The Campaign of John F. Kennedy, Sixty-Four Years Later

It is inspiring, surprising and more than a little heartbreaking to read T.H. White’s The Making of the President 1960 now that almost sixty-four years have passed and another presidential election proceeds on its frantic pace, as autumn and the election itself is some six weeks away.?

The electorate is deeply divided as then.? The economy is not doing particularly well; not that it is doing particularly poorly.? Likewise America’s reputation abroad.? The nation is more divided than ever.? It is the best of times; it is the worst of times; all depending on whom you ask.?

T. H. White wrote this book when John F. Kennedy was just finding his feet in the White House.? Robert Kennedy was Attorney General and Ted Kennedy was just beginning to think of running for Jack’s seat in the Senate.? Martin Luther King was hitting his stride as public orator and conscience of the nation.? The Peace Corps had just begun.

I read it in the summer of my first year in college, during lunch breaks while working at E.J. Korvette’s, an early big-box discount store located in shopping centers, long since gone out of business.? It was 1970, perhaps the dreariest year ever to be alive in America; except for the year before, and the year after.? Campus protests over the Kent State killings in May were supposed to transform America.? It was clear even a week afterward that they had accomplished little, if anything.? It was as if Richard Nixon were the President of a United States in which the battle between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd had finally ended, with Fudd, an uncannily and demonically clever Fudd, winning.? Or so it seemed to this young man of nineteen at the time.?

Now these years are eerily coming to resemble the current one.?

I had come to consciousness of American politics ten years earlier.? While most households in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge were dark with disappointment on election eve in 1960, including the Rodham household on the other side of town, my Irish Catholic family was dancing for joy.? Aunt Caroline came over for dinner that evening, which always made for a party; that night the party began early and continued late.? The adults drank and told stories and laughed:? how Mom became a Democrat and voted for FDR in 1932; how Dad’s parents welcomed her, a Protestant, to the family because she was a good Democrat.? Dad and Caroline talked about being Democrat and Catholic in Iowa in 1928, in public high school, wearing Al Smith buttons.?

My brother and I enjoyed the unprecedented of privilege of listening to the radio after we were sent to bed and lifted a cheer when NBC News awarded New York’s forty-five electoral votes to John F. Kennedy.? In the morning, I walked into my fourth-grade classroom in the Sanford E. Merrill Primary School to celebrate with Mike Udolph, the only other Democrat in the class:? the only Catholic and the only Jew, a proud alliance.?

T.H. White may have been the best political reporter ever, writing history with a novelist’s flair.? He began the book with election eve in Hyannis Port, then told the whole long story beginning in 1959 before ending dramatically in the wee hours of the following morning:

“At 5:35 Am, Easter Standard Time, Chief of the Secret Service Urbanus E. Baughman noted that television had given Michigan’s 20 electoral votes to Kennedy, to make a tentative total of 285 and a majority.? It was now too late to wonder or doubt any longer, for his responsibility was clear, and at 5:45 Baughman telephoned Inspector Burrell Petersen in Hyannisport at the Holiday Heath Inn and instructed him to establish security at the Kennedy compound.? . . .? The candidate and his staff still slept as the sixteen agents in their borrowed cars set out in the night for the compound by the beach; by seven in the morning, security had been established and the President-elect was walled off, as he would be for four or eight years to come, from all other citizens and ordinary mortals.”

Later that day, as White told the story, the newly-arrived agents looked on in horror as the Kennedys indulged in an all-afternoon game of touch football that often left the President-Elect of the United States at the bottom of a pile of laughing, tangled bodies.

If nothing else, this president was fun.

White concluded with a section “The View from the White House,” surveying the state of the nation in the winter of 1960-61.? He was extraordinarily prescient:

“In the sixties, the office of the Presidency, which John F. Kennedy held, was above all an intellectual exercise.? For the courage and skill required in the sixties in war and peace was no longer the simple manly courage and skill that dominated war from the days of the caveman to the last screaming combat of American P-51 and Japanese Zero over Okinawa.? Of this old courage and skill, this new President of the United States had much.? . . . But such courage and nerve is, in modern war, all but obsolete.? This old kind of courage may possibly be reflected in an ultimate decision over the telephone console to trade the death of New York for the death of Moscow, the death of Los Angeles for the death of Leningrad, the death of Washington for the death of Peking.? But it would require greater courage and exertion of mind to decide to change the rules of the new chess game, and greater skill to persuade his adversaries and friends, at home and abroad, to abandon dogma and meet him on the plains of reality.”

Less than two years later, Kennedy survived just such a test.? With authority from his handling of the missile crisis, his speech in Berlin and his relationship with Khrushchev and Congressional leaders, he signed the Limited Test-Ban Treaty in the summer of 1963 and was riding the waves of public opinion and world affairs like very few before him and none since.? Though only nine years old, I loved this president.? This smiling, confident, radiant, Roman Catholic man was my President.? He is my President still, inspiring my imagination like no other.

I never saw President Kennedy in person.? I did see Robert Kennedy once, in the parking lot of a shopping center in Mt. Prospect, Illinois.? It was a dreary overcast day in October of 1966.? He appeared with Senator Paul Douglas who was to lose the election a few weeks later to Charles Percy.? Both Senators spoke briefly.? Robert Kennedy, although suntanned and fit, seemed short, shy and almost infinitely sad, even when smiling.? We had to strain to hear him.? Only when Senator Kennedy of New York reached out to shake hands did the candidate come alive as the crowd surged forward, women squealing, hands reaching over hands as one enormous writhing organism.

I saw Edward Kennedy speak at Harvard in the mid-nineties.? He was warmly welcomed by a capacity crowd in the Forum of the Kennedy School of Government.? What I remember most from that now distant afternoon, aside from how proud I was just to be there, was the apparent absence of security other than one Harvard University policeman.? There must have been a plain-clothesman somewhere.? But the courage of Ted Kennedy - smiling, confident, charming - to get up in front of a crowd touched me then as it touches me now.?

Then there was his voice.? The most Irish-looking of them all, large and ruddy-faced, looking more like a Daley of Chicago than a Kennedy of Massachusetts, he sure sounded like a Kennedy.? Watching any of the Kennedys on old videotapes often gives me a lump in the throat, but it is the voice that does it, that eloquent tenor; plaintive, inspiring.? I will never forget Ted Kennedy’s voice breaking during his eulogy of brother Robert in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in June of 1968.?

For years to come shall their names be familiar in our mouths as household words:

Jack the President, Bobby and Ted

Sorensen and Salinger, O’Donnell and O’Brien -

Be in our flowing cups freshly remembered

These few, these happy few, this band of brothers.

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