The Mood And The Style

...It will not result in a renewal of political conflict at home or in a resumption of the social changes begun by the New Deal...

...His first State of the Union address was a dark (though incomplete) description of all that is wrong with the country...

...It requires discipline and mass participation...

...Reread today the speech of April 20, 1961, delivered after the failure of the Cuban invasion...

...Eisenhower was content to allow his lassitude to represent the weariness and confusion of the nation...

...But of that not a word...

...but "what is our posture...

...He would explore the stimulating effects of both upon the energy and idealism of Americans, seeking in political debate an alternative to conformity...

...In recent weeks (November, 1961) he has been warning the American people to expect neither victory nor defeat in Berlin, but rather a long "twilight" struggle and a series of compromises...

...would be a sacrifice indeed...

...More important, however, it would drastically interfere with the image of unity and strength which Kennedy also seeks to project...

...Readiness, will, nerve, determination, endurance, sacrifice: these are the terms of his rhetoric...

...Kennedy is not in fact a pragmatic liberal...

...He reasserted the integrity of our national will, our determination to triumph, our refusal to tolerate Communism in this hemisphere...

...His nerve vindicated (his voice had been steady throughout the difficult speech...

...In fact, the new administration may be analyzed in terms of a curious dialectic between its public style and its private intentions...

...A politics of willfulness and nerve continually falsifies our prospects and generates crises and "disappointments" out of what are in fact expected events and, by now, well-known dangers...

...THE EFFECTS HE SEEKS are clear enough...

...he obviously intended to use the Berlin crisis to further his attack upon both...

...And when the President made his first political tour, after enduring repeated defeats at the hands of a congressional coalition of Southerners and Republicans, he spoke out against...

...he assumed full responsibility for the "defeat"), Kennedy has never felt it necessary to defend rationally either the invasion or the hands-off policy which followed it...

...They are kitsch, because they do not describe our real condition...

...But the opportunities (in any conventional sense) are unreal...

...In his effort to arouse the American people after the Eisenhower drowsiness, Kennedy has fallen back upon the rhetoric of the wartime Leader—Lincoln, Roosevelt (Mr...

...New Deal), Churchill, De Gaulle...

...Since Kennedy realizes that frustration feeds the radical Right, he must occasionally play the realist...

...But the strained antitheses and parallelisms of Kennedy's prose are not eloquent...

...Leadership of this sort obviously requires the end of internal conflict, the continuation of "bipartisanship" and even its extension to the sphere of domestic affairs...

...Perhaps it is...

...we hardly encouraged heroic behavior when the Berlin wall was being raised...

...He campaigned against being second to the moon...

...The July 25 speech on Berlin was a more intelligent and careful example of the same sort of thing...

...but it is also a testing place for our diplomatic craftiness and political imagination, and the President left little leeway for either in his address...

...KENNEDY'S RHETORIC even misrepresents his own policies...

...It reflected a mentality for which every crisis was a "test"—and a test of nerve (style) rather than of intelligence (policy...

...This tension produces a kind of oscillation in what Kennedy says and does which is similar to that of De Gaulle on the Algerian question...

...Against that complacency, Kennedy has sought to generate a new nationalism, a sense of unity and determination...

...But he seeks to represent the unified will and call forth the unselfish sacrifices of a nation totally committed to struggle and triumph...

...it reflected the mood of intellectual opposition to Eisenhower's complacency...

...He has made no significant start toward educating his public or arguing with his enemies of the Right...

...internationally, they are a part of the elaborate and frightening mime the cold war has engendered...

...For this image, as I have argued, is not compatible with a realistic foreign policy...

...they were simply included in the spurious unity which he proclaimed against Left and Right alike...

...He campaigned against the declining image of America...

...He aspires to be a wartime president...

...The same ideology: Berlin, Kennedy declared, is "the great testing place of our courage and will...

...The same rhetoric: "We do not want to fight—but we have fought before...

...To talk of will, sacrifice and triumph, then, is to invite frustration...

...Only nineteen days after Kennedy spoke, the East Germans raised the wall across Berlin—and we did not fight (as we have not fought before...

...It was a hastily and loosely written speech, but not different in style from those which preceded and followed it...

...They do not constitute a political program or suggest a legislative effort comparable to that of the New Deal (the promise of another "hundred days" was designed to convey a sense of urgency but not a program...

...Kennedy's rhetoric is dangerous also because it increases the political risks of compromise and indecision...

...Kennedy could hardly make this a convincing issue in the cold war without sacrificing something of the rhetorical immediacy of his campaign demand that America always be first—and without permitting someone else to take up the cry...

...A president like Franklin Roosevelt depended at least as much upon the effects of his radically new policies as upon his personal style...

...At no point in that speech—nor in his talk to American publishers a week later when he called for wartime discipline—did Kennedy suggest the policy we have since followed toward Cuba...

...It is a little hard to adjust one's conventional ideas about politics and power to this new situation, to the idea, for example, that the crisis atmosphere of last summer and the policies adopted at that time did not have the purpose of increasing our strength but of making our use of that strength conceivable...

...But it is at least as important that this new citizen be credible as that he be real...

...Thus the arguments for aid to education and civil rights tend increasingly to be put in cold war terms, that is, to be made unanswerable...

...Surely there is something dangerous about a presidential rhetoric which so inadequately describes the problems we face and our real intentions...

...They aim at the easy and false fervor of schoolboy patriotism...

...On the one hand, Kennedy and his advisors surely realize the need to accept neutralism and democratic socialism—and to bargain for much worse—to assist in economic development even at the expense of American investors, to avoid the risks of brinksmanship...

...As De Gaulle's rhetoric of patriotism and glory is incompatible with the "defeat" he is going to accept, so the rhetoric of national will and wartime unity is incompatible with the long struggle (more difficult than war) which Kennedy more soberly promises us...

...Civil defense offers an ideal (and, in a certain sense, a safe) training ground for the national will...

...Only the strong, and the industrious, can possibly survive...

...THE TWILIGHT TONE, of course, has been present from the first...

...Truman was innocent of the higher art of public relations and depended for his effects upon actual participation in vulgar political struggles...

...But Kennedy cannot yet couch his realism in matter-of-fact terms or give up the rhetoric of grim determination...

...Win-theWar not Mr...

...He is the first of our politicians whose style and rhetoric are perfectly adapted to the cold war...

...Or rather, it was ritual of a new sort designed not to set our minds at ease, but to exercise us, to goad us forward to some (undetermined) effort, some assertion of strength...

...Kennedy has hardly done the same...

...A truly pragmatic liberal, I should think, would choose conflict and change as the best way out of the Eisenhower era...

...Only once did he refer vaguely to a struggle "more difficult than war, where disappointments will often accompany us...

...They do not require any involvement in social conflict...

...it is the inevitable outcome—excepting war—of the July speech...

...Comfort was the effect he achieved and for that, art was unnecessary...

...That is the substance of the complacency and self-indulgence of which he complains...

...he hopes to generate activism and willfulness without uncovering disagreement...

...How else to maintain the "credibility" of American courage except to suggest that opportunities for heroism are always in the offing...

...But Kennedy's grimness is more high-minded than zealous...

...Kennedy introduced it into his Inaugural Address and it has been an undertone in many of his public statements since...

...He seeks in unity an alternative to conformity...

...Nor was any of this mere ritual, as it would have been with Eisenhower...

...And Kennedy's style similarly invites imitation and improvement from the Right, while he himself does little to encourage a realistic state of mind in the American public...

...Kennedy's decision was for half-a-resumption of nuclear testing, and it invites comparison with the half-an-invasion he launched against Castro's Cuba...

...Such a policy is hard to come by...

...Any more radical program has been laid aside...

...National purpose" was the gambit essentially of his supporters, despite its adoption by Time-Life...

...Its purpose is to create a cold warrior—frightening but high-minded—with a stern visage and an uplifted face...

...if pursued with any consistency it would undoubtedly lead to critical battles at home...

...He has done this although he surely knows that the cold war cannot profitably or realistically be described in the oldfashioned imagery of warfare...

...At the same time, it is characteristic of the approach of the new administration that terms like "will" and "sacrifice" have so little concrete meaning...

...President Kennedy played his part in this crisis with considerable skill...

...Kennedy's style reflects the official morality of the cold war...

...To ask the American people to pay significantly higher taxes so that greater economic assistance might be given to the underdeveloped countries...

...His tone throughout was not one of disappointment but of nervous belligerency...

...The outcome in practice of these contradictory impulses is the hypocrisy and confusion which followed, for example, the Russian resumption of nuclear testing...

...Hence the exhilarating grimness he has brought to American politics: it is the most direct reaction imaginable to Eisenhower's bland smile...

...it is never possible to deduce from Kennedy's rhetoric his real intentions...

...Nowhere more clearly than in his own person and administration are the limits and dangers of cold war politics revealed...

...The warning is necessary in large part because of Kennedy himself...

...I don't mean to suggest that he is likely to launch a "pre-emptive strike" or that he yearns for the excitement and simplicity of conventional combat...

...It is significant that he chose this speech to elaborate the "new start on civil defense" which he had promised in May (only a few weeks after the Cuban affair...

...nor has anything been said of the "sacrifice" which American business must make if social reform is to be carried out in countries where it has massive investment...

...Kennedy's style, on the contrary, is deliberate and willful...

...It is dangerous because it conceals the fact—which Kennedy himself has recently admitted—that the trend of events in places like Laos, Cuba and Berlin is not dominated or controlled by our national will...

...he is an adherent of the "crisis ideology" of the cold war...

...Kennedy's "crisis ideology" received its finest expression at this moment of national "defeat"—and sounded for a moment startlingly like certain other ideologies: The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history...

...Kennedy thus disarmed his real enemies, without in any way rendering them harmless...

...Conceivable first of all to ourselves, so that the resulting mood (or appearance) of national determination might convince the Russians...

...Domestically, the new questions suggest an end to significant political conflict...

...One constantly catches echoes in his speeches of what has often in the past been the eloquent language of national unity and the will to victory...

...One of the things wrong with the cold war thus far, in Kennedy's view, is the ability of so many people to opt out, to take no active, or conscious, part...

...The choice had nothing intrinsic to do with the Berlin crisis, but it was intimately related to the style of Kennedy's approach to the cold war...

...The image of the leader at home, and now the "credibility" of his intentions abroad—these are the crucial elements of contemporary politics...

...The two were manifestations of the same tension between the tough style and the "twilight" realism of the new administration...

...Hating and fearing the inertia, indeed, the comfortableness, of his public, he is constantly straining for effects of a new sort...

...the Birch Society and the pacifists...

...Similarly, he does not ask us "how are we living...