JFK still remembered fondly
Think of John Kennedy the way he was described by the sage of the Chicago, Carl Sandburg. Kennedy, Sandburg pronounced, “walked with the American people in their great diversity.”
Or the way Norman Mailer saw him. Kennedy, Mailer wrote, fulfilled America’s need for a hero and for “a man central to his times.”
On the anniversary of JFK’s birth 100 years ago, trying to puzzle out Kennedy’s contemporaneous popularity and his hold on Americans generations removed from his presidency, there is no better place to start.
My own view of Kennedy is shaped, in part, by the West Virginia primary of 1960. West Virginia was central to Kennedy’s winning that year’s Democratic nomination for president and thus the presidency itself. A Catholic, Kennedy won a decisive victory in Protestant West Virginia. The old bugaboo that the White House was out of the reach of Catholics suddenly became less persuasive.
Richard Reeves, a Kennedy biographer, once said his judgment of Kennedy was colored by an incident in which the candidate was late getting to his private aircraft, his indifference stranding friends and family inside a sweltering fuselage. The man just didn’t care about others; his only concern was himself.
To a great many West Virginians, Kennedy didn’t come off this way. Joyce Hollestein was in the crowd the day JFK campaigned in Hinton, West Virginia, in the southern part of the state. “Handsome” and “friendly”, the candidate was not the least bit pushy, an impression she gathered as Kennedy inched his way through the crowd to the speaker’s platform. When Kennedy got to where she was standing, he inquired, shyly Joyce thought, ‘May I shake your hand? I’m John Kennedy.”
Kennedy seemed acutely aware of others. Once, he apologized to a top West Virginia aide for delivering the same remarks time after time. “The next time I’ll see you, I promise I’ll have some new speeches. I suspect you’re getting tired of these,” he said.
Harold McBrayer owned a Charleston beauty salon in which Kennedy campaigned. Kennedy entered the shop unannounced. He stood under the archway separating the reception area and the working portion of the shop. It was clear to McBrayer that Kennedy was not entirely comfortable busting in on him and being “among so many strange women.”
The women were charmed, McBrayer recalled.
Near Mullens, Kennedy visited a coal mine, and later, outside, sat on grimy railroad tracks. Soon, miners gathered round and began to pepper Kennedy with questions as Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy speech writer, looked on.
It was part of Kennedy’s charm, Goodwin said, that he was able to strike an easy rapport with people, creating the feeling that he and they “were alone together.”
And it all stemmed, Goodwin said, from Kennedy’s “quest to know and understand what others were like.”
How unlike the current president of the United States, unempathetic and incurious, incapable of self-reflection and irony. In most of the ways that count, Donald Trump is Kennedy reversed.
“He was by nature stylish,” the great political reporter Theodore White wrote of JFK, “by twist of mind ironic … Style to Kennedy was very relevant to politics. Indeed, style was the essence of personality; personality determined the quality of leadership” and “leadership was … what he offered.”
It is ironic that as cautious as Kennedy was, he would usher in a host of groundbreaking changes, starting with his own election. Kennedy, by busting the Protestant establishment stranglehold on the highest reaches of American politics, opened a door through which all are able to walk, including presidents as different as Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
In civil rights, in the management of the economy, in our relations with the Soviets and with nations emerging from colonialism, in a willingness to speak honestly and intelligently and with nuance about our problems, by employing the best brains and talents in science and space as well as in the arts and academia in the service of the country — in all of these areas and others, John Kennedy plowed new ground.
Kennedy served one of the shortest tenures of any president. Yet he remains vividly alive in the nation’s historical imagination. In many ways, we are today a country Kennedy would not recognize. The moon shot he launched spawned everyday computers and the internet. In many other ways, we are not so much different at all.
We ache for Kennedy style leadership. Reading his speeches, the historian David McCullough recently noted, makes “one … wonder why such thinking, such insight, has gone from so much of what passes for political expression and leadership.”
Why, indeed.
Before closing, I want to thank the readers who alerted me to the glaring error in last week’s column. Of course, JFK commanded PT-109 in the Second World War.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of World War II” and “Our People.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.