Missing JFK More Than Ever

He has been gone now longer than he lived. On this day 47 years ago, John F. Kennedy was killed at 44, and November 22nd has been a heartsick day ever since for those who remember.

What we feel this year is more than nostalgia. We miss a president who, after averting nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, felt the urgency to control those weapons by signing the first Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets, which the Senate ratified by a vote of 80-19 two months later, only weeks before he died (Jon Kyl, take note).

Now, as Republicans play political games to stall a new arms treaty with the Russians to the alarm of American allies and the North Koreans keep playing nuclear chicken, I recall what JFK told me in an interview then:

"(T)hose who are in opposition to these efforts usually are well organized and highly motivated, and they make their voices heard up on the Hill and throughout the country...

"A great mass of the people frequently are not heard or may not be informed, may not understand the arguments, may feel the arguments are too complicated, may be so involved in their own private lives that they don't have time to take an informed interest in world events or in great national issues. Therefore, the field is left to a few participants on both sides."

In another interview with me, he had put it more simply. "Too many people," Kennedy said, "want to blow up the world."

As today's President struggles to find the votes to prevent that, he could do worse than falling back on what JFK said back then: “It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.”

If he had been spared, John F. Kennedy would be 91 now and certainly saying the same things. With the wisdom of age, he might well repeat what he said then about the brutal and violent instincts of human beings that, in his words, “have been implanted in us growing out of the dust.”

In controlling those destructive impulses, JFK said sadly, “we have done reasonably well——but only reasonably well.“

More than ever, we miss him.

45 Years Ago Today

As editor of Redbook, I was about to make a lunchtime speech to three hundred advertising people at the Ambassador East in Chicago. After that, I would check out, have dinner on the Twentieth Century Limited, read myself to sleep and be home in the morning.

Shortly after noon, I was at a table with guests, nattering about nothing over shrimp cocktails, when a waiter bent to my ear and whispered, "President Kennedy's been shot."

I followed him into the kitchen. A small TV set was surrounded by waiters holding trays, chefs with knives and cleavers, maids carrying mops, frozen in shock, tears in their eyes. On the grainy screen, Walter Cronkite was talking evenly about a motorcade, a book depository, Parkland Hospital, but his stricken face was telling more.

I came back to the dining room, went to the platform and tapped on the microphone. As the clatter calmed, I found words coming out of my mouth.

"I'm sorry to have to tell you, but President Kennedy's been shot and it looks...bad. I know you'll want to go where you can find out more. Thank you for coming."

As I sat down dazed, the waiter asked if I wanted lunch and I shook my head. A minute later he put a goblet of brandy in front of me.

A white-haired man came up and asked, "Aren't you going to make your speech?" I shook my head.

The large TV screen upstairs showed Cronkite's face crumpling as he told of Kennedy's death. I packed my bags.

On the train, I felt I was going from where my life had been to somewhere else. In my fortieth year, in the dining car, I tried to take in people talking and laughing, but nothing made sense. I went to my roomette for a night of sleepless sleep.

Three months earlier, I had been in the Oval Office with the man now dead in Dallas. Kennedy was sitting in a rocking chair and his face, under the Hyannisport tan, was drawn, lines around his sunken eyes telling an unspoken story of pain and pills. We talked for half an hour and, when he rose to shake hands goodbye, I thought I saw him wince.

Now he was gone, and the world would never be the same again.

Obama's Kennedy Connection

There were echoes in his Iowa victory speech Thursday night that may come from the influence on Barack Obama of the man who worked with JFK on "Profiles in Courage" and his Inaugural Address in 1960.

At 79, Ted Sorensen has been out on the campaign trail, introducing Obama and comparing him to the President he served almost half a century ago.

"Obama is older than Kennedy was when Kennedy ran for president," Sorensen has been pointing out. "He's had the same experience in the Senate as Kennedy had when he ran for president, and he's had the same opportunity to view the country from abroad as Kennedy did when he ran for president."

Sorensen, who doesn't see well now and needs help getting up to speak, tells crowds, "Don't worry about my eyesight. I have more vision than the President of the United States."

Taking the oath of office, John F. Kennedy said "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.'

In Des Moines, Obama said, "The time has come for a president who will be honest about the choices and the challenges we face, who will listen to you and learn from you, even when we disagree, who won't just tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to know...who restores our moral standing, who understands that 9/11 is not a way to scare up votes but a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the 21st century."

Sorensen was at Robert Kennedy's side when he campaigned for President in 1968 and would say, "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not." Now Obama is telling Americans "our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be."

In last night's debate, Hillary Clinton observed that "words are not actions, as beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are." But Obama insisted that "words do inspire. Words do help people get involved...Don't discount that power."

With Ted Sorensen at his side, Barack Obama is not likely to forget that.

What's Offensive Is Romney's Religiosity

He has painted himself into a corner and, no matter where Mitt Romney goes in tonight's speech on religion, he is going to leave messy footprints.

Even the locale is a mistake. Meant to evoke a parallel with John F. Kennedy's deft defense of his Catholicism in 1960, it only underscores how much the role of religion has changed in American politics and, in the Bush era, for the worse.

In Kennedy's time, separation of church and state was an article of faith for mainstream politicians of both parties. Until then, Presidents had all been white Protestant men. Kennedy, in trying to broaden the definition to white Protestant or Catholic men, was arguing that religious belief may be a reflection of a President's principles but is not substantively involved in how he governs.

"I believe," he told Protestant ministers in Houston, "in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish...where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all...

"I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."

Voters agreed and, in Gore Vidal’s 1960 play, “The Best Man,” as a former President recalls the old days when politicians “had to pour God over everything like ketchup,” audiences laughed at the anachronism.

Nobody is laughing now. George W. Bush has erased the line between church and state to the point where Romney, as a candidate, has been pandering to the Religious Right to win the nomination. It is that religiosity, not his religion, that is offensive.

Now Romney, still holding the ketchup bottle, will try to persuade voters that as President he would "maintain our religious heritage in this country," as he recently put it, but that his own particular religious beliefs are beside the point.

Romney is essentially a salesman (in amassing millions, associates say he was the "presenter") who has tailored his pitch on many issues this year to what voters want to hear. If he can sell this one, maybe he deserves to be President and use his skills to persuade the world to stop hating us.

Mixed Feelings About the Sixties

Suddenly we are back in the 1960s with Hillary Clinton citing virtues for what she did back then, Barack Obama claiming he is of a new generation above the divisiveness of those days and Tom Brokaw, as usual, writing a book to explain it all.

At her alma mater, Wellesley, this week, Clinton said, "I need your help to make the calls and knock on the doors and talk to your friends and family. That's what I did back in 1968 when a group of my dear friends and I jumped in a car…and would drive from Wellesley to Manchester, New Hampshire, stuffing envelopes and walking precincts for Eugene McCarthy. He was running for president on a platform of ending the Vietnam War. I am running for president on part of a platform of ending the war in Iraq."

In Iowa, Obama is telling voters, "Senator Clinton and others have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. It makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done. And I think that's what people hunger for."

Politicians hype everything about themselves, including the accident of when they were born, but the 1960s were formative years for today's America, exposing fault lines in our national life that still divide us.

From my ancient perspective, what happened back then goes too deep for glib generalizations and political pandering.

On the one hand, the first generation of Americans not entirely driven to outdo their parents materially turned to moral superiority--about war, race, gender. In the 1950s movie, "The Wild One," biker Marlon Brando, asked what he's rebelling against, answers, "What have you got?"

There was awakening from complacency to challenge injustice and try to create a better society. But there was also self-righteous and self-serving acting out by draft-card burners, culminating in the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention where anti-war protesters and delegates, including me, were tear-gassed.

We started the decade with JFK's "Ask what you can do for your country" and ended up with Richard Nixon and his dirty tricksters in the White House.

The culture wars began. People Nixon called "The Silent Majority" were appalled by privileged kids publicly trashing their traditional values at Woodstock and elsewhere, paving the way for Reagan's revival a decade later of the fictional feel-good America he lived in as an actor in 1940s movies.

In looking ahead to 2008, it would be a mistake to overuse the 1960s as a template. America was going through social and political growing pains back then that are not quite parallel to what we face now, but at the same time, there is no virtue in dismissing all that and assuming we can just turn to a blank new page in our history.

If Republicans are living in a nostalgic past, Democrats can't just push ahead to a fantasy future. There are enough questions to answer about what we do now in today's world.

A Golden Age in Black and White

In the 1950s, we began to see the world differently. A new generation of photographers was transforming frozen posed pictures into available-light images of people and places as they really were.

Those golden days of black-and-white photography are recalled in a new web site by one of the best of them, my friend George Zimbel. A few clicks will take you to a Bourbon Street bar, an Irish dance hall, a Vermont quarry of that time.

A few more will show you the unguarded famous--Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Edward R. Murrow, Richard Nixon.

“Photographs,” Susan Sontag wrote, “alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.”

Now that we are flooded with pictures, it’s good to be reminded there once was not only an aesthetic but an ethics of seeing, when everyone did not feel entitled to observe everything. What photographers who were artists did show us was well worth seeing.