The Kennedy Legacy-Four Articles
MEYER, HANS J. MORGENTHAU / REINHOLD NIEBUHR / GEORGE E. HERMAN / HOWARD NEMEROV / KARL E.
The Kennedy Legacy - Four Articles Significance in History By Hans J. Morgenthau While it is obviously premature to evaluate the historic contribution of the Kennedy Administration, it...
...But when the vital votes were in, he lost as often as he won...
...Miscalculation is bound to be fatal either to the interests of the nation concerned if it yields to the bluff, or to its existence if it stands up to a nuclear threat that is not a bluff...
...Sorrow is easy, America, we are a people Quick to the handkerchief...
...Maybe our tears can be Impounded behind a dam and used to turn the wheels Of some concern whose wastes will more pollute the waters...
...it is fair to say He died because of all the people, of his party And of the party opposed...
...At the outset, it ought to be said that Johnson is a politician to the tip of his boots, a seasoned craftsman capable of being a big man...
...If we fretted at his failures and reproached him for his excessive caution, it was because he seemed more a brother than father, and because we judged him in terms of his capacity for greater things...
...On the international scene, it became aware of novel problems, and when it came to an end it was still groping to find solutions to them...
...Yet the American President is just such a symbol, despite the fact that he is the leader of a political party...
...He can do for his region what his predecessor did for his religion...
...The three pivotal facts about President Johnson are that he is a product of the South, the Senate and the stream of Populism that forms one part of the Democratic party's tradition...
...It is too early to fix President Kennedy's place in history because so much of what he initiated was left for others to complete...
...To politics as foolish as intemperate...
...Another man, having as yet much life to live...
...History is likely to associate the Kennedy Administration with seven developments, four domestic and three international: the intellectual as public servant, governmental concern for culture, the responsibility of the Executive Branch for civil rights, permanent unemployment, the demonstrated implausibility of nuclear threats, the disintegration of the Atlantic Alliance, the crisis of foreign aid...
...he said, slowly, he did not agree with Professor Rossiter...
...Was he, as some claim, more concerned with political style than content...
...An independent nuclear deterrent for France and eventually for Europe was de Gaulle's answer to this dilemma, an answer which conjures up the specter of the uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear weapons...
...nor can it afford to stand up to a threat that turns out not to be a bluff...
...Thus in the successive Berlin crises and the Cuban crisis of October 1962, the U.S...
...THE MORNING AFTER November 23, 1963 As though a diamond were to split apart and show Its central core was soft with pus that all the glitter Could not at last contain, could not at last disguise Or keep from stinking, is that how it is with us...
...I once confronted President Kennedy with a quotation from Clinton Rossiter, to the effect that no American President could hope to be considered great by future generations unless in his time he was widely accused of trying to subvert the Constitution...
...Deterrence has thus far worked only because there has remained in the minds of both sides a doubt as to whether the other side was really bluffing...
...His was one of the readiest wits in this sometimes brilliantly witty community, and he sharpened his mind on the highly articulate people with whom he surrounded himself...
...Finally, the Kennedy Administration developed a new conception of foreign aid which found its most persuasive formulation in the philosophy of the Alliance for Progress...
...secondly, Johnson comes to his office at a critical time for his party-a national election is less than a year away...
...This style might be best analyzed by separating the royal from the political functions of the American Presidency...
...Everyone in Congress knew that voting against President Kennedy was anything but fatal-some of his best friends did it, and they remained among his best friends...
...He is no stranger to Washington...
...He was, in fact, a superb political creature, a man who combined political shrewdness-even ruthlessness -with a statesmanlike courage and prudence...
...The candidacies of Adlai Stevenson were a first indication of a change in that popular attitude, as his defeats were perhaps an indication of its persistence...
...His ideological background derives from the agrarian Populism of the Southin exact counterpoint to Kennedy's urban...
...As a matter of simple self-survival, the Democratic majority in Congress will most probably fall behind a new President in desperate need of a record to run on in 1964...
...Where there are the most reservations is the broad field of foreign affairs...
...In chains, in filth...
...First, every new President has a honeymoon period in which he can expect national assent...
...The important thing was to compete hard, to compete to win...
...His strengths and weaknesses are far better known here than were those of Harry S. Truman in 1945...
...Royalty also was expressed in White House social events, to which leaders from the world of the arts and sciences, and not only of big business, were summoned to be entertained by such internationally renowned artists as Pablo Casals...
...The princes and presidents lent pomp to the final rites and the demeanor of his widow was, as one reporter wrote, like that of a queen in classic tragedy...
...It is irrelevant for the purposes of this account, which does not seek to evaluate the merits of persons and policies but rather to point up the great historic changes associated with the Kennedy Administration, that this concern for civil rights was imposed upon the Kennedy Administration by a spontaneous popular initiative...
...Of these policies, two deserve special mention, and the first and most important is his stand on civil rights...
...Yet John was considered the family dreamer...
...In speeches and in private conversation, he continually measured himself against the shadows of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...Our deathy phantasies about "Defense" and that "Security" that could not, when the moment came, Secure the life of the one man who stood for us...
...at the same time, he took the world to the precipice of a war but followed his unexampled personal triumph by deeds intended to eliminate the risk of a holocaust through madness or miscalculation...
...internationally, attempts at reorientation without conclusive results...
...He became, possibly in consequence, intellectual and bookish, at least for a Kennedy...
...More than a change of Administrations, it was a change of generations, a change of outlook-and most immediately apparent, a change of style...
...They should have persuaded us that in effect we have an elected monarch more powerful than the symbolic heads of constitutional monarchies...
...It consisted of a crisp, quick and inquiring intelligence...
...The people elevated him...
...His ideal of government seemed to be half academy, half precinctheadquarters...
...In the area of economic welfare, the Kennedy Administration tried to come to terms with a new kind of unemployment, which appeared impervious even to prolonged prosperity...
...Perhaps it was begun by the Supreme Court decision of a decade ago...
...What will be required is a radical transformation of our economic thinking, more radical than was the Keynesian departure from classical economics...
...Maybe our tears will poison all the Russians...
...The Kennedy children were thus brought up with the feeling that they were almost "in," that the goal was in sight, that they needed only that extra bit of effort to make the difference...
...Since his renomination next year is considered certain...
...But the President himself showed little strain...
...The truth behind this cruel comment is that John F. Kennedy was one of the fastest moving and fastest thinking persons ever to hold the Presidency...
...Until one stood with them, it was impossible fully to grasp what President Kennedy meant to the generation for which he spoke...
...Ambassador Kennedy encouraged this constant honing of mind on mind within his family practically up to the moment that his son became President of the United States...
...His style and bravura were brilliant, though their effect still awaits final judgment...
...What Kennedy did for the arts he has also done for civil rights...
...It may therefore be prudent to begin with the non-political aspects of the Kennedy reign-namely, its style...
...But confronted with the revolt, Kennedy did not vacillate or temporize...
...Some of the experience of his formative years is well known-the period when his father was Ambassador to the Court of Saint James, his student days at the London School of Economics and at Harvard, his hitch in the Navy...
...Presidents would be known, he believed, by what they accomplished, what they got through Congress...
...Sorrow, America, sorrow has always been Easy for us because we love ourselves so well, And it may be we love ourselves so well because We're always able to dredge up the extra tear In favor of survival, after we have made The great refusals that leave survivors blind with grief...
...I would note in passing what I pointed out in this magazine at the beginning of the Kennedy Administration (NL, July 3, 1963): that politics has its own standards of excellence and that intellectuals, especially on the level of policy making, are not a priori better qualified to manage public affairs than businessmen...
...By virtue of television, and his superb performance at press conferences, he became in life an intensely personal figure to millions...
...His identity as a Southerner is at once an asset and liability-indeed, during his campaign for the Presidential nomination in 1960 Johnson vainly tried to describe himself as a Westerner...
...This resulted in a blend of grace and toughness...
...When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was sworn in, he appeared to fulfill Robert Frost's augury that an age of poetry and power was commencing in Washington...
...There was no premonition of tragedy, but rather a sense of rebirth in a capital mantled in beauty as the oldest President yielded power to the youngest man ever elected Chief Executive of the United States...
...Our stingy computation of the overcost Of charity, or kindness, or common honesty...
...This combination is what gave Kennedy his unique prestige not only in America but in the world, although he was the youngest of our Presidents and had less than three brief years to establish his personal authority...
...The magnitude of the task which would have faced the Kennedy Administration, and will face its successor, is illuminated by the fact that the Keynesian measures it proposed (probably obsolescent), must overcome powerful and widespread opposition to their allegedly revolutionary nature...
...Rose Kennedy turned to the friend and, with a sort of desperation, said: "Tell me, when are the nice people of Boston going to accept us...
...Otherwise you can wait while the world collapses...
...In the nuclear age, the very purpose of threat and counterthreat is to prevent the test of actual performance from taking place...
...But every politician responds to the pressures around him, and as Chief Executive of the United States Johnson has been vaulted to an eminence that changes the landscape around him...
...The second decision, to enter into a limited test-ban agreement with the Soviet Union, established his position throughout the world as a statesman who was fully aware that two giants were wrestling with each other on the edge of art abyss, and that no conventional kind of anti-Communism could obscure the common danger of this situation...
...But what made the funeral unbearably moving was the uncounted tens of thousands of young people who came from afar, as if by invisible command, to Washington...
...Three reasons can be advanced to support this hope...
...One seldom found any two reporters agreeing about John F. Kennedy while he was alive...
...Domestically, we have witnessed the expansion of the public sphere...
...Ironically, he was far less successful with the problems that came up in quieter times...
...Opera and theater still flourish in the country according to consumer response and not because of their intrinsic quality, which docs not necessarily coincide with the consumer's judgment and, hence, needs support from independent private or public sources...
...IT is indicative of the character of the historic era in which we live that the quandary which beset the Kennedy Administration in the economic sphere was duplicated in international relations...
...President Kennedy's domestic policy contained too many items to mention, but all of them dealt with the responsibility of government for the general welfare of the people in a rapidly accelerating technical society...
...Moreover, as Kennedy found, the intractable realities of the East-West stalemate, of ideological competition in poorer nations, and of coalition diplomacy all tend to restrict the choices open to any American President...
...The historic fact remains that under Kennedy the Executive Branch of the Federal government transformed itself from a mildly interested bystander into an active proponent and champion of civil rights...
...Kennedy was a man with a passion for erudite quotations who at the same time was not unwilling to twist an arm where it would further his purposes...
...He was naturally a political animal, a man who could hardly talk to a friend without planting some seed for future political harvest...
...The brutal drama of the assassination has given the President a claim to greatness that was still only a promise while he breathed...
...The "nice" golf club at Palm Beach would not accept Joseph P. Kennedy for membership...
...A CURIOUS MIXTURE The Elusive J.F.K...
...The special pathos of his death is that he seemed on the verge of broadening his commitment...
...Here, therefore, was another dilemma which the Kennedy Administration brought to the fore but could not transcend...
...in death he leaves a mournful void...
...They isolated the core of the crisis...
...Rich yet ambitious, honorable even in The ways of power, one elected by the people To express the intricacies of their will through tangled paths In the mechanical jungle of this world, has died Of his election...
...Interestingly, some of the very journalists who now extol his achievements only a few weeks ago were speculating on the reasons why his program was bogged down in Congress...
...THE issue of counterforce strategy has fortunately remained in the realm of theoretical planning, but the nuclear dilemma has had a destructive impact upon political reality in that it has called into question the survival of the Atlantic Alliance...
...Inside the family the Kennedy children found friendliness, but friendliness mixed with constant competition...
...No nation can afford to yield to a threat of nuclear war that is only a bluff...
...Or, to put it the other way around, both sides were able to give the threat of nuclear war at least a certain measure of plausibility...
...After the second hem, and the third haw," the man said, "John Kennedy will have fired him in exasperation...
...The tax cut was also in difficulty because the ineffable Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee...
...Despised and beaten for the color of their skins...
...That problem consists in the coordination of the political interests of all concerned to such an extent that no member of the Alliance would want to use nuclear weapons for a purpose for which all the other members of the Alliance would not want to use them, too...
...On September 22, 1961, he gave a farewell breakfast for the Congressional leaders of both parties, at which he dazzled the Republicans...
...Hans J. Morgenthau, a longtime contributor, is Albert Michaelxon Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and Modern History at the University of Chicago...
...In this area, his background will certainly not be a handicap...
...As in the Shakespearian formula, the elements were surely mixed in him...
...The answer to this riddle may be that President Kennedy could charm men, but not move them...
...And the Congress, he added, had great blocking power, power which first became painfully evident when one took up residence on Pennsylvania Avenue...
...What had he been doing lately to subvert the Constitution?, I asked, not altogether facetiously...
...The exercise of this royal function was not altogether popular in some parts of the nation...
...What was wrong was the a priori assumption in favor of businessmen and professional politicians and against intellectuals...
...Our will, I mean, to money and armor more than all...
...Throughout Kennedy's youth his family felt itself to be on the outside...
...In foreign policy, where the American Presidency has reached heights of authority unimagined by our Founding Fathers, his stature was strikingly revealed in two complementary decisions...
...He pointed out that Beam, though experienced, wise and wellsuited for the job, was a slow talker who liked to pause for reflection and hem-and-haw while putting his thoughts in order...
...Johnson's utterances on foreign policy have been orthodox and uninspired-set pieces laden with Cold War clichés...
...Our will to hatred and the arrogance of wealth...
...This preoccupation with style will surely be mong the questions endlessly argued once the emotions surrounding the President's tragic death have worn themselves out...
...Then his preoccupation with style re-asserted itself, and he put these thoughts in more positive fashion, emphasizing the need for cooperation to push the nation forward to get the country moving again...
...The President and his staff never functioned more smoothly than in the second Cuban encounter, the missile crisis of October 1962...
...But even more ironic, the murder of this gifted man may make it possible for his far less imposing successor to approach unexpected greatness by carrying out the Kennedy program...
...He will probably be more liberal as President than he was as Senator, especially since he will be under more pressure from the Left than President Kennedy was...
...Was the Address itself merely a triumph of style without deep conviction behind it...
...The circumstances of his death were ironic enough-a sniper's bullet at high noon, fired by a madman, brought down a President who sought to make sanity and realism the core of his political philosophy...
...He struggled to whip up enthusiasm in the country for his legislative program, then publicly complained that the people would not give him the support they once gave FDR because the issues were too complex for them to appreciate what he was trying to do...
...If a man, like a pearl, is made up of the successive layers of his life and experience, then John F. Kennedy's background provides the foundation for the particular shine of his days in the White House...
...Joseph P. Kennedy was tough and felt that his children would someday have need of toughness, too...
...During his nearly three years as Vice-President, Lyndon Baines Johnson remained a stranger to much of the world...
...But, as we know, Congress was far from giving him what he wanted...
...The cause for which he stood remains in doubt, and the last page of his biography must be written with what Virgil called the tears of things...
...They were the wrong kind of Irish...
...The Kennedy Administration is, then, marked by a transitional quality both at home and abroad...
...Especially in its uppermiddle layers, his Administration was dominated by professors and professional PhD's...
...And they did this knowing that the Democratic party has its traditional power in the South, and that Southerners dominate the majority of Congressional committees...
...Sorrow, America, and while you sorrow, think...
...Pressing the money from the chambers of its heart...
...Moreover, historical perspective is lacking for such a task, and the unfinished state of many of the various projects initiated by the slain President makes it doubly hard to give a reasonably objective judgment upon a career tragically cut off by an assassin's bullet...
...He fostered competition among them on every level: sports, games, intellectual fireworks, anything...
...This effort to weigh the Administration of President Kennedy has, I see, turned into a simple eulogy, despite my own best efforts to be "objective...
...At this point, the mechanics of mutual deterrence raise a most serious political dilemma...
...He opened the White House to anybody who could impart a ferment and his good humor as a host was legend...
...To Americans like myself who were near his age, he renewed our pride in our country and gave a dignity to the political calling...
...It is this wrong that Kennedy righted...
...ROYALTY AND POLITICS A Tentative Assessment By Reinhold Niebuhr IT is a hazardous task to essay the significance of an Administration while the whole nation is still in grief over the tragic death of a gifted young leader...
...But what of the emotional climate in which he lived...
...While conventional force operates psychologically through the intermediary of actual physical employment, nuclear force has a psychological function pure and simple...
...This philosophy tries to connect foreign aid with the political interests of the United States, on the one hand, and the demonstrated capacity of the recipient countries for economic development, on the other...
...Such people compelling generals and, more particularly, admirals to do what they did not want to dohere was certainly something new in military administration...
...But the primary function of nuclear force lies in making its physical application superfluous by deterring the prospective opponent from using it...
...And they embarked on a series of steps designed to show their own determination not to back down, as well as to leave open a path for a graceful Soviet retreat...
...The public powers in the United States, in contrast to their contemporaries and predecessors throughout Western civilization, have acted by and large as though culture were no more their concern today than was economics 30 years ago...
...It is conceivable that as a native Southerner he can do more to heal the sickness of Dixie than could a Catholic from Boston, whose very manner was anathema to the South...
...As though the nation's will, So evenly divided and balanced as to be Near paralyzed, as in a catatonic state, Had suddenly expressed itself as trigger-happy...
...But the poetry is now hushed, and the promise of power wisely used is now an unfinished chapter in a volume entitled, 'Let Us Begin . . .' None of us suspected that in retrospect the Inaugural snow would seem as a shroud...
...I have been told that a survey shows PhD's to have a superior chance of becoming administrative assistants of members of Congress...
...he may do better...
...So soon afterwards, how can one pick up the fragments and make of them a meaningful pattern...
...In fact, he had an impatience, almost a contempt, for those who moved slowly in government...
...they were an undeniable fact of Washington life...
...For there is no way of overcoming the immensity of nuclear destruction, which is out of all proportion to the ends sought and, hence, is irrational...
...And yet, were his politics successful...
...It was indeed an extraordinary and awe-inspiring spectacle to see the Department of Defense, over which a succession of businessmen had presided in hapless ineffectiveness, transformed by a group of young intellectuals...
...In the '60s, it began to extend that responsibility to culture and civil rights...
...When they wanted a report on a crucial problem, they did not want to wait a week-they wanted it fast...
...Karl E. Meyer is a member of the editorial board of the Washington Post and Washington correspondent for the British New Statesman, where this article also appears...
...They coolly and quietly considered all the alternatives...
...Though he abhors political labels, his place in the spectrum is to the Left of Center on many domestic issues...
...He and his brother, the Attorney General, placed the full power of the Federal government on the side of the Negroes in their effort to extricate themselves from the ghettos of racial injustice...
...He was not a man given to easy commitments, but before his death he embarked on two major ventures: For the first time in this century, he placed the power and might of his office behind a dispossessed race whose second-class status demeaned all citizens...
...It made a gesture toward arms control in the partial test-ban treaty...
...In the '30s, the Federal government assumed responsibility for the economic welfare of the nation...
...While the Kennedy Administration demonstrated the dilemma of nuclear forces, it was unable to devise policies capable of transcending the dilemma...
...It will do no good To say the man who pulled the trigger was insane Or Communist-inspired...
...Nevertheless, his strong stand on civil rights imperilled his legislative program in Congress...
...And, product of these, our will to be indifferent To sufferings that enduring wrong permissively Sustains among our own, excluded and kept poor...
...It proposed to attack this problem with the Keynesian methods of increasing purchasing power...
...He was a curious mixture of pride and self-deprecation, of ringing challenge and sour complaint, of enormous personal charm and a chilly New England restraint which tended to keep people at arm's length...
...Now, citizen, consider...
...He passionately believed he must get the country moving, and yet was unwilling to take totally new directions or add exotic fuels...
...The political program elaborated by the young President was the inevitable fruit of his style...
...On the one hand, the nations of Europe cannot be absolutely sure that the United States is willing to commit suicide on behalf of their interests...
...Yet under the threat of imminent collapse or communization they claimed and received foreign aid just the same...
...He did not believe Presidents would be considered by the single criterion of what they had done to concentrate power in their own hands...
...As long as this belief exists, it is irrelevant whether or not the reality corresponds to it...
...Our answer has been a multilateral sea-borne nuclear force, a military monstrosity and a political evasion...
...Kennedy's style marked him as a political prodigy...
...Conventional force is an instrument for breaking the will of the opponent either through successful defense or attack...
...If the second conclusion is correct, it is permissible to hope that President Kennedy's otherwise senseless death may become meaningful in the light of history by furnishing the inspiration needed for completing his unfinished tasks...
...But two of his achievements seem likely to take root...
...He was, in short, the kind of man who could retire to some quiet corner and write his moving Inaugural Address, and then one year later to the day deliver a hilarious parody of that same speech to a group of the Democratic party faithful at a fund-raising dinner...
...The "nice" people of Boston would not have the self-made millionaire and his wife, the daughter of Mayor Fitzgerald, in their homes...
...The issue is a logical extension of the nuclear dilemma...
...Thus we took a decisive step away from that naive philosophy which equated foreign aid with economic development, economic development with social stability, social stability with democracy, and democracy with a peaceful foreign policy...
...Something else, however, is irretrievably lost-the brilliance of his presence, the glow of his style...
...The extension of the public power, which was at its most spectacular during the period of the NewDeal, was continued by the Kennedy Administration...
...To smugness and expediency and want of charm...
...The nature of this condition, it will be observed, is political rather than military, for what is essential is the appearance of possessing the ability and resolution to make good threat and counterthreat, not the reality of such possession...
...Let the reader decide whether this judgment merely proves that partisan commitments color all judgments of contemporary leaders...
...he probably did not even anticipate it...
...It is an asset because his roots in Texas (which was a Confederate state) may tend to neutralize Southern attacks...
...The arts have been flourishing in America through private initiative, and it is only our cultural inferiority complex vis-a-vis Europe which has made us unaware of the original and vital force of our artistic life...
...His daring was great, his innovations small and cautious...
...On the other hand, these nations are not willing to commit suicide for the interests of the United States...
...And savagely deprived of even the little learning Our universities afford-all this because Their ancestors were haled to us in prison-holds...
...Very well, so be it...
...and the USSR tried to convince each other that they were irrational enough to incur their own destruction by supporting their respective positions with nuclear violence, assuming at the same time that the other side would be rational enough not to provoke such an irrational reaction...
...Yet-and here is the dilemma-a nation cannot determine with certainty when the other side is bluffing without the test of actual performance, a test which it is the very purpose of mutual deterrence to avoid...
...And his early maturity and Navy years reinforced the mixture in him...
...In this way his death would crown the work of his life not only in the moral imagination of the nation, but in the political fruits of his Administration...
...The second important item in President Kennedy's domestic program was the proposal for a massive tax cut to stimulate the economy...
...This last effort, the so-called counterforce strategy aimed at military objectives rather than industrial and population centers, is no less certainly doomed to failure than were its predecessors, such as the "clean bomb" or tactical nuclear war...
...Does that death express our will...
...But as a Southerner, the President may be unavoidably identified with the racial barbarisms of his region...
...In other words, the mechanics of mutual deterrence require an element of bluff, either real or suspect...
...He is also a child of the Senate and his whole outlook is colored by his years as a legislator...
...It was a historic innovation for Kennedy not only to pay his personal respects to the arts but also to make a beginning in supporting them through the instrumentalities of the Federal government...
...In Cuba, Kennedy brought into the missile age what in Korea President Truman had established in the age of conventional warfare: the concept of setting a goal of victory within the range of what would be tolerable to the enemy, publishing that goal, and allowing the enemy to opt for it rather than for costlier alternatives...
...It is the historic merit of Kennedy to have made the intellectual respectable as a manager of national affairs...
...it is in the effectiveness of its physical application that its primary function lies...
...The Kennedy Legacy - Four Articles Significance in History By Hans J. Morgenthau While it is obviously premature to evaluate the historic contribution of the Kennedy Administration, it is not too early to point to its historic significance...
...Kennedy's passion for restoring historical memorabilia to the White House, making it a kind of shrine of patriotic piety...
...In fact, Lyndon Johnson may not only do no worse than President Kennedy...
...The "long-haired professor," the "egg-head," the impractical fellow "who never met a payroll" might be appreciated privately as a virtuoso or enjoyed as highbrow entertainment, but certainly the management of public affairs was too serious a business to be left to such people...
...The Kennedy style was indeed royal in its emphasis on historical continuity, and in Mrs...
...The appearance of possessing both the ability and the resolution to make good threat and counterthreat becomes, then, of paramount importance as a condition for the success of mutual deterrence...
...Obviously, without his rigorous action in countering the peril of Communist power in Cuba, even a small step to lessen the tensions of the Cold War would not have been possible...
...Still, his charm and especially his flashing wit cannot be easily dismissed...
...For the American people have never been fully conscious of the fact that our system of non-parliamentary democracy does not obviate the necessity of having a living symbol of the nation's identity and unity, a symbol furnished in many European democracies by a constitutional, and generally powerless, monarch...
...This approach was heightened by Kennedy's unemotional presentation of the decisions he had reached, a characteristic which gave his televised press conferences their own individual aura and made his style into something of an art form...
...But they are not less qualified either...
...Surely the Kennedy style was a novelty, particularly after the Eisenhower years with their aura of decent bourgeois respectability and amiable but uncomprehending goodwill...
...As Johnson rose in the Senate hierarchy, he shifted to tne middle-and on some issues, notably tax privileges for the oil plutocracy, he was solidly with the Right...
...Perhaps history will see the significance of this era of economic thinking and practice as that of a dual backwardness: the backwardness of a public opinion which has not yet assimilated the Keynesian revolution, and the backwardness of a government which tries to apply Keynesian methods to a situation which has left the Keynesian model behind...
...In foreign policy, the Kennedy Administration at least made a start at coping with the fact that we have been living for a decade in a world whose objective conditions have outpaced our traditional modes of thought and action...
...One is inclined to obey the dictum of the old Latin proverb, "About the dead speak nothing but good," in which case even a sincere appreciation might sink into the dimension of banal and uncritical eulogy...
...Johnson is in a position to nullify once and for all a demeaning "law" of eligibility in American politicsthat no Southerner may head a national ticket...
...wealthy and powerful though his father had grown, they were still struggling to get in...
...Add to this a third reason: the way in which Johnson succeeded to the office...
...This contradiction between tradition and reality had to be faced in three fields: nuclear war, alliances, and foreign aid...
...Did he think the magnificent speech worth more than the good fight, the skillfully phrased message to Congress more important than the follow-up campaign to turn the striking phrases into useful legislation...
...But the new philosophy of foreign aid came up against intractable political conditions in the recipient countries...
...Few deny his efficacy as Majority Leader, though his manipulative approach irritated liberals...
...The United States and the Soviet Union have continued to threaten each other with nuclear war, although this threat has always been implausible in view of the radical difference between nuclear and traditional violence...
...Here again, the Kennedy Administration was groping for a military answer to what is essentially a political problem...
...One Republican leader, trying to clear the fog of Kennedy charm from his head, said: "If the President can handle Khrushchev and the neutral nations the way he can handle Congress, there shouldn't be any world crisis...
...Or was John F. Kennedy the kind of man whose sense of humility allowed, even compelled, him to deprecate the speech he felt most strongly about...
...It does not in the least detract from the courage of Kennedy's unequivocal policy in meeting the civil rights problem, which he himself accurately described as a "moral crisis," to observe that he was shrewd enough to realize he could lose part of the South and still win the next election by carrying the nation's urban centers...
...whom he idolized...
...As the President himself once remarked: ". . . One of the functions of the President is to have [things] move with more speed...
...Many of the recipient governments were incapable or unwilling, for political reasons, to create the domestic preconditions for the effective use of foreign aid...
...In order to make mutual deterrence work, two nations need only to create the mutual belief that they are willing and able to destroy each other in nuclear war...
...History does not record what must have been the polite and fumbling answer, but the import of the question is clear...
...He carries with him not only the emotional afterglow of a popular President, but he also takes command at a time of national contrition, when the country may be prepared to do for a dead John F. Kennedy what it was unwilling to do for John F. Kennedy alive...
...Yet here his relative inexperience may assure a broad continuity, for he will surely lean heavily on his predecessor's advisors...
...The prospective opponents are kept constantly aware of the inevitability of their own destruction should they resort to nuclear force, and this awareness prevents them from resorting to it...
...IT seems likely that John F. Kennedy will leave future historians more unresolved puzzles and paradoxes than most of his predecessors...
...He would never acknowledge that his program itself lacked the impact of Roosevelt's...
...But there was always a line between you and John Kennedy, and he never crossed over that line...
...John F. Kennedy came in with a snowstorm, and the setting was flawlessly right on Inauguration Day, January 20, 1961...
...The Kennedy family was indeed truly a royal family, in the proper sense of the word...
...A few days after his death, Senator John O. Pastore (D.-R.I...
...During the course of the ride, Mrs...
...Yet it is a moot question whether we are here in the presence of a temporary discrepancy between productive capacity and purchasing power to be removed by Keynesian remedies, or whether we are not rather face to face with radical changes in the structure of the economic system, due to a technological revolution that is replacing human labor with machines permanently and on an unprecedented scale while at the same time enormously increasing productive capacity...
...His unfailing wit, which he could turn on himself, his literacy, his physical grace and his sense of history were part of a harmonious whole...
...In the sphere of military strategy, it attempted to "conventionalize" nuclear war, that is, to overcome the irrationality of nuclear weapons by using them as though they were conventional ones...
...His temper remained much as usual-an occasional burst of Irish passion, but on the whole steely, cool and even...
...Perhaps it was a spontaneous combustion of the century-old resentments of citizens who had been reduced to second-class status by the vagaries of American politics and the stubbornness of racial prejudice...
...Kennedy not only made the intellectual respectable in the public eye, but culture in general as well...
...Clearly, though, style was one of John F. Kennedy's great gifts to the government and the people of the United States...
...He is far more familiar with the legislative process -and is more highly regarded by the ageing potentates on Capitol Hill-than was the case with President Kennedy...
...During the '30s, he was a New Deal Congressman trusted by FDR...
...As Vice-President, his speeches on civil right have been unequivocal, and his efforts on behalf of non-discriminatory employment have won no applause from the bigots...
...They should have been obvious...
...Catholic, melting-pot background...
...The first occurred in October 1962, when he encountered Russian power in the Cuban missile crisis and managed both to avoid a nuclear catastrophe and to drive the Russian missiles from Cuba by a stand at once courageous and prudent...
...The mighty civilization, racing to the moon...
...Yet John F. Kennedy was not, like Woodrow Wilson, a pure intellectual in politics...
...At one point it was said that Ambassador Jacob Beam would be appointed the President's new representative to Moscow, but one Washington wag punctured the rumor...
...He seldom won out in the various intramural battles against his elder brother, Joe Jr...
...a fervent admirer and supporter of the President, observed: "He could exert enormous charm and radiate friendliness...
...That excuse may serve by day, But what of the night, the evil hatred born of fear That eats the heart...
...Public affairs ought to be managed by businessmen, who had already provided proof, calculable in dollars and cents, that they were practical...
...Intellectuals have been as spectacular failures in public life as businessmen...
...The Johnson technique was to find the common denominator, settle differences in the cloakroom, and obtain consent on the floor with a minimum of debate...
...thus we rewrite the Word of Christ: "If once you smite a man, give him the other fist...
...A prodigious reader, he cherished not only learning, but the learned...
...The new nature of these nuclear threats and counterthreats, which had been analyzed before in theory, was now demonstrated in practice...
...Howard Nemerov FILLING THE VOID An End and a Beginning By Karl E. Meyer John F. Kennedy died a mortal on Friday, November 22, and was already a legend when he was buried on the following Monday in a ceremony that strangely mixed tenderness and dignity...
...At home it staked out new areas for the public sector and had just begun to fill these new areas with new accomplishments...
...The President returned the kind of chilly, disapproving look his normally friendly face could easily assume...
...George E. Herman is the White House correspondent for CBS News...
...At freezing dawn on Monday, they formed most of a line far more than a mile long of those waiting to pass the President's coffin in the dimly lit dome of the Capitol...
...Kennedy did not initiate the Negro revolt...
...Maybe...
...His own record is the best answer to this: As Senate Majority Leader he guided the passage, in 1957, of the first civil rights legislation to be enacted since Reconstruction days...
...He brought to the Presidency a brilliance and a luster we are not likely to see again for a long time...
...Circumstance has made Lyndon Johnson the President at a moment when Congress is floundering and the need for deft leadership obvious...
...He is the first President from the South since the Civil War (Woodrow Wilson, born in Virginia, is counted as a New Jersey man...
...By George E. Herman No two people are ever likely to see a third person in the same light, especially after death has fixed that person forever in a kind of crystal block of time...
...He and his staff poked, prodded, whipped and spurred the State Department unflaggingly for almost a year...
...If the latter should be the case, as I think it is, Keynesian remedies will not cure the disease...
...If we did not know this before now, the depth and breadth of the national sorrow and the ceremonies attending President Kennedy's untimely death should have made us aware of it...
...The pure intellect and the arts have traditionally occupied a lowly place in the estimation of the American people...
...It is worth noting that in the prenuclear age the threat and the counterthreat of force could always be, and frequently were, put to the test of actual performance, and either the threat or the counterthreat was then proved to be empty...
...Perhaps, too, Kennedy was excessively cautious...
...But the political style of the late President was of more significance than his monarchical style, because the elected American monarch is the manipulator of more political power than is available to any other leader in the democratic world...
...He insisted on marshaling all the relevant facts affecting a decision, and demanded the same rational attitude and competence from his various aides and collaborators...
...He wooed and won the friendship of many...
...or whether we are dealing, as I think we are, with a rare political personality and his unique achievement in the few short years of his reign...
...One day when the late President was a student at Harvard his family picked him up for a ride home, and he happened to bring along a friend and classmate who was from a family well entrenched in Boston's formidable high society...
...The second Cuban crisis was felt to be so severe that the White House was on a state of informal standby to evacuate the capital...
...Why, for instance, did he choose to make fun of his own Inaugural Address...
...Did that man, by his distant kill, Reflect the people of our country to themselves...
...This was having a rough time in Congress partly because our "conventional wisdom" demanded that the government observe socalled "fiscal responsibility," and did not recognize that the unprecedented phenomenon of high prosperity and high unemployment (in large measure due to automation) requires unprecedented policies to break the immobility of the economy...
...President de Gaulle raised that issue in his press conference of January 14, 1963...
...In doing so, he spoke not only for himself and for France but for the major European powers as well...
...But it must be said that this lowkey attitude, though it certainly reflected the competence of his political decisions, was not a clear asset in a democracy: It probably prevented him from making an effective appeal to the people over the heads of Congress, in the manner of FDR...
Vol. 46 • December 1963 • No. 25
