New Mexico Mercury

Say not in grief, he is no more,
but live in thankfulness that he was.
-- Hebrew proverb

After studying his life and times for many years, I see Kennedy as a modern man, a contemporary man, completely in touch with himself and his times.  I recall the first time I saw him, campaigning in 1960 in Ohio.  As a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, I saw him as incredibly relaxed, interesting, someone you’d like to get to know.

As for the “interesting” part, author Norman Mailer called Kennedy, “a true existential hero”, and wrote in his famous Esquire essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”, “His appearance changed with his mood, strikingly so, and this made him always more interesting than what he was saying.”

And I remember where I was when I learned of his death; I was in the back row of my high school zoology class -- stunned and half scared.  I couldn’t believe it.

Kennedy, as president, epitomized what a leader should be.  There, of course, was the charisma, that mysterious ingredient, as well as Kennedy’s approach to the presidency of making us see where we needed to go (“get the country moving again”), and showing us how to get there.  Kennedy had a powerful influence on the country in his two years and ten months as president.  Despite his flaws and mistakes, he was popular.

Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, and the Kennedy family has preferred that we remember his birthday and his life, beyond simply mourning his passing.  Had he lived, he would be 96 years old.  It is hard to imagine JFK in his nineties; we still see him as ageless, forever young, even on the 50th anniversary of his death.

Although Kennedy’s memory endures, and his life and times still fascinate us, it still remains difficult to see him clearly now in the wake of 50 years, through the myth and legend that Kennedy himself would have disdained.  When recalling the late president, it will always be more important to remember how he lived, rather than how he died.  In short, he reluctantly went to right-wing Dallas, at the time a cauldron of hate, in late November 1963 to boost his popularity, to help resolve a Democratic Party political feud in Texas concerning Congressman Ralph Yarborough, and to unofficially start the 1964 presidential campaign.  He was reluctant to make the trip, and so was his wife.

His wife Jacqueline, herself the subject of numerous books, perceptively described him as an “idealist without illusions”.  He described himself as a liberal -- “a free man with a free mind”.  Like the Greeks, Kennedy felt that happiness was the full use of one’s abilities along the lines of excellence.  He loved laughter as well as reason, and possessed a strong intellectual curiosity alongside a keen sense of humor.  Such qualities were the essence of the man, and the leader.  Ironically, his aides saw him as “destiny’s child, our talisman against outrageous fate.”  Kennedy was no ideologue; he was a moderate-liberal pragmatist -- a realistic politician.

It is well to remember that he won the 1960 presidential election with a narrow margin of less than 120,000 votes.  As a result, his presidency was, as his special counsel Theodore Sorensen once said, “a seed-planting presidency”, a bridge to the future.  He was counting on a first term and a second term after eight years of Republican somnolence.  Aides quoted him as saying, “I can’t do these things until I’m reelected.”  Eisenhower left the White House as the oldest president in history.  Kennedy, the youngest president, needed a second term of leadership leverage to harvest the fruits of progress in civil rights, economic prosperity, reducing poverty, exiting Vietnam, and international peace.  With his American University speech (June 1963), perhaps the best one he ever made, he was clearly pivoting towards detente with the Soviets, and a thaw in the Cold War.

Last month, I attended a symposium at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, entitled “The Kennedy Legacy”.  Whenever I mentioned New Mexico, people spoke of their fondness for the state; one recalled Kennedy’s visits to Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

His legacy, his “life after death”, after a thousand days in the White House, is mixed.  He achieved success with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, with his restraint and resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, and with his establishment of the first Commission on the Status of Women.  SEALs (Sea Air Land teams) and the Green Berets were created by President Kennedy in 1962 as a way to expand unconventional warfare.

He failed most notably at the Bay of Pigs, and he knew it.  But he learned the lessons of the fiasco:  be wary of the use of military force, and of overuse of experts, and know the dangers of misassumptions and miscalculations in foreign policy decision making.

To his own disappointment, Kennedy realized that political factors, particularly in Congress, made him compromise on some measures and delay initiatives he knew were important.  Civil rights is the best example.  He had great capacity for growth and change; the Kennedy of 1963 was not the Kennedy of 1961.

There were tragedies in his charmed life:  the death of his child, Patrick; the death of a brother and sister; his mentally challenged sister, Rosemary.  His own death, the stuff of Greek tragedy, was made more grievous by the fact that Kennedy seemed to have everything (except his health).  Ironically, he had fortified his marriage and he was at the height of his powers, just as he was struck down at 46.

Fifty years after his death, his life and tragic death still fascinate us, and eludes us.  His close friend Charles Bartlett said, “No one will ever know all of Jack Kennedy.”  We know much about JFK, yet so little; we know so little because he lived his life in compartments, and he kept secrets.  He had much to hide.  Critics and revisionist historians like to talk of his private life, but deep down many of us know that what counts in history is his public life, his public leadership ability, and his public performance.  For as presidential scholar James MacGregor Burns has written, “Denunciations of JFK for violating someone’s concept of personal morality do not get us very far unless the historian is able to relate private morality to public character.”

What would he do today?  Kennedy could win and govern because of his capacity for growth, his adaptability to the times, his media persona, and, most of all, his powerful effect on people.

John F. Kennedy stands for courage and commitment to a better world.  He challenged us to risk change together for a better national and international community, and a higher public purpose beyond self interest.  That is leadership.  Vance Bourjaily said it well in his 1967 novel, The Man Who Knew Kennedy, “We owe something in this life to someone who helped us define ourselves.”

The New Yorker magazine’s obituary for Kennedy, written in part by E. B. White, captured the man as he lived, “When we think of him, he is without hat, standing in the wind and weather, ... It can be said of him, as of few men in like position, that he did not trim his sails, but instead challenged the wind itself, to improve its direction, and cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.”

In a letter to Kennedy, White wrote, “One of the excitements of American citizenship is a man’s feeling of identity with his elected President.  I never had this feeling hit me so hard as on January 20, 1961.”

Kennedy made us see our possibilities as a people and as a nation.  Fifty years ago, we confronted the future with Kennedy, as we tried to imagine all that would lie ahead.

Richard L. Fox worked in government and academia for 36 years.  He taught political science at UNM and CNM.  His personal Kennedy library contains more than 200 volumes.