22 November 2013

JFK remembered

I was a sophomore in high school, in my English class, when the awful news reached us: the President had been shot in Dallas. Later I learned John F. Kennedy was dead. As a member of a deeply anti-New Deal family — my mother, a Texas New Dealer, excepted — I was no fan of the President, but as the day lengthened I was overwhelmed with a sense that something terrible had happened. And before returning to school several days later, I joined millions in watching Jack Ruby murder Lee Harvey Oswald on live television.

We don’t forget such events. Just as my parents remembered with photographic clarity where they were and what they were doing when they learned Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, and when they learned that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died, so do I remember 22 November 1963.

It would be years, however, before I began to fully appreciate JFK’s legacy. When we’re young, we adopt the politics of our families because we know nothing else; because love, respect, and even awe, for our elders discourages challenges to their wisdom; because we don’t really begin questioning our political, social, and religious upbringings until we’ve spent time in the post adolescent world, learning beyond the influence of our families. That’s why I oppose letting 16-year-olds vote: they’re poorly informed, intellectually immature, and not yet ready to cast responsible votes. Letting 18-year-olds vote isn’t much better, which is why I would return the voting age to 21.

As I returned to JFK’s legacy over the years, I became increasingly aware that his eloquence defined his presidency and established his place in history. Studying the New Deal and FDR, I realized that government can and does improve lives, that unfettered capitalism is destructive, that progressive policy is important but not enough, and that FDR’s sunny disposition and avuncular assurances that better times were certain was vital to his successes. My mother, who grew up in the Texas dustbowl, never forgot the dust storms that brought midnight to midday, and also never forgot listening to FDR’s fireside chats that provided hope and helped her and millions muster the courage to survive the Great Depression.

JFK’s inspirational eloquence, although more cerebral than FDR’s, had the same effect on millions more, especially millions of my generation. We remember JFK for his inaugural address, for the Peace Corps, for resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis through diplomacy, for encouraging the arts, for supporting health care and civil rights initiatives that came to fruition as Medicare, Medicaid, and the Civil Rights Acts, under Lyndon Johnson.

JFK’s inaugural address is the modern gold standard for inaugural speeches, as important as FDR’s first inaugural address, Lincoln’s second, and some would say, Washington’s second. Less well known, but also important, are his City on a Hill speech, delivered in Massachusetts during his interregnum; his speech on religious freedom delivered in Houston to protestant clergymen during his Presidential campaign; and his address on the path to peace, delivered at American University in June, 1963.

Finally, there are his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Profiles in Courage, still a good read, especially for its reflections on an elected official’s responsibilities and approach to his duties, and PT 109, the movie (there’s also a book) depicting his struggle for survival in the South Pacific in World War II.

The ante-penultimate paragraph of JFK’s inaugural address — And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country, — is its most widely known and quoted, and the penultimate paragraph — 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, — perhaps the most forgotten, but it is his final paragraph that encapsulates an ideal and standard of public service upon which no one has, and perhaps never will, improve: