The Washington Spectator/Burning the Flame for JFK
Ferguson, Andrew
THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR If you drive or take the subway, it's a bit of a hike to the John E Kennedy Gravesite and Eternal Flame in Arlington National Cemetery, which may be why so many come by...
...It's for a little boy," she said emphatically...
...There it pours out a wave of sightseers, wrapped in parkas on a cold autumn afternoon and heavy-laden with shopping bags from the Air and Space Museum and with children leveled into stupefaction by hours of tourism...
...Le Camelot, c'est moi...
...even (dare I say it...
...All the poetry, all the surging rhetorical uplift, is the work—it's readily admitted—of Ted Sorensen and John Kenneth Galbraith and a dozen other skilled hired hands...
...her husband said...
...To close the discussion she turned and stepped down to the tiny plaza where, on a curving granite plinth, are inscribed passages from Kennedy's Inaugural...
...Let ta word go fort' . ." she said...
...as busy as the modern pol...
...across the Tidal Basin, at the Lincoln Memorial, you can read the Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address...
...Has there ever been a more succulent time for a young reporter...
...There—I contend—you have it...
...On a Saturday in late October I visited the grave and found myself next to a couple who, judging by their accents, were fresh off the Amtrak from Chicago...
...THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR If you drive or take the subway, it's a bit of a hike to the John E Kennedy Gravesite and Eternal Flame in Arlington National Cemetery, which may be why so many come by Tourmobile...
...This must be Bobby," he said, solemnly—and, being a Chicagoan, very loudly...
...and, when stripped of the poetry, the purpose—which is all John Kennedy, as the man who spoke the words but didn't write them, could lay rightful claim to—vanishes...
...At his death, Kennedy, like all Presidents and perhaps more than most, was controversial, by no means universally admired, and it is refreshing to have Manchester, in an otherwise predictable hagiography, admit as much...
...This is written before the ceremonies have gotten underway marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kennedy's assassination, but already, in late October, the bookstores are keister-deep in memorial volumes, and the newsmagazines—most notably US...
...It's an old device, and one which John Kennedy used to good effect...
...Washington is a city of many monuments—the temples of our civic religion, as they say in college sociology class...
...One answer, which of course isn't really an answer, is that the question itself has faded into irrelevance...
...Likewise, a chapter of Life in Camelot (Little, Brown, $40.00) is boldly entitled "Camelot Had Its Bad Moments...
...So where, on this Virginia hillside exposed to the wind and the weather, is the man...
...Back home, meanwhile, the President couldn't pry his legislation loose from Congress with a crowbar...
...But to the keepers of the Kennedy flame—well, here's Arthur Schlesinger, who as a historian has specialized in the unfalsifiable assertion: "Kennedy would have beaten Goldwater by an even bigger margin than Johnson and would have picked up even more seats in the House of Representatives...
...So far there have been few references to the facts which might cast light on the more obscure regions of JFK's character: that he was often moved by a reckless and inexhaustible goatishness, for example ("I need it at least once a day," he reportedly told a colleague), or that he accepted (with well-deserved modesty) great acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize for writing a book, Profiles in Courage, which he didn't write Just how obscure such facts remain in the national consciousness was indicated by a Harris poll in the early eighties, in which Kennedy was rated first among the last nine Presidents in "setting high moral standards" for the country...
...Sidey asks...
...Eight minutes...
...And those words reveal today in their fitting memorials the shape of the minds of the men who wrote them, in a studied blending of poetry and purpose...
...Really...
...Threading its way through the Washington area, from the Library of Congress to Mount Vernon with all the usual stops along the way, the Tour-mobile pulls right up to the Kennedy grave ("Authorized by the Department of the Interior" is the Tourmobile motto...
...Life in Camelot contains some revealing quotes in this regard from Time magazine's Hugh Sidey, widely billed as "Jack Kennedy's favorite reporter," a billing not at all difficult to understand...
...The man looked at the marker for Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who lived for two days during August 1963...
...William Manchester, in his recently republished contribution to the Kennedy myth, One Brief Shining Moment (Little, Brown, $16.95), writes: "When Jackie asked you [among the memoir's many unattractive features is that the author refers to himself only in the second-person] to write an account of the President's last days and his funeral, with the understanding that it could not be published for another three years, your literary agent, who was rightly regarded as the best in his craft, predicted that by then the public would have lost interest in Jack...
...The 'mingling of journalism with power and wealth . . . it was a golden time for scribes...
...AF 56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988...
...Beautiful words, and not one of them John Kennedy's, alas...
...At the Jefferson Memorial you can read the Declaration of Independence and the Statutes of Virginia for Religious Freedom...
...Of course he could not have anticipated the power that those he flattered—the journalists, the academics, the artists—would eventually assume...
...And, lastly, into the stratosphere with PBS's Robert MacNeil, editor of The Way We Were The Year Kennedy was Shot (Carroll & Graf, $39.95): "His life and death bore the marks that have always turned heroes into legends and legends into myths—stories so powerful that they flow eventually into the underground river of human consciousness...
...How does a view so ahistorical and far-fetched—so kitschy—gain common currency among grown men...
...It's for a little boy who died...
...But when they had something important to say they took pen and paper and went to work...
...Which accounts for the eeriness at the Kennedy memorial, and in the high-toned words carved in that curve of granite...
...and rolls back to the Tour-mobile where it pours through the doors that fold shut, and in a cloud of diesel fumes is gone...
...And: "Now ta trumpet summons us again . . ." When she finally finished-Jin ta long history of ta worl' only a few generations have been granted ta role of defendin' freedom in its hour of maximum danger"—she heaved a deep sigh...
...In a quiet, out-of-the-way alcove at the National Cathedral, you unexpectedly find engraved Lincoln's incomparable Farewell Address at Springfield...
...Much moved, she said: "Such beautiful words...
...I think it's for Bobby...
...John Lennon, another pop icon inflated, in death, beyond all reasonable proportion, once told a friend, "If you want a good biography when you're dead, pick your biographer and be nice to him while you're alive...
...So now, when they celebrate Camelot, they celebrate themselves...
...Such a raising-up would have been hard to predict twenty-five years ago...
...the tears they cry are for their own "golden time," surely not the country's...
...Being a Chicagoan myself, I wasn't surprised when she insisted on reading each passage aloud, in a voice straight from Damen Avenue...
...He talked to us, listened to us, honored us, ridiculed us, got angry with us, played with us, laughed with us, corrected us and all the time lifted our trade to new heights of respect and importance...
...At the flame there are three markers: one for the President and two for Kennedy children who preceded their father in death...
...And the late Teddy White: "If he had gone on till 1968 it might have been . . . one of the three most memorable administrations in American history...
...When the encomiums swell to tidal levels on this sad anniversary, as they certainly will from Sorensen and Galbraith and MacNeil and Manchester and the rest of the best and the brightest, we should remember that John Kennedy, a graceful and witty man if nothing else, deserves more, and less...
...Busy men both, Jefferson and Lincoln...
...The nostalgia of a clique has been nationalized...
...No," his wife answered, in a half-shout...
...News & World Report—have begun to weigh in with their lugubrious reflections...
...At Vienna, after all, Khrushchev ate Jack for breakfast and then built the Berlin Wall to work off the calories...
...Are you sure...
...the Tourmobile guide calls—if you want to see everything there's a limit on somber reflection—and the wave rolls out and up the slate walkways to the flame where it crests in silence and recedes at last---Eight minutes...
...The tubby premier placed missiles in Cuba and then extracted from Kennedy a guarantee of Fidel's sovereignty as the price for removing them...
Vol. 21 • December 1988 • No. 12
