had always been laid on his oldest brother, but the death of Joe Kennedy in 1944, killed on a mission over the English Channel at the age of twenty-nine, meant that his father’s hopes for high office were transferred to Jack. Kennedy’s first job after the war, arranged by his father, who knew the proprietor William Randolph Hearst, was as a special correspondent for Hearst newspapers. In that position he was in Berlin, the scene of his own later triumph with a speech (see chapter 2), to cover the Potsdam Conference.
Kennedy returned to America and set out on his political course. He represented Massachusetts in the House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 and in the Senate from 1953 until 1960, in which year he became the Democrat nominee for president. In the general election of 1960, Kennedy won a tight victory over his Republican rival, Richard Nixon. The young president came to power bearing vast domestic hopes. He had plans for ending privation and poverty, for action in the cause of equal civil rights, federal funding for education, medical care for the elderly and a programme of economic stimulus, most of which would fall to his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The 1964 Civil Rights Act passed in part because Johnson invoked the memory of his slain predecessor.
Kennedy’s short time in office was dominated, as the tenure of most presidents is, by foreign affairs. His first error was to overreact to a Cold War speech by the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in early 1961 which poisoned the atmosphere of the Vienna Summit that year. Kennedy announced in Vienna that any treaty between Moscow and East Berlin which affected American access rights in West Berlin would be regarded as an act of war. The Russians proceeded nevertheless, and the prelude to war, with the threat of nuclear confrontation, began.
The next site of the struggle with communism was Cuba. Following Fidel Castro’s victory against the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in January 1959, Kennedy approved a plan he had inherited from President Eisenhower and ordered the invasion of the island using CIA-trained Cuban exiles. The landing at the Bay of Pigs on the night of 16/17 April 1961 ended in humiliation when the invaders were killed or captured. What took the world to the brink, though, were the events of the following October 1962, when the CIA took pictures of ballistic missile sites being built by the Soviet Union in Cuba. Against the advice of some hawks on the National Security Council, Kennedy settled on a naval quarantine. The world trembled on the cusp of nuclear war, but after a perilous period the Russians backed down and removed the weapons.
The next domino to fall was Vietnam. Kennedy vastly increased American involvement in Vietnam, but found no lasting solution and handed on an unresolved problem to his successor. It is still disputed, and will never be settled, whether America’s entanglement in Vietnam would have happened had Kennedy lived longer.
Everyone remembers where they were on the day that C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died. It was 22 November 1963, the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, shot by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. After just two years and ten months in office, he became the youngest president to die. Perhaps because of that early death, Kennedy remains an icon of American politics.
The light has flooded in on his private life since his death. News has spread about his alleged infidelities, such as spending a week at Bing Crosby’s house with Marilyn Monroe, and his illnesses, which were at times critical. Perhaps Kennedy’s brief presidency would not have been possible in this more prurient age. There are plenty of commentators on American politics – Gore Vidal and Arthur J. Schlesinger, for example – who date the decline in trust in the political establishment to the death of John F. Kennedy.
None of the revelations appear to have besmirched his reputation. The Kennedy White House exists in a sepia reality in which hope is forever young. The culture and the politics never seemed so well aligned. Kennedy’s approval rating remains the highest of any American president. It is now impossible to read the speech that follows without a retrospective sense of foreboding. This was Kennedy’s only inaugural address, and it cannot be read now, as is also the case with Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, free from the shadow of what is about to befall him. On his grave at Arlington Cemetery in Washington DC there is a plaque on which many of the lines from this speech are engraved.
We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom – symbolizing an end as well as a beginning – signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago.
Before he began writing, Kennedy insisted that his speechwriter Ted Sorensen read all the previous inaugural addresses. Sorensen concluded that the best speech of all was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and resolved to keep his drafting simple, or at least to prune the finished text of ornamentation. A lot of hard work goes into making a speech sound simple. Sorensen has said that ‘no Kennedy speech ever underwent so many drafts. Each paragraph was reworded, reworked and reduced’. This opening sentence began as: ‘We celebrate today not a victory of party but the sacrament of democracy’ and was then changed to: ‘We celebrate today not a victory of party but a convention of freedom’. The final completed version has a better balance and does the required thing – required for Kennedy as it had been for Jefferson – which is to bring the nation back together. The 1960 election had been one of the closest of recent times. The difference in votes between the two candidates was tiny, although Kennedy emerged with a majority in the electoral college. America was, as it usually is, split between two competing visions of how it should be governed. Kennedy thus signals at once the function of the inaugural address, which is to heal fresh wounds.
The campaign had contained a famous incident that shows us that rhetoric is visual as well as oral. Kennedy and Nixon had taken part in the first televised presidential debates. The verdict of the radio audience was that the debate had been a draw. If pressed, that audience would probably have awarded the debate to Nixon. The television audience took a clear and differing view. Nixon looked tense and ill at ease, perspiring under a heavy five o’clock shadow. The professionally made up Kennedy was by contrast a picture of relaxation. This marks the moment television began to play a big part in American politics, although the impact of presidential debates on the outcome is exaggerated. It is not likely that many since 1960 have made much difference.
Kennedy, in fact, did give an inaugural speech that would fit neatly into the television schedule. He was determined to keep it short. ‘It’s more effective that way,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want people to think I’m a windbag.’ At under 2,000 words, 1961’s was the shortest inaugural speech since 1905. It worked: as Harry S. Truman said afterwards, ‘it was short, to the point, and in language anyone can understand … Even I could understand it, and therefore, the people can.’
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe – the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage – and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
The central theme of the speech is time passing: a new generation has arrived. This rather empty chronological point was given substance by the fact that Kennedy sat next to his predecessor, the seventy-year-old Dwight Eisenhower, once the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe while Kennedy had been a navy lieutenant in the Pacific. The young men Kennedy proposed to bring into his administration were visible behind the new president as he spoke.
The final text had not only undergone many mutations in the drafting. It had also had a number of previous
