disease and war itself. Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?
With the claim that the future rests in your hands rather than mine, Kennedy drops the first hint of the line that will forever after be the title of this speech. It is notable that citizen action has not featured thus far. Suddenly the speech switches focus, from the world to America, from the president to the citizen body. This was a regular Kennedy theme. The president was irritated by his party’s comfort-zone tendency to argue that government will fix social problems. He thought the Democrats were too ready to reach for the state. The speech he had given at the Democratic Convention, which became known as his ‘New Frontier’ speech, was notable for this reason. ‘The New Frontier of which I speak’, he said on that occasion, ‘is not a set of promises – it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.’
Kennedy dramatises this switch, and this focus, in the writing. He made a conscious decision during the drafting to strike out all uses of the word ‘I’. He also eschews one obvious course, which is to make himself the embodiment of the new generation. Instead, new times will be defined by a compact between the governor and the governed. This is the irony in the existence of the prestigious John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard: an academy devoted to the craft of using state power is named after the president who is famous for wanting to devolve his power to the people. This evocation of ‘we’ over ‘I’ leads perfectly to the theme of his peroration, which is that power is dispersed. Power resides with the people. This is a way of asking for popular support and a reminder of the central virtue that democracy exhibits over other forms of government. It is only in a democracy that the people would be asked to contribute. In other forms of polity they would be told.
This was also a way of diverting attention from Kennedy’s relative youth and inexperience, which had been a problem for him during the presidential campaign. The era of Eisenhower, De Gaulle and Adenauer was fresh in the memory. By making a speech of such gravity, and by drafting the people as partners, Kennedy is, in effect, saying that he is ready to serve in dangerous times.
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavour will light our country and all who serve it and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
The famous chiasmus comes at the end of the speech. In this formulation the words will last, but this was by no means their first airing. This was another line that had been tested on the road. In a televised campaign address in September 1960 Kennedy had said: ‘We do not campaign stressing what our country is going to do for us as a people. We stress what we can do for the country, all of us.’ By the time of the Inaugural, Kennedy has polished the words for effect. He told Sorensen that he was worried that the ending sounded very much like the one he had given in a recent speech in the Massachusetts legislature. Three other campaign speeches, in Anchorage, Detroit and Washington, had all included a variant of the same idiom.
The famous line – ‘ask not …’ – was an echo of Jefferson’s belief, which he took from the ancient governments, that taking part is an important aspect of American citizenship. The words were an instant inspiration as soon as it was uttered. Legions of young Americans joined the effort to fight poverty in America’s inner cities. The Peace Corps took many volunteers overseas. By the end of Kennedy’s presidency, more than 7,000 mostly young Americans were working in underdeveloped countries around the world.
For all that it is a wonderfully poetic sentence and a fine sentiment, and at the risk of heresy, it is a slightly odd conclusion to a foreign policy speech. What can any individual really do, in the context in which this advice is offered? This would have been a more comprehensible counsel in a speech about domestic policy, where active citizen engagement is part of the solution. Quite how the individual was to affect the conduct of the Cold War was less obvious.
However, it didn’t feel like that at the time. The 1961 Inaugural shows how occasion matters to the verdict of greatness. This speech is not as important, historically, as the televised address from October 1962 in which the president revealed to the world the secret presence of Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles on Cuba. It is, though, the speech that is best remembered. The line it is remembered for is this one. It is the naming of popular power that makes it memorable. Kennedy gets into a magnificent rhetorical phrase one of the great insights into democratic politics, which is that it needs an active citizen body. It is the conclusion to a different speech, if we want to be fastidious about the structure. It is a brilliant conclusion nonetheless.
BARACK OBAMA
I Have Never Been More Hopeful about America
Grant Park, Chicago
7 November 2012
No matter what he achieved in office, Barack Obama changed the world simply by who he was. The forty-fourth president of the United States was the first black leader of a nation no more than a generation after it had been segregated by race. The shock proved too much for some opponents who confected a conspiracy that Obama was not actually American, a nonsense ended by the production of his birth certificate. More than any American leader since John F. Kennedy, Obama embodied, and spoke about, the idea of hope. Even more than Kennedy he owed his elevation in politics to the pitch and power of his rhetoric. In an age when oratory was deemed to have collapsed into stock phrases, Obama rescued the trade.
Barack Obama was born on 4 August 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a Kenyan intellectual and a white teenager from Kansas. After briefly living in Indonesia, he was raised by his grandparents in Hawaii. He studied law at Columbia and Harvard and worked as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago. Obama’s political break came in 1996 with a seat in the Illinois state senate, followed by a US Senate seat in 2004. His book The Audacity of Hope, which prefigures many of the themes expressed in his speeches, became a best-seller. Political aficionados had spotted his rhetorical brilliance, but it was still somehow from nowhere that he ran, in 2008, a flawless campaign to beat Hillary Clinton to the Democratic presidential nomination. In a nod to the classical origins of the American Republic, Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in front of a reconstruction of a Roman forum.
It is as yet early to assess Obama’s legacy as president, especially on foreign affairs, on which he was elected to pull America back from engagement. On this basis he was awarded a premature Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. As most presidents do, he found the world came to him even if he had not invited it in. Obama’s domestic record may stand the scrutiny of time. The American economy recovered on his watch from the financial crisis of 2008, but his claim to political memory is the Affordable Health Care Act. Every Democrat president has promised universal health care for America. Every one before Barack Obama failed to put anything into statute; Obama did. If even a cover version of his legislation survives its assault by his successor, Obama will be remembered as the Democrat who succeeded.
Tonight, more than two hundred years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward. It moves forward because of you. It moves forward because you reaffirmed the spirit that has triumphed over war and depression, the spirit that has lifted this country from the depths of despair to the great heights of hope, the belief that while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people. Tonight, in this election, you, the American
