Grace, wit, irony, youth, courage: all combined to make us admire Kennedy. And there was one more thing: the speeches. Kennedy spoke too quickly; he often failed to pause for applause; his accent was strange to many Americans. But he made some of the greatest political speeches I’ve ever heard.
Most of them were written by Ted Sorensen (with occasional help from others, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Goodwin). But Kennedy was not a mindless robot, reciting the words presented to him by his handlers. He was actively involved in the process of crafting each major speech, from sketching the broad outlines to changing (and often improving) specific language. Kennedy had written two books (Why England Slept and the best-selling Profiles in Courage) before becoming president. He originally wanted to be a newspaperman and sometimes mused about buying the Washington Post after he left office. He cared about words, and it showed in the speeches.
Looking again at the texts, I can hear his voice still coming to me across the decades, charged with urgency, insistent that the world must be challenged and life itself embraced. He never slobbered. He lifted no phrases out of cheap movies. All the revisionism cannot deny the quality of those words and the tough-minded decency of their message. Some excerpts:
To Baptist ministers in Houston, September 12, 1960:
“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish. Where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source. Where no religious body seeks to impose its will, directly or indirectly, upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.…For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist.…Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you.”
To the American people, after returning from Europe, June 6, 1961:
“Mr. Khrushchev made one point which I want to pass on. He said there are many disorders throughout the world, and he should not be blamed for them all. He is quite right. It is easy to dismiss as Communist-inspired every anti-government or anti-American riot, every overthrow of a corrupt regime, or every mass protest against misery and despair. These are not all Communist-inspired. The Communists move in to exploit them, to infiltrate their leadership, to ride their crest to victory. But the Communists did not create the conditions which caused them.”
Reporting to the nation about the white mob violence attending James Meredith’s entrance into the University of Mississippi and the decision to protect him with the National Guard, September 30, 1962:
“Even among law-abiding men, few laws are universally loved, but they are uniformly respected and not resisted. Americans are free, in short, to disagree with the law but not to disobey it. For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob, however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law. If this country should ever reach the point where any man or group of men by force or threat of force could long defy the commands of our court and our Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ, and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.”
In a commencement address at American University, about the need to negotiate with the Soviet Union, June 10, 1963:
“What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace for our time but peace for all time…
“So, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
To the nation, on civil rights, June n, 1963:
“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home — but are we to say to the world and, much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race except with respect to Negroes?”
Receiving an honorary degree at Amherst, October 26, 1963:
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness. But the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.
“Our national strength matters. But the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. ’I have been,’ he wrote, ’one acquainted with the night.’ And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. …”
V.
Years later, long after the murder in Dallas and after Vietnam had first escalated into tragedy and then disintegrated into defeat; long after a generation had taken to the streets before retreating into the Big Chill; long after the ghettos of Watts and Newark and Detroit and so many other cities had exploded into nihilistic violence; after Robert Kennedy had been killed and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; after Woodstock and Watergate; after the Beatles had arrived, triumphed, and broken up, and after John Lennon had been murdered; after Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter had given way to Ronald Reagan; after passionate liberalism faded; after the horrors of Cambodia and the anarchy of Beirut; after cocaine and AIDS had become the new plagues — after all had changed from the world we knew in 1963,1 was driving alone in a rented car late one afternoon through the state of Guerrero in Mexico.
I was moving through vast, empty stretches of parched land when the right rear tire went flat. I pulled over — and quickly discovered that the rental car had neither a spare nor tools. I was alone in the emptiness of Mexico. Trucks roared by, and some cars, but nobody stopped. Off in the distance I saw a plume of smoke coming from a small house. I started walking to the house, feeling uneasy and vulnerable — Mexico can be a dangerous country. A rutted dirt road led to the front of the house. A dusty car was parked to the side. It was almost dark, and for a tense moment, I considered turning back.
And then the door opened. A beefy man stood there, looking at me in a blank way. I came closer, and he squinted and then asked me in Spanish what I wanted. I told him I had a flat tire and needed help. He considered that for a moment and then asked me if I first needed something to drink.