When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  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 airings on the campaign trail. Repetition of this sort would be assailed as plagiarism or lack of imagination now. In his acceptance speech in Los Angeles, for example, Kennedy had said ‘man … has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over’, which is a less polished version of what we have here. The line ‘it is time, in short, for a new generation of Americans’ has here acquired the light of a metaphorical torch.

  This opening signals something unusual for a presidential Inaugural. Kennedy has ordered this speech to be exclusively about foreign policy. Domestic questions, which were plentiful and problematic – a third recession in seven years, the highest unemployment for two decades and the oppression of black Americans – were weeded out. This is the origin of the flat phrase ‘today at home and around the world’, which has the air of not being at all crafted. It was in fact inserted by Kennedy at the last moment because he suddenly took fright at the realisation that, as a speech devoted to foreign affairs, his Inaugural might read like an evasion on civil rights at home. The effect of seeking to have it both ways is that it doesn’t work. Trying to patch the omission makes the absence of domestic topics glaring. It would have been better to leave out the reference, as his speech-writer had, because then the audience appreciates that the omission was a choice. A perfunctory inclusion makes the audience feel that it must have been an error.

  Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge – and more. To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do – for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder. To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom – and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

  The survival of liberty is, as a subject for a speech, ‘nobly conceived’, as John Steinbeck put it at the time. But words are close to deeds for a president, and Kennedy has, ever since then, faced the accusation that he locked himself into the stance of the cold warrior in the short time he governed with the pledge to ‘pay any price, bear any burden’ in the defence of liberty. Critics have drawn a straight line that runs through the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the peril of the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond.

  Kennedy’s rhetoric has both a lineage and a legacy. The lineage runs in the commitment to liberating the oppressed around the globe, which is an echo of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism. The legacy ensues in the echoes from 1963 that are audible in the first inaugural addresses of both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and in George W. Bush’s rhetoric against tyranny in his second Inaugural, after 9/11. ‘When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.’ That could have been Kennedy; in fact it was Bush.

  Bear in mind, though, that the calculation changes over time, and the same words in defence of liberty have one charge in 1961 and quite another forty years later. For Kennedy the threat to American liberty was real and domestic, as nuclear annihilation would respect no boundaries. By the time Clinton and Bush come to make speeches in the name of the liberal international order the demands are different. The question has become solely whether America should be out in the world helping to police liberty. But here Sorensen’s writing is as sonorous as anywhere, and we see one of the dangers of rhetoric, which is that it can run away with the speaker. The words have a grandeur which, in the hindsight of the troubles to come, is skirting closer to hubris than Kennedy might have meant. Indeed, a famous later speech, at the American University in Washington in 1963, treated a similar topic in a much more emollient fashion.<
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  Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction. We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed. But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course – both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war. So let us begin anew – remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate. Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belabouring those problems which divide us. Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms – and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations. Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce. Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah – to ‘undo the heavy burdens … [and] let the oppressed go free’. And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavour, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

  That opening ‘finally’ must make the speechwriter cringe: we’re only halfway through. It is the final part of its own section but it still sounds the only false note in the writing, which is otherwise perfectly controlled. The credit for that is due to Sorensen, who acted as editor-in-chief of the many contributions that Kennedy commissioned. Solicited suggestions came in from the columnists Walter Lippmann and Joseph Kraft, civil rights advisers Harris Wofford and Louis Martin, and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, along with a pile of unsolicited material. Secretary of State Dean Rusk added phrases. Billy Graham sent a list of possible biblical quotations, as did the leader of Washington’s Jewish Community Council, Isaac Franck. Sorensen held the pen, though, and Galbraith, in particular, was disappointed that so few of his resounding phrases made the final cut. Years later he rather forlornly claimed that among the surviving words of his contribution was the simple refrain: ‘Let us …’

  This is the passage in which Kennedy moves the argument on from rigid Cold War binary opposition. The speech does contain plenty of counterpoints to his deliberate show of strength – ‘civility is not a sign of weakness’; the United Nations is ‘our last best hope’; and the need for ‘a grand global alliance’ against ‘the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself’. It would therefore be wrong to read this speech as nothing other than a resilient text of a cold warrior, although that is the essential context. In 1957 the Soviet Union had launched the first space capsule to orbit the earth. West Berlin had been threatened by a Soviet ultimatum. South Vietnam had been menaced by a guerrilla campaign from the communist regime in Hanoi. America felt ill-equipped for the challenge and wanted a strong response. That speech about the peril is in there certainly, but so too are the caveats and the entreaties. Kennedy’s message to Khrushchev is clear. He will stand against armed encroachments, but he wants to lower the temperature with negotiations and cooperation.

  In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe. Now the trumpet summons us again – not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need – not as a call to battle, though embattled we are – but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’ – a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, 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. Numberless 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.