JOHN KENNEDY'S AMERICA
KRISTOL, WILLIAM
JOHN KENNEDY'S AMERICA by William Kristol LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON? Yes, in their verve and grace. Yes, in that their lives were sadly cut short. Yes, in that both men lived, in important respects,...
...It began to lose ground after President Kennedy's assassination, and has lost it ever since...
...obviously, during the 1960s...
...But Americans of Jack Kennedy's era remembered another British funeral—that of King George VI, in February 1952...
...only a year before, Douglas MacArthur had given a much-noticed, and justly acclaimed, farewell speech at West Point...
...He rose above our popular culture...
...George views political life through a prism of irony...
...Our sense of loss suggests that we know this...
...Shawn Hubler observes in the Los Angeles Times that our sorrow over John Kennedy's death was not unrelated to the fact that "the end of this century has not been kind to America's sense of itself as classy and graceful...
...After all, "culture drives politics...
...Prime Minister Winston Churchill's announcement of the king's death was broadcast in America as well as in Britain...
...William Kristol is editor and publisher of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...We live in a lesser time...
...Our America is in many ways a lesser America...
...Yet MacArthur, born in 1880, outlived President Kennedy...
...There is not much grandeur in George...
...And not in their times...
...Some of our reaction is, to be sure, Diana-like in its sentimentality and celebrity worship...
...In mourning John Kennedy, we mourn the loss of our most direct link to Jack Kennedy and his Ameri-ca—the America of Profiles in Courage, of un-ironic idealism, of John-John's salute...
...Kennedy wanted to rappel down Mount Rush-more (a request denied by park officials...
...Churchill concluded his eulogy: "i, whose youth was passed in the august, unchallenged, and tranquil glories of the Victorian era, may well feel a thrill evoking once more the prayer and the anthem: God save the Queen...
...one must of course allow for the difference between an assassinated president's state funeral and chaotic events surrounding accidental deaths near a vacation island...
...But how different the inclinations are...
...When Ted Kennedy and his sons were taken to the Coast Guard ship Wednesday, as the bodies were brought up, they wore shorts...
...Jack Kennedy was a member of the World War II generation...
...Not in their individual characters: Jack Kennedy, all drive and ambition...
...MacArthur's rhetoric seems closer to the 19 th century than to the late 20th...
...But the continued prominence of the Kennedy family in our public life has obscured the gulf between President Kennedy's America and his son's...
...The magazine was intended to be, John Kennedy explained in the first issue, not really "a political magazine" but rather "a lifestyle magazine with politics at its core...
...The salute suggests an era in which, at moments of great sorrow, the appropriate bearing was formal, dignified, almost military...
...rather than trying to scale the heights of elective politics, he was . . . thumbing his nose at it...
...It shouldn't be a surprise that, in certain ways, he had more in common with other members of his generation than with the son who barely knew him...
...That America is gone...
...We landed on the moon, fulfilling President Kennedy's promise...
...But the last three decades have altogether undermined Apollo's meaning...
...Diana was a perfect exemplar of our confessional and bathetic age...
...We might have paid it more notice had it not been for John Kennedy's plane crash...
...Why are we moved by John Kennedy's death...
...Churchill, after all, had inspired Jack Kennedy...
...Yes, in that both men lived, in important respects, admirable lives...
...That America carried out the promise made by President Kennedy: to "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and success of liberty...
...Churchill's invocation of the Victorian era, his hope that Queen Elizabeth could usher in some sort of renewed Victorian greatness, did not yet seem in 1963— despite all the talk of a new generation and a new fron-tier—hopelessly archaic...
...Jack Kennedy was justifiably proud to be considered the author of Profiles in Courage...
...But no...
...John Kennedy was better than our age...
...John Kennedy, remarkably decent and considerate...
...it was a different country...
...We demonstrated that we had the right stuff...
...As Sam Tanenhaus points out in the New York Times, George "made sport of politics...
...Today, we are informal, expressive, sentimental...
...His father sought rather to cast a heroic mist over politics...
...It seems somehow emblematic that on a recent visit to South Dakota Mr...
...Today it seems from another world...
...But our sense of loss, I believe, goes beyond this...
...We leave handwritten notes and flowers outside John and Carolyn's New York apartment building...
...and he too outlived him...
...in our national consciousness, Vietnam and "the 60s" trumped the moon landing...
...Does it echo still...
...That speech ended with a phrase that he said "echoes and re-echoes: duty, honor, country...
...The most memorable image from Jack Kennedy's funeral was John's salute...
...If his magazine sometimes simply celebrated popular culture, John Kennedy's life was better than his magazine...
...The loss of this classy and graceful young man brings into relief the vulgarity of the culture we have made...
...Could John Kennedy's death sting us to act on this unwanted but inescapable knowledge...
...His decency suggested a refusal simply to surrender to the temptations of our celebrity culture...
...Jack Kennedy was skilled enough at irony, but his tempered a grand (even grandiose) view of politics...
...The only shorts then to be seen were the three-year-old John Kennedy's—and his formal dress shorts are unimaginable today...
...Who since 1969 has embraced Kennedy's grand vision for our space program...
...John Kennedy was justifiably proud to have founded George magazine...
...It did survive politically through the 1980s, long enough to win the Cold War...
...But if you want to pick a date, consider July 20, 1969...
...That America no longer exists...
...The most memorable funeral of recent times was Princess Diana's...
...Last week marked the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11...
...Mary Elizabeth Williams, writing in Salon, says John seemed to be something rare among the famous of our time: In "a world of crotch-grabbing rock stars, adulterous presidents, and petulant movie actors," John seemed "a true gentleman...
...But it soon became clear that we no longer much cared...
...Her death, and the public reaction to it, ratified and made evident for all to see the ascendancy of "Cool Britannia...
...When did it all change...
...Each tendency has its dangers...
...But i suspect informal attire in any funereal circumstance would have been unthinkable in 1963...
...For who, this past week, could fail to be struck by the difference between our America and the one that mourned Jack Kennedy only 36 years ago...
...In this he was very much at one with the spirit of his age...
...And "if we can do just one thing at George, we hope it's to demystify the political process...
...Profiles in Courage offered a profoundly un-ironic account of American politics...
...But the contrast with Diana seems greater than the similarity...
Vol. 4 • August 1999 • No. 43
