The 35 th US presidents legacy remains questionable, but his latest successors travails induces many yearn for a more eloquent leader
On 14 June 1956, then-senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy delivered the commencement speech at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our nations first great legislators were also among the nations first great writers and scholars, he said. Volumes were their tools , not their enemies.
More than 200 miles back in New York, a son was celebrating his 10 th birthday. His name was Donald John Trump.
The jarring contrast between Americas 35 th and 45 th chairmen will be writ large on Monday, when Trump will speak at a wreath-laying rite at Arlington National Cemetery to mark Memorial Day. It are not aware if he will also pay tribute to Kennedy, who lies in the cemetery beneath Cape Cod granite and an eternal flame, on what would have been his 100 th birthday.
The Kennedy centenary is obtain significant ceremony elsewhere. In Boston, his presidential library has opened an exhibit that includes his high school scrapbook, the suitcase he utilized while campaigning in 1960 and some of his neckties. In Washington, the Smithsonian is hosting exhibitions and programs while his living memorial, the Kennedy Center, has a season of festivities including, on Monday, reads of his speeches by journalist Dana Bash, soprano Rene Fleming, and actors Brian Dennehy and Martin Sheen, among others. There are also volumes, magazines and Tv specials rekindling Americas love affair with Camelot.
The tone is positive and in some cases hagiographic, emphasizing Kennedys glamour, erudition and soaring oratory and favor not to linger on his extramarital affairs, secret medical problems or foreign policy blunders. Among admirers, the nostalgic yearn is intensified and perhaps oversimplified by their contempt for the current occupant of the White House.
The sense of wistfulness was unmistakeable at the recent gala opening of an exhibit of photos from Kennedys life and career at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, was effusive.
I thought the exhibition was beautiful, she told the Guardian. It was genuinely a manifestation of how wonderful the Kennedys always were. It showed history, household scenes and political careers that were to perfection, so I loved seeing it.
Veteran journalist Gay Talese , 85, told the audience: For we in journalism have never known, and perhaps will never again know, a chairwoman who brought such eloquence to prose and brought to us, even the press the cynical, cynical press such a pride in having such a human as our president.
Apart from a shared mastery of television, Trump is, in many respects, the anti-Kennedy. The 70 -year-old Republican, who had no political experience, was the oldest person ever elected US president. Kennedy, a 43 -year-old Democrat who had served in the House and the Senate, was the youngest. At the 100 -day mark, Trumps public approving rating was 41%. Kennedys was 83%.
Trump was granted five draft deferments during the Vietnam war; Kennedy received military honors for saving the lives of crewmates when their torpedo barge was struck by a Japanese destroyer during the second world war. Trump infamously does not read books, dedicates disjointed speeches and has claimed: You have to be wealthy in order to be great. Kennedy was fond of referencing ancient Greeks and Shakespeare, won a Pulitzer prize for the book Profiles in Courage, and once proclaimed: This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.
Kennedys nephew Stephen Kennedy Smith , 59, co-author of JFK: A Vision for America, published to mark the anniversary, studiously avoided mentioning Trump when he said in an interview: I suppose President Kennedy believed in America as a great civilization, as a moral enterprise, as an evolving decide of ideals, and so he believed in the arts and funding for the arts, he believed in science and funding for science.
He wrote a volume called Nation of Immigrants about how America had been built by immigrants. He dedicated the greatest speech on religious discrimination thats maybe ever been given by an American president because he was a Catholic. I think those things speak for themselves.
The circumstances of Kennedys death assassinated in Dallas in 1963 are notoriously better known than his birth. He was born in the affluent Boston suburb of Brookline on 29 May 1917 to a family of great faith, great ambition, great wealth, as journalist Tom Brokaw put it. He attended Connecticuts elite Choate Rosemary Hall school where, incidentally, he never get higher than a C+ for public speaking.
He studied at Harvard University and the London School of Economics, opposed in the war and went on to serve in the House and Senate before winning a constrict, still questionable election over Richard Nixon. Whereas Trumps 2017 inaugural address provoked Nixonian bleakness and set an emphasis on America first, in 1961 Kennedy set out an optimistic vision, called for a grand and global alliance and define America course to put a human on the moon.
Thomas Henriksen was there that day in a bitterly cold Washington, marching past the new chairwoman as an undergraduate of the Virginia Military Institute.
Our feet were frozen, he recalled. We were on the bus, listening on the radio ready to get down, when he made the famous statement about, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Wow! We were all excited about it. We told, Thats really good! It hit the fingernail on the head. He kind of gave you an uplift.
Henriksen, 77, is now an emeritus senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California. He added: The Kennedys had a lot of grace. They stimulated you proud of America. This young guy, his attractive wife and two small children. He seemed like the future.
I think hed be bewildered
Kennedys presidency of only 1,036 days is best recollected for the low of the Bay of Pigs when a group of about 1,350 Cuban exiles, backed by the CIA, launched a doomed intrusion of their country and the high of the Cuban missile crisis, where reference is depicted grace under pressure in dealing with Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev and pulling the world back from the brink of nuclear war.
The Republican senator John McCain, who was serving on a nuclear-armed aircraft carrier off Cuba during the crisis, viewed Kennedy as the first president of his generation. He wasnt that much older than I was and he certainly was young in appearance, he said. Asked what Kennedy would think of Trump, the 80 -year-old responded: I think hed be bewildered.
Kennedys most famous birthday came in 1962, when he was serenaded by actor Marilyn Monroe at New Yorks Madison Square Garden. Historian are divided over whether the civil right conflict and Vietnam war would have taken different courses if Kennedy had lived and not been succeeded by Lyndon Johnson. But with the assistance of spouse, Jackie, the mystique and mythology of Camelot survived him along with a dynasty that followed him into politics and public service.
Robert F Kennedy Jr , an ecological activist and son of Robert Kennedy, the presidents friend and us attorney general, remembered lovingly: I wrote him a letter when I was, I think, eight years old, asking to come in to talk about the environment. I went into the White House and expended an hour with him in the Oval Office talking about pollution.
Then he introduced me to Rachel Carson[ author of Silent Spring] and to Stewart Udall, who was the secretary of the interior. I brought him a salamander and he walked out with me and we released it in the rose garden fountain.
Kennedy Jr, 63, added: I think one of the most important parts of his legacy is his passion for peace and reconciliation with both Soviets and with Cuba and his determination to get us out of Vietnam. All of those things came from an abhorrence that he had for war. He was asked by Ben Bradlee, who was one of his close friends, what he wanted on his gravestone and he told, He kept the peace. He said that was the most important task of a chairwoman: to keep the country out of war.
John F Kennedys son, John Jr, was killed in a plane crash at merely age 38. His daughter, Caroline, 59 , served as US ambassador to Japan under Barack Obama. His nephews Patrick Kennedy and Joseph Kennedy II both had stints in Congress and another nephew, Chris Kennedy, is currently a candidate for governor of Illinois.
A great-nephew, Joe Kennedy III , 36, is a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, putting him on the front line of opposition to Trump.
I think its pretty clear the values that he stood for and the vision that he had for this nation are fundamentally was rejected by the authorities concerned, which is an unfortunate course and an unfortunate turning including the president, he said. But for those of us that believe in those values, its up to us to stimulate them real and got to go and do better in the next election.
In the age of partisan politics, it remains to be seen whether Kennedy can still has become a transcendent figure and whether his centenary can provide a rare moment of unity. There are critics on the right who reject the heroic narrative.
Niall Ferguson , a British historian and biographer of Henry Kissinger, who was a consultant to the Kennedy White House, said: I guess the Kennedy myth will live on and, the longer it lives, the further it will be removed from historical reality.
Its impossible for most Americans to reconcile the image of John F Kennedy that people like Arthur Schlesinger propagated with Camelot and the glamour associated with Kennedys presidency with the realities of a razor-thin margin of victory, maybe won with some mafia help, the crazy philandering that even jeopardised national security when it turned that out he and a mobster were sharing a girlfriend with the KGB.
I virtually forgot: were bugging Martin Luther King through brother Bobby. The realities of the Kennedy White House are so inordinately scuzzy that Trump is a kind of saintly figure by contrast.
Kennedy was spared the intense media scrutiny that Trump experiences, Ferguson added, while his foreign policy missteps pushed the world to the brink of disaster.
Its a chronicle of malfeasance and yet the man is remembered as a hero, he said. Maybe theres hope for Donald Trump yet.
Read more: www.theguardian.com
