THE OLD MOOD AND THE NEW FRONTIER
Hyman, Sidney
The Old Mood and The New Frontier by SIDNEY HYMAN When John F. Kennedy took his inaugural oath, he seemed a new Adam at the start of a second creation. No force from the past could shove him...
...Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and 1916, and Harry Truman in 1948, were elected with a minority of the total popular vote, yet in no way were they held in check by that fact...
...This is no longer so...
...First, the more the nation is indifferent to the need of self-education by joining in the decisions about its own political affairs, the less is it inclined to join Mr...
...Kennedy in any kind of purposeful political dialogue...
...Indifference, "not-seeing," sentimentalism, privacy, noncommit-ment, and, above all, managerialism still hang like a curtain of brass over the American earth...
...The way out, if there is one at all, must begin with a restoration of the nation's political mentality as a whole—with a restoration of its power to interpret the events affecting its interests, to care that a correct interpretation be given to them, and to be ever watchful of how the interpretation agreed upon is carried out by the chief officers of the government...
...For, said Solon, such a man places himself above the human community on a plane reserved for the gods, and thus is guilty of blasphemy...
...His desire to do so is abundantly present...
...Why should the case between Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy be different...
...Kennedy's own efforts to stir things up in case by case situations...
...He has been careful to avoid needless irritations in the conduct of foreign affairs, while making it plain that he will not rattle under pressure...
...But if there should be a division of opinion among the people about where the best interest of the community lies, then the man who does not take sides in that division shall be punished...
...Nor does the way out lie by way of case to case pragmatic judgments, however indispensable these, too, also are to the political process...
...If this is agreed to, then a final thing remains to be said...
...On the one side, the personality of Mr...
...Peace and order in the community, he said, are goods ardently to be desired...
...On the other side, the hesitant national response to his program strongly suggests that the Eisenhower Presidency, formally ended on January 20, 1961, has retained an on-going power to dominate the nation's political psyche...
...A paradox has become quite plain since then...
...Affairs at home and abroad were in gross disarray...
...The key to the difference, it seems SIDNEY HYMAN ii the author of "The American President...
...Kennedy to adhere to the work of management and not to step forward into the realm of creative politics...
...Perhaps Mr...
...There would still be quarrels over the kind of monuments the chief actors merited...
...Kennedy is skillfully managing things all by himself...
...His Inaugural Address did honor to the power of human speech...
...And the probQuivering Needles lem Mr...
...to me, rises from a complex of things...
...No force from the past could shove him where he did not want to walk nor check his step on paths of his own choice...
...William Howard Taft, for example, could not do this to his successor, Woodrow Wilson...
...Yet the work of social reawakening in so vast a country as the United States goes beyond the power of any one man, even if that man is the President...
...When the predecessor stepped down, the public adhered to the successor and allowed him a fairly wide latitude for action in his early months...
...So it seemed on Inauguration Day—but no longer...
...All these now stand apart from each other, so that each tends to sound tunelessly like an unattended harp when a draft of wind sweeps across its strings...
...All of us in our own way must place ourselves under the injunction of a law Solon once gave to the Athenian people...
...And the more it does this to him, the less inclined is the nation to ask why its own direct involvement in the political process is necessary, when Mr...
...Wilson could not do it to Warren G. Harding...
...He has restored gallantry to politics, along with some gayety...
...In these and in similar ways, he has more than silenced his election-time critics who said that he was not to be trusted with the Presidency because he lacked "executive experience...
...There must instead be a mutual seeking for one another's spirit...
...Personal magic displaced the rule of reason...
...From a purely managerial standpoint, it is doubtful whether he has any equal in the modern history of the Presidency...
...The way out, in short, is to revitalize American society so that its own political health can restore the health of the American state...
...Minute factual knowledge, however indispensable to the political process, will not lead the way out of the circle...
...But even when the best was attempted, either the springs of the transaction were hidden from public view, or the act was announced as an accomplished fact—as if the world itself had arrived at a stage where the people could not be trusted to govern their own interests in it...
...On the one side, our options cannot go beyond those permitted to us by the coalition of nation-states in which we are, of necessity, a member...
...Good intentions, to be sure, abounded on every side...
...The will to believe displaced proofs...
...It is the task of every teacher, every magazine and newspaper editor, writer, clergyman, poet, dramatist, novelist, every leader in the economic, scientific, and technological realm of our communal life...
...The nation, that is, is content and asks for nothing more from a President than that he should seek the possible instead of the good, let the part pass for the whole, manipulate rather than create, " make workability the mark of truth, usefulness the test of value, and efficiency the proof of value...
...He has, as the Constitution intended, reunited power and responsibility in the person of the President...
...Can President Kennedy break out of this vicious circle, and lead the nation out of it with him...
...The less it is inclined to do that, the more does it force Mr...
...The new truth is that we are now only one of many lords of the universe, and in our contests with the other lords, we are in for our own share of profound frustration...
...The freedom to act politically, to seek the good of democratic opportunities, seemed limited to the act of hiring a group of managers to manage the people...
...The work of social reawakening is everyone's task...
...Kennedy if only our constitutional morality was in good health...
...Yet they know that even their minimal objectives might be denied to them, unless they succeed first in winning to their own side the political mind of the nation that remains under the posthumous control of the Eisenhower Presidency...
...From this follows a cruel argument which threatens to catch the Kennedy Administration—and the nation—in its net...
...Nor is it because Mr...
...Even then, in matters of foreign policy, he would be strained to bridge the gap between the physical ability of the United States to have its way in matters of war and peace, and the ability of other nation-states to deny the United States the objects on which it would exercise its will...
...He seemed wholly free to find within himself the means for whatever future he chose to will into being...
...and by talking, ignites the spark that brings a self-sustaining social flame into being...
...Kennedy's popularity, as I believe it does, one would be warranted in saying something further: To the extent that the basis for the President's popularity sprouts from the same "management" root of Mr...
...If the public sense that this is so accounts for much of Mr...
...Heady sensations displaced critical intelligence...
...Eisenhower's own popularity, it affirms the continued dominance of the managerial values that came prominently to the front in the years 1953-60...
...There was a government for, and in some degree, of the people, but not a government by the people...
...In the days ahead, events would be shaped by the new generation Mr...
...The question is how...
...The political question presenting itself was whether or not we would wish to intervene in, and so decide, a particular case or controversy...
...Perhaps an updated resort to the device of the fireside chat can win a greater degree of national assent to his purposes, where that assent is now confined primarily to his person...
...Here, in visual form, was the end of the era that had begun with Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...To say that this is the legacy of the Eisenhower Presidency is not to" say that all would now be easy for Mr...
...He has swept away the clutter of inter-agency committees piled up by the Eisenhower Presidency...
...They are also troubled by it...
...Kennedy has not exhausted all his Presidential means to reawaken in the nation a sense of its existence as a community of men sharing a common destiny...
...The retreat into privacy displaced a life in the public forum...
...President Kennedy and his chief aides are aware of this paradoxical gap between personal popularity and political assent...
...But the actors themselves had played out their parts to their curtain lines...
...On the other side, there is arrayed against us the countervailing physical power of the Communist bloc states, and the intervening political power of the so-called "neutralist" or "uncommitted" nation-states...
...Kennedy faces of "stirring things up" outside Washington—in order to stir them up inside the legislative order in Washington—is as difficult as trying to breathe through brass...
...Even then, in domestic matters, he would be strained to bridge the gap between his own Presidential constituency formed by voters on a nation-wide basis and a rival Congressional constituency entrenched behind the rural-ridden mechanism of the Congress...
...But the natural difficulties President Kennedy would face are now compounded by the dulling of the nation's political sensibilities during the Eisenhower years...
...Specifically, in the years 1953-60, we grew accustomed to functioning as a state but not as a society...
...Kennedy won only a hairline victory in the popular vote on election day...
...Within the executive order proper, he has been, in ways that have been widely reported, a one-man revolution...
...With the White House as the style-setter, sentimentalism displaced argument...
...The sense of this being so was underlined by the contrasting figure of a gray and worn President Eisenhower who sat nearby...
...Difficulties of the kind just mentioned would harass the new Administration even if it worked in the context of a healthy and vigorous constitutional morality...
...Kennedy is now held in high favor by a great post-election majority of the people...
...There can be no criticism of Mr...
...Eisenhower left office at the height of any political success...
...Kennedy led...
...Willful "not seeing"—an old method by which the human mind corrupts itself—had as its natural consequence an anti-political kind of politics...
...He has shown himself a master of detail, and a restless searcher for the truth about the things into which a man in his position ought to inquire...
...The first is that, along with a cultural crisis, the nation under the Eisenhower Presidency suffered a loss in its power of self-education through the instruments of self-government...
...I know of no modern case like the present one—no case where the Presidency passed in a regular election from the control of one political party to the control of another, yet the vanquished still managed to chain the motions of the victor to a short leash...
...His State of the Union message was the first true inventory in eight years of where the nation stood...
...His articles frequently appear in the New York Times, The Reporter, and The Saturday Review...
...The twenty-odd policy statements he has issued have all been carefully documented and cogently argued...
...Herbert Hoover could not do it to Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor could Harry S. Truman do it to Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...a new conversation where each talks to the other...
...In combination, these elements render obsolete the agreeable notion that if only we choose to act we can, in our own good time, and on our own terms, settle all earthly troubles...
...They have an action-program in mind whose agenda is far more extensive than that so far revealed...
...His appointments have regenerated the human quality of a President's chief aides...
...Administration displaced policy purposes...
...There was a time, perhaps as late as 1945, when the options with respect to the issue of war and peace seemed to reside mainly in the hands of the United States...
...It is not because Mr...
...Rips in the social fabric, economic troubles, decay in institutions of learning, weakness in the defense establishment, cracks in the alliance—these were dealt with either by walking away from them entirely, or in ways that compounded existing troubles...
Vol. 25 • May 1961 • No. 5
