A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  I think now he had deeper reasons for this than I understood at the time—that his cast of mind had a profounder source than a pragmatist’s preference for a law over an issue, than a rationalist’s distaste for give-’em-hell partisanship, or even than a statesman’s need to hoard national confidence against the possibility that foreign crisis might require swift and unpopular presidential decisions. I believe today that its basic source may have been an acute and anguished sense of the fragility of the membranes of civilization, stretched so thin over a nation so disparate in its composition, so tense in its interior relationships, so cunningly enmeshed in underground fears and antagonisms, so entrapped by history in the ethos of violence. In the summer of 1963 Kennedy spoke to Robert Stein of Redbook about the destructive instincts “that have been implanted in us growing out of the dust” and added, “We have done reasonably well—but only reasonably well” in controlling them. His hope was that it might be possible to keep the country and the world moving fast enough to prevent unreason from rending the skin of civility. But he had peered into the abyss and knew the potentiality of chaos. On another day in the summer of 1963 he concluded an informal talk with representatives of national organizations by suddenly reading them Blanche of Castile’s speech from King John:

  The sun’s o’ercast with blood; fair day, adieu!

  Which is the side that I must go withal?

  I am with both: each army hath a hand;

  And in their rage, I having hold of both,

  They whirl asunder and dismember me.

  3. THE KENNEDY APPROACH

  The fact that neither his time nor his temperament encouraged Kennedy to be a public educator in the explicit manner of the Roosevelts and Wilson did not mean that he renounced the presidential responsibility of public education. On the contrary: he turned out to have an ability unmatched in his age to call spirits from the vasty deep; and they generally came when he called for them. But he did so in his own fashion—a fashion which so subtly permeated national attitudes and so quietly penetrated individual lives that no one realized how much he had changed things until his time was over. The essence of his attack was not admonition and remonstrance, in the earlier style, but example.

  It was this which led to the familiar charge that Kennedy and his administration were preoccupied, to use the odious word, with ‘image.’ Noting the discrepancy between Kennedy’s personal popularity and the support for his policies, observers concluded that he was reluctant to spend his popularity for result. Critics compared him to a matinee idol. One Republican Congressman dismissed the enthusiasm in which he was held: “It’s like that of a movie actor—it’s not related to legislation.” Yet the Kennedy image was not, of course, anything like that of a movie actor. It was packed with a whole set of intellectual implications which were preparing the nation for legislative change as surely as Theodore Roosevelt’s muckrakers or Franklin Roosevelt’s depression. In an age of pervasive contentment, his personality was the most potent instrument he had to awaken a national desire for something new and better. The extraordinary effect with which he used it became apparent only in later years: thus Howard K. Smith in retrospect pronounced Kennedy not a failure in public education but a “brilliant communicator.”

  Kennedy communicated, first of all, a deeply critical attitude toward the ideas and institutions which American society had come in the fifties to regard with such enormous self-satisfaction. Social criticism had fallen into disrepute during the Eisenhower decade. In some influential quarters it was almost deemed treasonous to raise doubts about the perfection of the American way of life. But the message of Kennedy’s 1960 campaign had been that the American way of life was in terrible shape, that our economy was slowing down, that we were neglectful of our young and our old, callous toward our poor and our minorities, that our cities and schools and landscapes were a mess, that our motives were materialistic and ignoble and that we were fast becoming a country without purpose and without ideals. As President, he proceeded to document the indictment. In so doing, he released the nation’s critical energy. Self-criticism became not only legitimate but patriotic. The McCarthy anxieties were forgotten. Critics began to question the verities again, and defenders of the status quo no longer had the heart, or nerve, to call them communists. The President, in effect, created his own muckraking movement.

  The literature of protest in the Kennedy years poked freely into sacrosanct or shadowed corners of American society—the persistence of poverty (Michael Harrington, Herman P. Miller, Ben Bagdikian, Edgar May, Harry Caudill and many others), racial inequities (a whole bookshelf), taxation (Philip Stern, Stewart Alsop), the spoiling of land, air, water and environment (Stewart Udall, Peter Blake, Howard Lewis, Lewis Herber, Donald Carr), the drug industry (Richard Harris, Morton Mintz); it even challenged such national ikons as television (Newton Minow, Merle Miller and others), the pesticide (Rachel Carson), the cigarette (Maurine Neu-berger) and the funeral parlor (Jessica Mitford). There had not been such an outpouring of self-examination since the New Deal. While Presidents cannot claim entire credit for the social criticism of their day, and while in certain fields, notably Negro rights, schools and cities, the process had begun before Kennedy, nonetheless the presidential stance has a pervasive effect on the national mood. “There wasn’t a point,” said a writer in the Village Voice, “where he didn’t upset some preconception of every group in the country.” Like the Roosevelts, Kennedy, by his own personal attitude, helped the nation see itself with new eyes.

  Facts thus collected were one weapon in the dissolution of the established pretensions. Wit was another. The fifties had constituted probably the most humorless period in American history. A President and Vice-President who might have been invented by H. L. Mencken were viewed with invincible solemnity. Adlai Stevenson, a truly serious man who expressed part of his seriousness in humor, was regarded with suspicion. The zone of the acceptably comic had never been so contracted. In 1952 Al Capp, explaining why he was marrying Li’l Abner to Daisy Mae, said that he had decided to go in for fairy tales because the climate for humor had changed; the “fifth freedom” was gradually disappearing. “Without it,” he wrote, “the other four freedoms aren’t much fun, because the fifth is the freedom to laugh at each other. . . . Now there are things about America we can’t kid.” This gloom permeated the decade. As Corey Ford asked in 1958, “What’s funny any more? Subjects we could treat lightly once are deadly serious today. Slowly but surely the wellsprings of humor are drying up. Derision is taken for disloyalty.”

  Part of the narrowing of the zone of laughability was no great loss. Laughing at the powerless—at the spinster or the cripple, at the Irishman or Jew or Negro—had never been wildly funny. But laughing at the powerful was one of the great points of laughing at all; and in the fifties this began to grow risky. Comedians watched one social type or group after another eliminate itself as comic material until in the end the one safe subject was the comedian himself: thus Bob Hope or Jack Benny. Only cartoonists—Jules Feiffer and Herblock especially—kept the satiric faith.

  For Kennedy wit was the natural response to platitude and pomposity. He once told me that the political writers he enjoyed most were Murray Kempton and Bernard Levin, who were by way of being the Menckens of their day. His whole personal bearing communicated a delight in satire; and in his wake came an exuberant revival of American irreverence. This had had its underground beginnings at the end of the fifties in small San Francisco and Greenwich Village nightclubs—Mort Sahl and the hungry i, Mike Nichols and Elaine May—but now it flourished, bringing Art Buchwald back to the United States (“There are only four of us writing humor from Washington these days,” Buchwald said. “Drew Pearson, David Lawrence, Arthur Krock and myself”), producing skits on the Kennedys themselves—Eliot Reid; Vaughn Meader and “The First Family”—and ending in the murky and ambiguous depths of black comedy. Like muckraking, satire forced the nation to take a fresh look at itself and helped prepare the ground f
or change.

  A third component of the Kennedy image was respect for ideas. The fifties had been a decade of anti-intellectualism. For his belief in the trained intelligence Stevenson was ridiculed as an egghead. Neither ideas nor the men who had them were welcome in the places where respectable men fingered the levers of authority. But Kennedy had long hoped, as he said in January 1960, to “reopen the channels of communication between the world of thought and the seat of power.” He felt this, I think, both technically essential in a world imposing novel and complex demands on policy and morally essential to assure civilized government. As President, he carried Roosevelt’s brain-trust conception further than it had ever been carried before. The intellectual was no longer merely consultant or adviser but responsible official, even in areas so remote from traditional academic preoccupations as the Department of Defense. Some imports from the campuses worked out better than others; but the reversal of national form in a decade could hardly have been more spectacular. No President had ever made such systematic use of the nation’s intellectual resources; and under his tutelage both academics and ‘practical’ men discovered that they had something to learn from the other.

  The combination of self-criticism, wit and ideas made up, I think, a large part of the spirit of the New Frontier. It informed the processes of government, sparkled through evenings at the White House and around town, refreshed and enlivened the world of journalism, stimulated the universities, kindled the hopes of the young and presented the nation with a new conception of itself and its potentialities. From the viewpoint of the fifties, it was almost a subversive conception, irreverent and skeptical, lacking in due respect for established propositions and potentates. Perhaps only a President who was at the same time seen as a war hero, a Roman Catholic, a tough politician and a film star could have infected the nation with so gay and disturbing a spirit. But Kennedy did exactly this with ease and grace; and, in doing so, he taught the country the possibilities of a new national style. If he did not get the results he would have liked at once, he was changing the climate in directions which would, in time, make those results inevitable.

  4. THE KENNEDYS AND THE ARTS

  He did this only partly by doubting the perfection of existing institutions. His more powerful weapon was his vision of the truly civilized community America might become. This vision animated his efforts to improve the quality of American life. It reached its climax in the unprecedented concern which the President and his wife gave to the place of the intellect and the arts in the national society.

  “The artist,” William Faulkner had said at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1958, “has no more actual place in the American culture of today than he has in the American economy of today, no place at all in the warp and woof, the thews and sinews, the mosaic of the American dream.” Perhaps it was not quite that bad. The postwar decades saw the beginning of the so-called cultural explosion which by 1960 was sprinkling the American scene with a fallout of amiable statistics—5000 theater groups, 20,000 dramatic workshops, 700 opera groups, 200 dance companies, 1200 symphony orchestras, $100 million spent annually on classical records, $1.5 billion annually on books, more people attending concerts each year than baseball games, more piano players than licensed fishermen, a quadrupling of museums in a generation. The popular interest in the arts soon exerted its pressure on government. In 1952 President Truman received a report from the Fine Arts Commission on “Art and Government”; in 1955 President Eisenhower proposed a federal advisory council on the arts and in 1958 secured a congressional charter for a National Cultural Center in Washington.

  On examination, however, the cultural explosion was less substantial than it seemed. The statistics confused quantity with quality. Most of the new activity was amateur; of the symphony orchestras, only about twenty-five could pay their members a living wage; of the opera and dance groups very few could put on a professional performance; of the books sold, too many were Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming and Fanny Hill. In the words of the Rockefeller Panel Report on the Performing Arts, “For the vast majority of Americans, even those dwelling in cities, a live professional performance of a play, an opera, a symphony, or a ballet is an altogether uncommon experience.” The problem, in the midst of the widening public interest in the arts, lay partly in the preservation and refinement of standards and partly in the organization of financial support for professional artistic institutions.

  The Kennedys came to the White House with a lively desire to help meet this problem. They were wholly unaffected in their attitude toward the arts; it was simply, as their close friend William Walton once put it, that they were “susceptible to the comfort of the arts. They couldn’t live without them—it is woven into the pattern of their lives.” The President’s curiosity and natural taste had been stimulated by Jacqueline’s informed and exquisite responses: art had become a normal dimension of existence. The art to which Kennedy responded most deeply and spontaneously, I think, was literature; but he had a growing interest in architecture, and he had acquired some knowledge of painting—he liked the impressionists, though he was baffled by non-objective art—and sculpture. He was fond of, for example, a Greek bronze figurine of “Herakles and the Skin of a Lion” of about 500 B.C. which he bought in Rome in 1963; at the same time he brought back a Roman imperial head of a young satyr for Jacqueline. He loved picking out presents for her: her birthdays would be a profusion of boxes from Klegeman and drawings from Wildenstein. Serious music, it must be said, left him cold. But even here he believed it important for the President of the United States to lend his prestige to distinction of creation and performance.

  Indeed, the character of his personal interest was less important than his conviction that the health of the arts was vitally related to the health of society. He saw the arts not as a distraction in the life of a nation but as something close to the heart of a nation’s purpose. Excellence was a public necessity, ugliness a national disgrace. The arts therefore were, in his view, part of the presidential responsibility, and he looked for opportunities to demonstrate his concern. Thus when Stewart Udall early in December 1960 suggested that Robert Frost be invited to read a poem at the inauguration, Kennedy instantly responded. (Frost replied: IF YOU CAN BEAR AT YOUR AGE THE HONOR OF BEING MADE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, I OUGHT TO BE ABLE AT MY AGE TO BEAR THE HONOR OF TAKING SOME PART IN YOUR INAUGURATION. I MAY NOT BE EQUAL TO IT BUT I CAN ACCEPT IT FOR MY CAUSE—THE ARTS, POETRY, NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME TAKEN INTO THE AFFAIRS OF STATESMEN.) And when Kay Halle of Cleveland and Washington proposed that leading artists and writers be asked to attend the inaugural—an idea which startled and annoyed the politicians hoarding tickets on the Inauguration Committee—Kennedy told her to go ahead. The combination of Frost on the rostrum and W. H. Auden, Alexis Léger, Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain, Robert Lowell, John Hersey, John Steinbeck, Allen Tate and fifty other writers, composers and painters in the audience did seem to prefigure a new Augustan age of poetry and power. Auden called the invitation “as thrilling as it was surprising.” “What a joy,” said Steinbeck, “that literacy is no longer prima facie evidence of treason.” “Thank you,” said Lincoln Kirstein, “for restoring to the United States the pleasures and the powers of the mind.” And among those who could not be present—

  E. B. White:

  One of the excitements of American citizenship is a man’s feeling of identity with his elected President. I never had this feeling hit me so hard as January 20, 1961, when, watching on television from a Maine farmhouse, I saw first the lectern take fire, then so much else—thanks to your brave words. I promise that where ever I can manage I’ll blow my little draft of air on the beloved flame.

  Archibald MacLeish:

  No country which did not respect its arts has ever been great and ours has ignored them too long. And I should like to add a word of my own about that ceremony. I heard the inaugural address on an uncertain short-wave set in a little cove on the west coast of Santa Lucia in the Windwards.
It left me proud and hopeful to be an American—something I have not felt for almost twenty years. I owe you and send you my deepest gratitude.

  And, from the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minnesota, Ernest Hemingway:

  Watching the inauguration from Rochester there was happiness and the hope and the pride and how beautiful we thought Mrs. Kennedy was. Watching on the screen I was sure our President would stand any of the heat to come as he had taken the cold of that day. Each day since I have renewed my faith and tried to understand the practical difficulties of governing he must face as they arrive and admire the true courage he brings to them. It is a good thing to have a brave man as our President in times as tough as these are for our country and the world.