JFK and the hope that lingers

Fifty years ago this fall, as he broke ground at Amherst College for a library named in honor of Robert Frost, John F. Kennedy testified to the power of poetry in public life.

“When power leads man towards arrogance,” he said, “poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

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JFK's favorite spots around town

Family visits the eternal flame

Indeed, as he said in another speech at Harvard in 1956, Kennedy believed that “if more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced that world would be a little better place in which to live.” Long before Barack Obama was an audacious gleam in his father’s eye, Kennedy had appropriated the credo of Amherst’s own Emily Dickinson — that “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers — that perches in the soul.”

Five decades later — as debates about Kennedy’s use (or misuse) of presidential power, and about the gulf between his public caution and private recklessness, rumble on — it is the hope he inspired that lingers. The columnist Mary McGrory had it about right on the day he died: “That lightsome tread, that debonair touch, that shock of chestnut hair, that beguiling grin, that shattering understatement — these are what we shall remember.”

In 1960, Frank Sinatra had serenaded Kennedy as the candidate of “High Hopes.” In 2008, Caroline Kennedy endorsed Obama as the candidate “who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe that our country needs every one of us to get involved.”

If that forecast feels far from fulfilled in the face of Obama’s current troubles, it is worth remembering that on Nov. 21, 1963, Washington saw Jack Kennedy in a far less flattering light than it does today. What might be called his “signature domestic initiative,” a proposed tax cut, was stalled in the Senate Finance Committee, and his long-sought civil rights bill had passed the House Judiciary Committee but was bottled up in the Rules Committee, its future in deep doubt. He was embattled on every front.

“There is a faltering effort now under way by apologists for the White House to blame the Congress because President Kennedy’s legislative program is a mess,” the Senate minority leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-Ill.) declared that very day. “This effort will fail because blame lies squarely on the White House doorstep and any reasonable examination of the facts will show it.”

In the aftermath of the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy was so concerned that her husband’s history would be written by “bitter old men” — she specifically mentioned Merriman Smith, chief White House correspondent for United Press International, and Arthur Krock, the cantankerous columnist for The New York Times — that she summoned Theodore H. White of Life magazine to Hyannis Port on a storm-swept Thanksgiving weekend to impart the myth of Camelot that endures to this day.

The initial wave of hagiography by Kennedy courtiers was followed by oceans of debunking revisionism so unsparing — about his bellicose inaugural address, compulsive womanizing, faltering legislative program and unfinished agenda — that some liberal and conservative critics alike now dismiss Kennedy’s presidency as mediocre, at best. Such criticism — imagine that Abraham Lincoln had died three days after delivering the Gettysburg Address, instead of five days after winning the Civil War — seems to miss the point.

As Ted Kennedy memorably said of their brother Robert after his own assassination in 1968, John Kennedy “need not be idealized, or enlarged in death, beyond what he was in life” to stand as a consequential figure in the life of the nation. He inspired a generation of young people to enter public service (many of whom decades later would, rightly or wrongly, see in Obama something of their first political hero). He looked forward, as he said in his Amherst speech, “to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.”