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January 10, 2008
A Kennedy Reflection
Madeleine Albright has a new book out, called Memo to the President-elect. In the short excerpt from Chapter 1, she quotes from John F. Kennedy's inaugural address:
we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty
I wonder about this now. In the same excerpt, Albright recalls the words of Colin Powell as he spoke to Congress as the new secretary of state:
It is a challenge of leadership. For it is not a dark and dangerous idological foe we confront, but the overwhelming power of millions of people who have tasted freedom. It is our own incredible success that we face.
The strength of commitment promised to the world by the young president of 1961 had achieved the survival and success he envisioned. Communism as practiced by the former Soviet Union and its iron curtain devotees was gone, capitalism had taken on global proportions and the world was at peace when Powell warned of the challenge that success brought us. We failed. We - all of us in this democratic nation - failed because we retained political leaders who had already proven they were not up to the challenge. So far distant is Powell's challenge from this moment, from that cold January day when Kennedy's words rang out, the Albright warns the new president "you will enter office with respect for American leadership lower than it has been in the memory of any living person."
Jack Kennedy became president a little over two months before I was born. My young childhood was shaped by his vision of what America could be. I liked Kennedy. The older I got, and the more I learned about him, the more I liked him. And I'm not blind to his shortcomings. They were legion. But as a president of this country, as a national leader, he was the right man at the right time. I have wondered many times how our country might have been different if he had lived.
But this week it's really been Jack's dedicated younger brother, Robert, who has been on my mind. Reading about the violence in the South during the Civil Rights Movements, the records of Bobby's efforts as head of the Justice Department to walk the fine line between states' rights and citizen's rights, to do what was right with an eye always focused on what would be best for his brother's presidency, and eventually catching the belief that he could be president himself. In an article I read over this past weekend, the writer was comparing 1968 to 2008, and for the similarities there are these are not nearly those days. He recalled that period of Kennedy's campaign as a wild 85-day adventure.
The article showed a picture of Robert Kennedy, that young idealist and presidential candidate standing in a moment of quiet sobriety, head bowed, in the moments before he told a crowd in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed in Memphis. His speech that night is nothing short of amazing. Impromptu, his own thought, his own encouragement to those who would be filled with hatred to choose unity and understanding instead, quoting Aeschylus from memory. Martin Kettle called it the "bravest speech of that campaign". In my lifetime, I have never seen another like it. Listen for yourself. It's currently the "Top 100 Speech of the Moment" at American Rhetoric.
Maybe it was because I had been so absorbed in this history, the awful times that followed the Brown decision, maybe it was the photograph, maybe it was the knowledge that 2008 isn't and can't be 1968, but as I sat with that article, I did something I almost never do with any seriousness. I looked at the man in the photograph and asked him, with tears threatening and the knowledge that this project I have engaged is changing me in ways I am only just glimpsing, "how might my life have been different if you had lived?"
Posted by cageyer at January 10, 2008 01:49 PM