The inauguration was the first step in the unfolding policy of presidential recognition of the arts. Then came a series of White House dinners. In November 1961, Pablo Casals, who had long declined to play his cello in public as a badge of mourning for Spanish democracy, agreed to perform at the White House on an evening honoring Munoz Marin. Kennedy said with emphasis in introducing Casals: “We believe that an artist, in order to be true to himself and his work, must be a free man.” They had talked together for an hour about world peace before the dinner. “I have never known anyone who listened more carefully than he did,” Casals said later. “And I was happy I went. When I played at the White House, I was very happy in my heart.” Other dinners followed—for Stravinsky; for the western hemisphere Nobel prizewinners (whom Kennedy called “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone”); for André Malraux (when Kennedy began his toast by saying, “This will be the first speech about relations between France and the United States that does not include a tribute to General Lafayette”)—all memorable affairs. He encouraged the cabinet to arrange a series of cultural evenings—readings, recitals, dramatic performances. Never before had any President sought to identify the White House with the whole range of the nation’s intellectual life. Thornton Wilder, who inaugurated the cabinet series, remarked that the administration had created “a whole new world of surprised self-respect” in the arts.
To complete the process of national recognition, Kennedy rehabilitated the Presidential Medal of Freedom in an effort to honor those “whose talent enlarges the public vision of the dignity with which life can be graced and the fullness with which it can be lived.” Though an interdepartmental committee was charged with making the recommendations, Kennedy took a keen personal interest in the candidates and citations. Thus he himself added Edmund Wilson’s name to the list in 1963. (Knowing Wilson’s dislike of honors on principle, I called him to see whether he would accept the Medal. He said that he would be greatly pleased to do so, but that the President should know he was writing a pamphlet attacking the income tax and the defense budget. It was not, he said, directed so much against the Kennedy administration, parts of which he much admired, as against governments in general; still the President ought to know about it, and he would understand if we decided not to go ahead with the presentation. When I reported this to Kennedy, he smiled and said that he didn’t think it would make any difference.)
5. THE ARTS AND GOVERNMENT
Kennedy well understood that honoring the masters would not solve the problems of the young artist or the elevation of artistic standards or the economic sustenance of the arts. Nor did he suppose that these were problems to which government had the solution. But within its own domain the national government did all sorts of things, from designing stamps to erecting public buildings, which bore upon the arts; and these things, the President felt, ought to serve as an example to the rest of the country. In the busy summer of 1961 he asked Pierre Salinger and me to consider how the White House might take hold of this problem. We recommended that he commission a special consultant to survey the areas where public policy had impact on cultural life and to define the elements of a national cultural program.
I had in mind for the assignment August Heckscher of the Twentieth Century Fund. Heckscher combined artistic sensibility with an astute practical sense of the way government operated. He had written a thoughtful paper on “The Quality of American Culture” for President Eisenhower’s Commission on National Goals and was no doubt responsible for the sentence in the Commission’s report which so well expressed part of President Kennedy’s concern: “In the eyes of posterity, the success of the United States as a civilized society will be largely judged by the creative activities of its citizens in art, architecture, literature, music, and the sciences.” After the success of the Casals dinner, the President thought it was time to go ahead. Early in December 1961 he invited Heckscher to conduct an inquiry “without fanfare” into the resources, possibilities and limitations of national policy in relation to the arts. “Obviously government can at best play only a marginal role in our cultural affairs,” Kennedy told Heckscher. “But I would like to think that it is making its full contribution in this role.”
Kennedy’s caution expressed, as Heckscher later noted, his fear of the vague generalization and the empty gesture. “To assume that the varied, unpredictable, and sometimes oddly expressed cultural life of our country could in any way be dependent on government, or be derived from government, was impossible for him. He was skeptical of any idea that government could do more than sometimes stir things up, and sometimes give recognition and support to what had strangely or wonderfully occurred.” Heckscher, Salinger and I all shared this feeling. The notion, proposed by some, of a Department of Fine Arts filled us with apprehension; we agreed with John Sloan who was said to have welcomed the idea because “then we’d know where the enemy is.” But Heckscher had a profound conviction, sensitively explained in his book of 1962, The Public Happiness, that public support of the creative arts could become an antidote to the boredom and alienation of modern industrial society and the means by which the individual in a world of flickering images could recover a sense of objectivity and reality. The goal, he said, was “participation in a common life which is recognized as being enriched, which is known to be illuminated and made coherent, by the forms of art.”
Heckscher began work as part-time Special Consultant on the Arts in 1962. “The statement of a philosophy of government and the arts,” Kennedy told him, “won’t be enough. We have to go beyond that now.” As Heckscher carried forward his survey, he suggested as the first test whether government kept its own house in beauty and fitness. Government was, after all, “the great builder, the coiner, the printer, the purchaser of art, the commissioner of works of art, the guardian of great collections, the setter of standards for good or for bad in innumerable fields.” Next he reviewed such questions as the impact of tax and tariff laws on artists and artistic institutions; the establishment of the Advisory Council on the Arts, which he lifted out of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, to which it had been consigned in the original Eisenhower proposal; and then, as “the logical crowning step in a national cultural policy,” the establishment of a National Arts Foundation. In the spring of 1963 he embodied these and other recommendations in a report on “The Arts and the National Government.” A few days later Kennedy set up the Advisory Council on the Arts by executive order and prepared to make the Special Consultancy on the Arts a fulltime and permanent office. Since Heckscher wished to return to the Twentieth Century Fund, it was the President’s intention to appoint Richard Goodwin to the post.
Kennedy and Heckscher had strong support throughout the government in this effort, especially from two members of the cabinet, Arthur Goldberg and Stewart Udall. Udall, the good friend of Frost, deeply believed that it was “the artists and the men of ideas who have done, and will do, the most to determine our national purpose, to fix our national character, and to shape the American legacy.” Under his leadership the Department of the Interior became an active sponsor of cultural activities and vigilant defender of historic sites and structures. Goldberg was thrust into cultural affairs when Kennedy insisted that he settle a strike which threatened to close down the Metropolitan Opera at the end of 1961. This led the Secretary of Labor into a characteristically trenchant inquiry into the financial crisis of the performing arts. “To free our art forms from destructive financial tests,” he concluded, “is to protect them from the tyranny of the majority. . . . If the arts are to flourish, they must be relieved of total dependence upon the market place.” Najeeb Halaby, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Agency, set up an expert committee to supervise the design and decoration of airports. In the House of Representatives Frank Thompson and John Lindsay and in the Senate Hubert Humphrey, Claiborne Pell,
Joseph Clark and Jacob Javits all fought hard for the cultural effort.
The President and the Attorney General had a particular interest in television. As Senator, Kennedy had told a group of broadcasters that politics and television presented the practitioner with similar problems. “Will the politician’s desire for reelection—and the broadcaster’s desire for ratings—cause both to flatter every public whim and prejudice—to seek the lowest common denominator of appeal—to put public opinion at all times ahead of the public interest? For myself, I reject that view of politics, and I urge you to reject that view of broadcasting.” In order to encourage the industry in this course, Kennedy appointed Newton N. Minow, the old associate of Adlai Stevenson’s, as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission; and Minow promptly told the National Association of Broadcasters that, if they would ever watch television from morning to night, “I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.” A day or so later Joseph P. Kennedy told Minow that “this was the best speech since January 20—give ’em hell—hit ’em again.” The powers of the FCC chairman were limited; but in the next years Minow not only hit them again and again but obtained laws providing federal aid for educational television and requiring that new television sets receive channels in the ultra-high frequency range. “You keep this up,” Kennedy told him on one occasion. “This is one of the really important things.” The Attorney General had a special concern for the quality of children’s programs. When, to the President’s great regret, Minow resigned in 1963, E. William Henry, a protégé of Robert Kennedy’s, carried forward his work with comparable humor and force.
The President’s commitment to the arts reached its climax in the city of Washington itself. Most Presidents since Jefferson had remained astonishingly indifferent to their immediate surroundings. But Kennedy, with his strong architectural instincts, had a consuming interest in the physical appearance of the capital. He had hardly taken his presidential oath when he confronted a plan conceived in the previous administration to replace the graceful old residences on Lafayette Square in front of the White House with enormous modern office buildings. He made William Walton, whom he subsequently appointed chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, his agent in these matters. The President and Walton wanted to preserve the nineteenth-century character of the Square; at the same time, it was essential to provide office space for the overflowing federal establishment. For a time the problem seemed to defy solution. Both Kennedy and Walton gave up and concluded that the old buildings would have to go. Only Jacqueline held out. “The wreckers haven’t started yet,” she said, “and until they do it can be saved.” Then the President, running by chance into John C. Warnecke, the San Francisco architect, asked his advice, and Warnecke came up with a brilliant solution which protected the historic houses and placed new and harmonizing office buildings behind them. Kennedy maintained a steady interest in the development of the Lafayette Square plan. One day Walton apologized for interrupting him when weightier affairs were on his desk. “That’s all right,” said Kennedy. “After all, this may be the only monument we’ll leave.”
He laid down as a guiding principle for Washington that the “nation’s capital should embody the finest in its contemporary architectural thought.” Bernard Boutin, the head of the General Services Administration and the government’s chief builder, faithfully executed this directive; Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and Gropius’s Architects Collaborative were soon designing federal buildings. The President’s greatest dream was the rehabilitation of Pennsylvania Avenue, that broad boulevard stretching from the Capitol to the White House, conceived by L’Enfant as the “grand axis” of the city but now, on its northern side, decaying into block after block of dingy buildings and cheap shops. Arthur Goldberg had noticed the decay when he rode in the stately procession down the Avenue on Inauguration Day, and he soon discussed with Kennedy whether anything could be done. In June 1962 the President appointed a Council on Pennsylvania Avenue headed by another San Francisco architect, Nathaniel A. Owings. The result was a splendid plan for the re-creation of the central city.
“You, sir,” said J. Roy Carroll, Jr., the president of the American Institute of Architects, to Kennedy in the spring of 1963, “are the first President of the United States—except, possibly, the first and third ones—who has had a vision of what architecture and its allied arts can mean to the people of the nation, and of what the careful nurturing of the architecture of the city of Washington can mean to the millions who come here to pay homage to the heart of their country.” And, in 1964, speaking where Faulkner had spoken exactly six years before, Lewis Mumford described Kennedy as “the first American President to give art, literature and music a place of dignity and honor in our national life.”
XXVIII
The Politics of Modernity
THE KENNEDY MESSAGE—self-criticism, wit, ideas, the vision of a civilized society—opened up a new era in the American political consciousness. The President stood, in John P. Roche’s valuable phrase, for the politics of modernity. “Liberalism and conservatism,” Kennedy remarked one night, “are categories of the thirties, and they don’t apply any more. . . . The trouble with conservatives today is that most of their thinking is so naive. As for the liberals, their thinking is more sophisticated; but their function ought to be to provide new ideas, and they don’t come up with any.” His effort was to dissolve the myths which had masked the emerging realities in both domestic and foreign affairs. His hope was to lead the nation beyond the obsessive issues of the past and to call forth the new perceptions required for the contemporary world.
1. THE PRESIDENCY OF THE YOUNG
It was no accident therefore that he made his most penetrating appeal precisely to those who were coming of age in this contemporary world and who were most free of the legacies of historic controversy. Indeed, nothing in the Kennedy years was more spectacular than the transformation of American youth.
In the fifties the young men and women of the nation had seemed to fall into two groups. The vast majority were the ‘silent generation,’ the ‘uncommitted generation,’ the ‘careful young men,’ the ‘men in the gray flannel suits’—a generation fearful of politics, incurious about society, mistrustful of ideas, desperate about personal security. A small minority, rejecting this respectable world as absurd, defected from it and became beats and hipsters, ‘rebels without a cause.’ Pervading both groups was a profound sense of impotence—a feeling that the social order had to be taken as a whole or repudiated as a whole and was beyond the power of the individual to change. David Riesman, hearing undergraduate complaints in the late fifties, wrote, “When I ask such students what they have done about these things, they are surprised at the very thought they could do anything. They think I am joking when I suggest that, if things came to the worst, they could picket! . . . It seems to me that students don’t want to believe that their activities might make a difference, because, in a way, they profit from their lack of commitment to what they are doing.” This was November 1960.
Probably it was all beginning to change; but the coming of Kennedy certainly made it change very much faster. He was the first President since Franklin Roosevelt who had anything to say to men and women under the age of twenty-five, perhaps the only President with whom youth could thoroughly identify itself—and this at a time when there were more young people both in the population and the colleges than ever before. His very role and personality, moreover—his individuality in a homogenized society, his wholeness in a specialized society, his freedom in a mechanized society—undermined the conviction of impotence. If the President of the United States seemed almost a contemporary, then political action—even picketing—no longer appeared so ludicrous or futile.
The New Frontier gospel of criticism and hope stirred the finest instincts of the young; it restored a sense of innovation and adventure to the republic. The silent campuses suddenly exploded with political and intellectual activity. Young people running for office explaine
d that Kennedy had made politics respectable; what perhaps they more often meant was that he had made it rational. The Civil Service Commission reported a great increase in college graduates wanting to work for the government. The Peace Corps was only the most dramatic form of the new idealism. Some of the energy Kennedy released moved rather quickly beyond him and against him, subjecting his administration to unsparing, often deeply emotional, criticism; but it was nonetheless he who had struck off the manacles.
The very qualities which made Kennedy exciting to the youth made him disturbing to many of his contemporaries and elders. For his message was a threat to established patterns of emotion and ideology. When he would say, as he did to William Manchester, “We simply must reconcile ourselves to the fact that a total solution is impossible in a nuclear age,” he was affronting all those on both the left and the right who had faith in total solutions. The politics of modernity was intolerable for the true believers. This accounts, I believe, for the ambiguity with which the radical left regarded Kennedy and the hatred which the radical right came to concentrate on him.
2. KENNEDY AND THE LEFT: IDEAS
From the start of the republic American progressivism had had two strains, related but distinct. The pragmatic strain accepted, without wholly approving, the given structure of society and aimed to change it by action from within. The utopian strain rejected the given structure of society, root and branch, and aimed to change it by exhortation and example from without. The one sprang from the philosophy of Locke and Hume; its early exemplars were Franklin and Jefferson. The other sprang from the religion of the millenarians; its early exemplars were George Fox and, in a secularized version, Robert Owen. The one regarded history as a continuity, in which mankind progressed from the intolerable to the faintly bearable. The other regarded history as an alternation of catastrophe and salvation, in which a new turn of the road must somehow bring humanity to a new heaven and a new earth. The one was practical and valued results. The other was prophetic and valued revelations. The one believed in piecemeal improvements, the other in total solutions. Both were impatient with established complacencies and pieties. Both recognized that the great constant in history was change. But the problem of power split them. The pragmatists accepted the responsibility of power—and thereby risked corruption. The Utopians refused complicity with power—and thereby risked irrelevance.
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