THE UNCOMMITTED
Kempton, Murray
John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon are quite different men. Yet there is a quality they have in common, something not quite tangible enough to be defined outside of metaphor. Neither seems to be a...
...That wrongness yielded its secret when I put my face in a corner and tried to read the speech aloud...
...He had reduced the material of epics to a mere physical thirst...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt was such a man...
...What departs from politics as the new men arrive is a kind of poetry, Edgar Guest's kind in the President's case but still powerfully evocative to those who can respond to it...
...I had never quite understood the impact of President Roosevelt's Administration until I went to Hyde Park and the Roosevelt Library and the custodian fell to talking about why it was so large...
...The man is entirely non-bardic...
...Yet the civil rights issue is only a reflection of what Negroes think...
...In this spirit, Robert Kennedy became for his journey a Catholic trade unionist...
...All this is rather odd in Kennedy's case, because he has so obviously taken for his model Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or at least the Roosevelt who won four straight elections...
...He so identified himself with their conflicts as to be rendered almost inactive...
...Well, Bobby," he inquired, "what shall I ask these fellows...
...It could not be read aloud...
...but it would seem to add up to an intermittently-repeated sentence familiar to the very rich: "Why do people feel and think like this...
...Senator Kennedy said that he was for civil rights everywhere and that included the right of every citizen to drink Coca Cola and anywhere he wanted to...
...He looked at the labor racketeers as upon men who had betrayed a priesthood...
...and Mrs...
...John Kennedy owes him much and not least Jimmy Hoffa, who was, however reluctantly, as much a President-maker as anyone in Los Angeles...
...It has come even to be spoken of as a strong quality of detachment...
...Stevenson's response to it in 1956 was to be torn between his awareness of the justice of Negro aspirations and his friendship with white Southerners like John Battle and Luther Hodges, who say one thing in public and quite something else in private...
...Senator Kennedy is a Catholic, but he appears as insensitive to the awful majesty and poetry of that particular tradition as Nixon is immune to the sweetness of the Quakers...
...Robert is not a vastly popular figure...
...We had to make it big," he said, "to make it hold all the papers...
...Senator Kennedy, with that frankness which is his most engaging characteristic, has said that in these matters he has the disadvantage of his environment...
...The inspiration is exterior...
...They are incurably prosy...
...It was absolutely tone-deaf...
...Roosevelt, argue how you will about the unbroken perfection of her vision, has the unique capacity of always looking below with insatiable curiosity...
...his brother was as charmingly detached as ever...
...One reason why the civil rights platform of the 1956 Democratic platform was so deplorable was that Stevenson could not find the will to fight for a better one...
...But Nixon and Kennedy evoke almost nothing...
...I do not mean that either is an indecisive man...
...President Eisenhower seems generally a model of indifference...
...but there was nothing remotely suggestive of a cadence to the ear...
...they merely register other men's thoughts...
...After all, the rational issues were the same in 1956 as in 1960...
...Young people in segregated colleges had begun the direct assertion of their dignity...
...even so, he showed himself particularly insensitive to the reason why...
...A Midwest editor commented at Los Angeles on what firm friends Nixon and Kennedy had remained until the day before the battle...
...That is the whole point...
...It can realistically be argued that a man who has the votes can afford to sacrifice the style to someone else...
...Having made that proper response, Senator Kennedy went to a pre-convention rally of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to claim his reward from those present...
...What interior conflict there is in Kennedy is less easily reducible...
...Adlai Stevenson remains such a man in a sense less general...
...Yet there is no escaping the recognition that he played his part in that plank merely because he had counted noses and knew what he had to do...
...Their deafness to tone has been described by close and not unfriendly students of Nixon and Kennedy as an absence of personal passion...
...Now we have laws and institutions to meet the troubles of society...
...Senator Kennedy is one of those to whom men who care have to give the questions...
...But the derivation is procedural rather than substantive...
...nothing could have been farther from their calculations than the vision of themselves in Los Angeles as architects of the political platform of a party for which most of them are too young to vote and from which, in many cases, their fathers and mothers are debarred from voting...
...He is also disadvantaged in his associations...
...The business charts will be better, but a President Kennedy will at least share with President Roosevelt a problem, less often mentioned, but not much less important than the bank closures and the great lines of the unemployed...
...If leadership is something more than the mere registry of impressions of the public will, then we must resign ourselves to a politics without leadership...
...it did not look to Washington...
...there is the instance of his brother Robert...
...but even he could not conceal a few years ago the torment of wondering what a good Republican soldier could do about Joe McCarthy...
...But there are persons so constituted that they can go nowhere without some piece of faith to serve for light...
...It defines their natures that these two friends exchange not presents but polls...
...We can find no better instance of this want than the civil rights issue, which is the only domestic issue which may be described as pregnant with poetic responses...
...yet there remains something oddly troubling in his speeches...
...The thing we shall miss the most will be the confrontation of men occasionally troubled by doubts answerable by less-ordered techniques...
...The Nixon manner, as William V. Shannon has already pointed out, is that of the television commercial...
...He proceeded into that jungle without guides or experience...
...but I cannot imagine Kennedy enjoying the deficiency...
...and naturally he sought his faith there...
...I think that one of the reasons for the decline of our society which has brought us to Kennedy and Nixon has been our refusal to understand the proper place irrationality has in most valuable human endeavor...
...As a substitute for emotion, each has settled for a manner...
...he goes, by his own wish, into the campaign with the strongest civil rights plank that the Democratic Party has ever written...
...It is the difference between his brother, the Senator, and himself, the difference between those who are only properly oriented and those who are truly involved...
...Yet the most that can be said is that he is engaging but somehow never engaged...
...One day last spring Senator Kennedy was addressing an audience which had loudly cheered Hubert Humphrey for suggesting that the Southern lunch counter strikers represented the America of Lexington and Concord...
...Robert Kennedy represents, in his way, the survival of the spirit...
...our world posture, in the wake of the Till and Autherine Lucey cases, was hardly less embarrassing then than now...
...The President settled for not inviting McCarthy to the White House, which" was petty, but at least displayed some capacity for uncalculating human pique...
...Yet, if there is one thing lacking to the parallel, it is Roosevelt's sense of and appreciation for that America which is fed from below...
...Roosevelt was the first President to whom people sat down— sometimes by the light of a coal miner's lamp—and wrote directly about their problems...
...That, I think, is the essential, taunting difference...
...Senator Kennedy handsomely remedied that defect in Los Angeles this year...
...It was the morning of a hearing...
...It was the least political of methods...
...Senator Kennedy is disadvantaged by having served the most conspicuous part of his public life in the United States Senate, probably the most insulated national institution left in America...
...It is the minority which has so often fed this country from below, choked almost since the war, but rising again...
...If I had a doubt for John F. Kennedy's immediate future, it would arise from the sense that those who imitate history are condemned to be forgotten by it...
...Senator Kennedy is certainly the more sympathetic of these two friends...
...Nothing more indicates his peculiar deafness to tones...
...What departs our politics with the anointment of these men is mystical presence...
...Yet it is a deficiency that will be apparent for a long time—not just when he is confronted, as he was in the case of Stevenson, with the mystical presence reluctant to depart, but on all future occasions where he is asked to respond to a poetic moment...
...One can only return the proffer in kind and give detachment back to both of them...
...It is that minority which Stevenson touched and held long after he was a figure of power, and which Nixon and Kennedy face, incapable of recognition and response...
...Yet that is what they have done...
...The difference, I think, was the Southern lunch counter sit-ins...
...But that is a measure of human response...
...MURRAY KEMPTON, columnist for the New York Post, has watched the Presidential candidates at close range, in Washington and on the stump, for a number of years...
...as the only new factor in a very old situation, they have managed to make the politicians understand that there are persons to whom this issue means something...
...Robert Kennedy began investigating Hoffa for want of anything else to do as general counsel of the Senate Committee on Government Operations...
...And the nostalgia which prevailed for Adlai Stevenson throughout the Democratic convention came, I think, from the recognition by those who clung to him that he is a more troubled, more uncalculating human being than the President is, let alone his successors...
...Both Kennedy and Nixon are receptive men...
...Robert Kennedy is a Catholic...
...the response was all from the stage...
...They do not think...
...They represent a triumph of prose...
...Kennedy had changed over the past four years, as most politicians had changed...
...in short, he became, for the occasion, a Catholic radical...
...The Senator is a tidy, even graceful, prose stylist...
...What they think, in the special cases of those Negroes who have forced their ways into our history, may be something more mystical than the considerations of ordinary politics: it is the response of a special minority to the terrible recognition that we are yet an imperfect country...
...But the reason why was the essence of the change...
...Neither seems to be a man at whose funeral strangers would cry...
...Dwight D. Eisenhower seems to be such a man...
...But the absence of honest rancor is, after all, a quality of professional wrestlers...
...He entered with a guard force of house Negroes...
...If there were not already enough barbarous adjectives in the language, we might define their common quality as "Univac-uous...
...They bring detachment to all doubts and all endeavors except the endeavor of winning elections...
...the fit was on Robert Kennedy...
...he has never known enough Negroes to know how they think...
...they are the bottle but not the wine...
...Why," he offered as evidence, "they even exchange polls...
...The periods balanced neatly enough to the eye...
...as Shaw almost said in another connection, they can tell a story well, provided someone else tells it to them first...
...This is not a spirit transmutable on the paper of polls or charts...
...integration was then as now the law of the land...
...each has his polls and the polls give answers of a sort...
...Kennedy reaches farther back to derive from the state papers of Woodrow Wilson...
...What interior conflict there is in Nixon adds up to the continually-repeated sentence familiar to the lower middle class: "What will people think...
...Neither, to choose an important instance, is even remotely eloquent...
...Franklin Roosevelt became President at a time when the creative minority of American culture was in conspicuous flight from politics...
...but these institutions arouse neither the sympathy nor the identification of the creative minority, which has returned to the anarcho-syndicalist mood of 1932, to a place outside society and public agencies—to picketing for Caryl Chessman, to marching against atomic bomb installations, to sitting down in lunchrooms...
...Senator Kennedy is, of course, not entirely without resources of the spirit within his family...
...The creative intelligence in America in 1932 was watching farmers break up sheriff's sales, and cherishing hopeless little unions of auto workers and coal miners...
...He offered the word "Coca Cola" as though it were a flag and a signal for automatic applause...
...The parallels with 1932 were all over Los Angeles—the pleasant young man, the strong but somehow disembodied voice, even the atmosphere of a convention which felt cheated and bruised, even Adlai Stevenson as Al Smith, and Lyndon Johnson as John Nance Garner...
...I remember feeling the difference between them one morning when the Senator came into Robert Kennedy's office in the rackets committee...
...Without the response of such persons, it is hard to see how any President can have a serious historical effect...
...he ended up thinking of Jimmy Hoffa's as a company union and of Jimmy Hoffa's friends in industry as strike-breakers...
...Stevenson, for example, beat Kennedy on style throughout the Democratic convention...
...he can offer any response short of the poetic...
...What is absent from the record of both these men is substantive interior quarrel...
...Yet it is vastly consequential...
...it has been said against him, as an example, that he is vindictive where his brother is not...
...there is no Eleanor Roosevelt in his family...
...Neither, it has been said, suffers from the handicap of being a vindictive man...
...And how can an Irishman believe something if at the same moment he cannot sing it...
...I remember reading all the way through his acceptance speech at Los Angeles and wondering at a certain wrongness in every line...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 9
