Youth and the 'Kennedy Effect':
PACE, ERIC DWICHT
Youth and the 'Kennedy Effect' By Eric Dwight Pace Washington THE ONLY really splendid elements in John F. Kennedy's Inauguration were his speech and Jacqueline Kennedy's saucer-eyed good...
...Young people, after all, are impressed by the quality they tend to lack the most: poise...
...It was like watching a gathering of the founders of the Weimar Republic...
...Kennedy's speech was strong, sensible and beautifully honed...
...The difference makes for Stevenson's weakness and Kennedy's strength...
...When he was lured to New Haven in the fall of 1956, the Yalies threw toilet paper at him...
...Even as they winced in the icy wind, their enthusiasm was obvious—and deeply significant for the success of the Kennedy Administration...
...His admiration was typical...
...Their main concern is more than the full garage and the ironclad pension plan...
...I see him, I see him...
...It was an epic afternoon, particularly for the thousands of young people in the audience...
...Then, at the head of the parade, he strutted some of his means: the shrewd men he picked for the Cabinet...
...His appeal to young people lies in the fact that he seems more able than any other man around to cope with the dangers that are their deepest concern...
...Youth and the 'Kennedy Effect' By Eric Dwight Pace Washington THE ONLY really splendid elements in John F. Kennedy's Inauguration were his speech and Jacqueline Kennedy's saucer-eyed good looks...
...Present, too, were the "jumpers," those shoals of ecstatic girls whose leaping and screaming delighted reporters during the campaign...
...In an age of epidemic ineptness, young people find "eptness" impressive—and inspiring...
...The late Senator Robert Taft, for instance, affected young audiences like a caricature preacher out of Mark Twain...
...Kennedy does not stir young people because he is "young" himself...
...As any college senior will tell you, Kennedy is middle-aged, not young...
...The myth of his age was fathered by the news analysts...
...The Marine Band sounded tinny, the bunting looked pale against the winter sky, and the parade floats chugged down Pennsylvania Avenue in a pageant of unrelieved poor taste...
...He has all the appurtenances of a prosperous middle age: houses, cars, servants, an incipient dewlap...
...Kennedy's speech was a marvelous exegesis of inspiring ends...
...Tammany had the potent means...
...Thomas Finletter, Anthony Akers and Herbert Lehman greeted their friends and responded rationally and civilly as the good news mounted in the early hours: They shook hands all around...
...But the President and his lady, between them, provided far more than enough Truth and Beauty to make it worth having your feet go numb in the snow on Capitol Hill...
...Kennedy, on the other hand, is the Big Man On Campus blown up to larger than life size...
...It was the same way at the Inauguration...
...The rest, unfortunately, was well-intended dross...
...Stewart Udall hunched his big shoulders in the cold...
...The public usually has to make a sort of guns-or-butter choice...
...Of the 20,000 onlookers at the actual ceremony, about a fourth were within five years, either way, of 25...
...Oh," her friend squealed as she spotted him, "I could die...
...Dean Rusk was solemn, Douglas Dillon benign...
...The Reform leaders had worthy ends...
...Kennedy's great strength is that he seems to have the best of both these worlds...
...But wisdom and ruthless administrative ability are rarely combined in sufficient doses in a single person...
...He may be young enough to be Eisenhower's son, but he is old enough to be a grandfather himself...
...At a moment when everyone else was shivering in the wind, embarrassed by Robert Frost's embarrassment, feeling cynical after the long prayers, Kennedy stood up, coatless and perfectly at ease, and firmly called on Americans to surpass themselves...
...His ideas sound fresh and forceful—the Peace Corps proposal, for instance—but in their carefully controlled phrasing they have a more elderly ring about them than, say, Stevenson's pronouncements in '52 and '56...
...Kennedy also stirred the more rational young people in his audience...
...I'd hate to mess with him," said a young man in a Chesterfield in an awed tone...
...Over the past year I have talked to a good many young people on campuses, in newsrooms and in their homes, from Maine to Texas...
...Even in deepest New Hampshire, they squirmed away in droves...
...But who, in this country, roots for the editor of the campus literary magazine...
...Eric Dwight Pace, who covered the Kennedy Inaugural as a reporter for Life magazine, is a member of the generation he writes about here, having graduated from Yale in 1957...
...Both deserved respect, but neither inspired confidence...
...Nor does Kennedy's impact on youth come from "young-sounding" ideas...
...But I had the feeling that, for all their sagacity, their grip on events was slack...
...There were undergraduates in ski parkas, young couples, pretty coeds and secretaries from offices on the Hill...
...Bobby Kennedy stood up and waved...
...Adlai Stevenson, of course, could fire the minds of young people who were on his side, but he was weak in impressing the skeptical...
...He jotted and totted figures, gave quick orders and smiled at the reporters crouched at his feet like hunting hounds...
...If this country really is run by its womenfolk, then it is off with a running start toward the New Frontier...
...That is why conservative undergraduates—the vast majority—are deaf to the bugles of the cold war...
...Anyone who has ever sat in a college auditorium at commencement knows how young men react to speakers they do not absolutely respect...
...But when Kennedy spoke, there was silence, except for the applause, the chorus of yesses, and once when a knot of undergraduates at the fringe of the Inaugural crowd starting chanting "Go, Go, Go...
...Their hysteria may seem silly, but it is the same emotion that made the women of La Plata sell their jewelry to buy cannon for San Martin, and it is a very considerable force at that...
...That, in the last analysis, is why the young men cheered "Go, Go, Go...
...a bright-eyed blonde yelled beside me on the Pennsylvania Avenue curb when Kennedy's car was still blocks away...
...To the great mass of politically inert young people Stevenson's wit, emotion and slightly mannered charm made him seem like a superannuated College Liberal, the kind of erratic fellow who tries to sell you a subscription to the campus literary magazine...
...Election night in New York City, for example, symbolized these two alternatives: At the Hotel Astor, the wise gentlemen of the Democratic Reform movement were dining together...
...This Kennedy Effect on young people is much more than the respectful enthusiasm due any celebrity...
...When he asked the audience to help forge his "grand and global alliance," even pudgy bureaucrats shouted "Yes...
...During the campaign his manner at times was like the headmaster of a large, democratic boarding school on the morning of the big game...
...on Inauguration Day...
...Basically, they want to maximize the odds that they will not have to rush off to die in a new war, and that their children will not be born twisted by fallout from H-bombs...
...During the campaign his arch modesty and the superb control of even his most offhand (public) remarks made him seem at times as smug as the fraternity rushee whose father endowed the frat house...
...This shatterproof self-assurance goes a long way to explain his impact on youth...
...But the Kennedy Effect stems from more than just the confidence his manner inspires...
...There are chuckles, coughs, wagging heads...
...Meanwhile, at the Tammany party, Carmine De Sapio was enthroned like a Venetian doge...
...So, when all is said and done, enlightened competence is what young people want in a politician: the skill to maximize those odds of survival...
Vol. 44 • January 1961 • No. 5
