark Halperin and John Heilemann volumes “Game Change” and “Double Down” with Theodore H. White’s heroic account of Kennedy’s election in “The Making of the President 1960.” Perhaps White was a bit starry-eyed, but the popularity of his book suggested that many shared his sense of romance.
How many politicians will ever again defend their line of work with the enthusiasm Kennedy brought to a 1957 commencement address at Syracuse University? Politics, he said, “has become one of our most neglected, our most abused and our most ignored professions.” Yet he urged the next generation to embrace the “compromises and majorities and procedural customs” of political life and to “offer to the political arena . . . the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you.”
Kennedy’s defense of politics and his celebration of service went hand in hand with his assumption that individual success found its roots in social arrangements that made prosperity and achievement possible. No wonder so many heeded his call to join the Peace Corps and to flock to Washington. Imagine a time when working for government seemed as exciting as joining the tech industry does now. Imagine when Wall Street was sleepy and the public sphere was thrilling.
After the assassination, the legendary columnist and Kennedy admirer Mary McGrory declared disconsolately to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a Kennedy aide: “We’ll never laugh again.” Moynihan replied: “Heavens, Mary, we’ll laugh again. It’s just that we will never be young again.”
Youth has its drawbacks. There was hubris on the New Frontier and a naivete beneath its relentless realism. The technocrat in Kennedy had an outsize faith in the capacity of experts to overcome previously intractable problems. But as a nation, we could use a dose of that youthful self-assurance. We miss it still.
Read more from E.J. Dionne’s archive