Washington Journal

The Torch Has Been Passed

President Barack Hussein Obama has now taken the oath of office, concluding with the words, “So help me God.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts, the first Roman Catholic chief justice, administered the oath. Forty-eight years have passed since John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic president, concluded the oath of office prescribed by the Constitution, as have all presidents since Franklin Roosevelt and most before, with the words “So help me God.” President Kennedy began his remarks immediately thereafter with a specific reference to this oath, thereby reassuring Protestant America that he was no different from those who came before:

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.

Religion was on everyone’s mind during the election of 1960, but race was also a decisive factor. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. had intended to vote for Richard Nixon because, like many other Protestant clergymen of that day, he did not think that a Roman Catholic should be president. Then his son, Martin Jr., was arrested in Atlanta on October 26, 1960 at a lunch counter sit-in. After several days, the merchants involved dropped the charges and everyone, some 280 students plus Dr. King, were released.

Except that it was discovered that Dr. King had violated his parole from a previous arrest, for driving in Georgia with an Alabama license. So he was taken, in chains, to a state prison. Many feared for his life under such circumstances. This obviously came at a critical time in a close election. While Vice-President Nixon chose not to mention the matter, Senator Kennedy made a phone call to Mrs. King and brother Robert made some lawyerly inquiries of the authorities. King was released. Then Martin Senior spoke to the press:

“Because this man was willing to wipe the tears from my daughter-in-law’s eyes, I’ve got a suitcase of votes, and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.”

Forty-eight years later, that suitcase has grown to immense proportions.

President Obama’s entire life, from conception and birth to the present, has taken place in those forty-eight years since John F. Kennedy brought the nation to its feet with his remarkable address on a similarly cold and sunny winter day. The Cold War was at its utmost intensity. Only one sentence of that remarkable address dealt with domestic policy. The rest focussed on our struggle with the Soviet Union, with Marxism, international communism, the specter that had been haunting Europe for over a century. Yet remarkable changes soon swept the country unleashed by the energetic and charismatic young president.

On that January 20, 1961, I was in the fourth grade at Sanford E. Merrill Elementary School in Park Ridge, Illinois. I walked home for lunch that winter day, as did all the kids in the school. We all lived within a mile of this red-brick school with a classical portico for a front door and a framed photograph of Sanford E. Merrill, who I believe was superintendent of schools in some distant decade, in the entryway. There were two classrooms for each grade, K through Six. Mom had the television on when I walked in the door and we, along with my brother, who was in the sixth grade, watched the inaugural parade as we ate lunch. I remember images of the President’s motorcade leaving the Capitol and PT-109 on a float parading down Pennsylvania Avenue accompanied by crew members and sailors in uniform.

A child of nine today is as far removed from that event as I was then from the inauguration of President Wilson in 1913. In the following forty-eight years, the United States went from being a potential world power to being a superpower that had twice landed expeditionary forces on the continent of Europe and welcomed them home victorious. The United States had put Europe back on its feet and was unquestionably the leader of the free world yet faced a powerful and belligerent coalition of opponents led by the Soviet Union, whose massive army had crushed Nazi Germany only fifteen years before.

From 1961 until today, we have seen our old adversary, the Soviet Union disappear and Red China join the practitioners of capitalism. A new adversary, terrorist Islam, has arisen. We also find ourselves in the midst of an almost unimaginable and barely explicable economic crisis. We have made extraordinary changes in our society and culture, probably greater than those made in the previous forty-eight years. Women are working in greater numbers and higher pay scales. African-Americans are accepted at levels of society and government. The sexual revolution took off in the 1960s, and proceeds apace.

Along with the giddying pace of social change, there is great concern for the survival of local customs and institutions in the age of the internet, much argument over the role of religious figures, institutions and ideas in public life, much concern about the ability of government and education to accommodate the unceasing and vertiginous waves of technological and cultural change. At the local level, people are as concerned as ever about schools, how to prepare children for the future while giving them a sense of the nation’s past, how to achieve the appropriate ethnic, cultural, racial, linguistic and economic mix, and at what price of transporting kids to and fro, and whose decision this is, what role the courts play in deciding who decides and what.

How many children today walk home from school to eat a lunch prepared by their mothers? Is this good or bad?

At this time, along with much soul-searching, finger-pointing and trepidation over said economic crisis, and other crises, and after a seemingly interminable election campaign, the American people have entrusted their leadership to this tall, handsome man from Kansas, Hawaii, Indonesia, southern California, New York City, Cambridge and Chicago, a man as close to being the American Everyman as anyone could imagine. How will a child of nine today look back on this presidency in 2056?

I have not written much about this new president because I am still having trouble believing all that has happened since he announced his campaign some two years ago. Just witnessing the transition that began in November has been unbelievable enough. Suddenly, when his eight years were almost up, here was a gracious and communicative President Bush. Where had this man been all these years? I could not help wondering about a presidency that might have been. He promised to be a uniter, not a divider, way back when, remember?

Now, several weeks after the inauguration, the focus is on the presidency that is and will be. Barack Obama looks like a president, talks like a president and walks like a president. He seems supremely comfortable in his new role, as does his family. William Kristol, a sharp-tongued conservative commentator, has written admiringly of Obama’s political talent. I do not know the story behind his departure from the editorial page of the New York Times, but he seems to be signaling that he will find other things to do for a while and wishes this president well.

There will, of course, be plenty of opposition to his policies. There already is. One cannot be successful without creating some opposition and one cannot expect a president to change the attitude and behavior of the opposition party. But by sounding a consistent theme and maintaining a consistent public persona, a president can accomplish much. There is every reason to believe that Obama is embarking on a presidency of the scale of Eisenhower’s, Reagan’s or Clinton’s in terms of consistent personal popularity.

Comparisons to President Kennedy are inevitable at this point, with Obama’s youth, athleticism, oratory, Ivy-League education and Ivy-League retainers. Back in 1993, when another very smart Democrat took office, many commentators noted the Vietnam disaster that followed the Kennedy presidency, brought on by the best and brightest of the Kennedy brain trust, the very advisers who had so admirably managed the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet no major national disaster occurred on Clinton’s watch. He was a popular president and his economic policies worked so well that they helped him to weather the self-inflicted wounds of his personal life.

Sixteen years later similar concerns have been raised by that school of thought that presumes minimalism to be safer than bold attempts at sweeping change. It is worth noting then, that the Vietnam debacle really unfolded after Kennedy was dead and that his advisers and President Johnson were following the conventional wisdom of the day that Communism had to be met and defeated wherever it reared its ugly head. America’s entire foreign policy establishment initially supported sending combat troops to Vietnam, as did most newspaper editorials, Time magazine and many others.

As an adult now of fifty-seven, I would not trade those thousand wonderful, giddy days of the Kennedy presidency for any other time in my life, whatever came afterward. If the Obama presidency is only half as inspiring, it will be a success.

Now President Obama faces the most severe combination of foreign and domestic crises since Franklin Roosevelt. He has a faltering economy and two shooting wars on his hands and there is no consensus about how to proceed. His greatest challenges lie in countries that no one thought particularly important back in 1961. He will need all the help he can get.

Which brings me back to where I began.

Much has been made of the fact that a conservative white Christian clergyman and a liberal black Christian clergyman, both Protestants, offered invocation and benediction on January 20th, 2009. I thought they each spoke well, but could have said more by saying less. Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Jews have been offering prayer and benediction at inaugurations since President Roosevelt instituted the practice in 1937. Perhaps he decided that the nation could use all the help it could get in the middle of the Depression. His choice for the first invocation: The Rev. ZeBarney Phillips, Chaplain of the Senate; for the benediction, Father John A. Ryan of Catholic University.

President Eisenhower began his inaugural address in 1953 by asking everyone to bow their heads while he prayed aloud. He did this, astoundingly, when he was technically not a Christian. He was baptized several days later, on February 1, at National Presbyterian Church, then on Connecticut Avenue. President Kennedy’s inauguration featured no less than three invocations, led by Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston, followed by Iakovos, Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America, followed by John Barclay, Pastor of Central Christian Church, Austin, Texas. A benediction by Rabbi Nelson Glueck, President of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, concluded the proceedings. Remember it was even colder that day.

Everything that happens on inauguration day (except for the taking of the oath, which must happen) is the prerogative of the President. The President is free to say “So help me God,” or not; place his hand on a Bible, or not; pray, or not; hold a parade, or not; patronize inaugural balls, or not. Should an atheist gain the highest office of the land, (s)he is free to affirm the oath and leave the rest out. If a strict Baptist is elected president, he does not have to dance.

This first African-American president has chosen to reassure the approximately 90% of Americans who profess a belief in God or identify with a religion that he shares their faith and respects their observance.

It’s a free country.

Washington Journal

August 29, 2008

The Campaign of John F. Kennedy, Forty-Eight Years Later


It is inspiring, surprising and more than a little heartbreaking to read T.H. White’s Making of the President 1960 now that forty-eight years have passed and another presidential election proceeds on its frantic pace, as summer nears its end and the election itself is still over two months away.

The electorate is deeply divided as then. The economy is not doing particularly well. Likewise America’s reputation abroad. A two-term president is about to leave.

But as Dwight David Eisenhower was enormously popular throughout his presidency, President Bush is now so unpopular that it is doubtful he will campaign at all. Appearances by the aging but ever-ebullient Eisenhower in the last ten days of campaigning coupled with a powerful burst of television almost surged then Vice-President Nixon to victory. Yet the young Senator from Massachusetts, illuminated by his stellar performance in the first televised debates, drew even larger and more enthusiastic crowds than the President, including a crowd of over one million in New York City, and held on to win.

T. H. White wrote this book when John F. Kennedy was just finding his feet in the White House. Robert Kennedy was Attorney General and Ted Kennedy was just beginning to think of running for Jack’s seat in the Senate. Martin Luther King was hitting his stride as public orator and conscience of the nation. The Peace Corps had just begun.

I first read it in the summer of my first year in college, during lunch breaks while working at E.J. Korvette’s, an early big-box discount store, long since gone out of business. It was 1970, perhaps the dreariest year ever to be alive in America; except for the year before, and the year after. The campus protests over the Kent State killings in May were supposed to transform America. It was clear even a week afterward that they had accomplished little, if anything. It was as if Richard Nixon were the President of a United States in which the battle between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd had finally ended, with Fudd winning.

I had come to consciousness of American politics ten years earlier. While most households in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge were dark with disappointment on election eve of 1960, including the Rodham household on the other side of town, my Irish Catholic family was dancing for joy. Aunt Caroline came over for dinner that evening, which always made for a party; that night the party began early and continued late. The adults drank and told stories and laughed: how Mom became a Democrat and voted for FDR in 1932; how Dad’s parents welcomed her, a Protestant, to the family because she was a good Democrat. Dad and Caroline talked about being Democrats and Catholic in Iowa in 1928, in public high school, wearing Al Smith buttons.

My brother and I even enjoyed the unprecedented of privilege of listening to the radio after we were sent to bed and lifted a cheer when NBC News awarded New York’s forty-five electoral votes to John F. Kennedy. In the morning I walked into my fourth-grade classroom in the Sanford E. Merrill Primary School to celebrate with the only other Democrat in the class, Mike Udolph: the only Catholic and the only Jew, a proud alliance.

T.H. White may have been the best political reporter ever, writing history with a novelist’s flair. He began the book with election eve in Hyannisport, then told the whole long story beginning in 1959 before ending dramatically in the wee hours of the following morning:

“At 5:35 Am, Easter Standard Time, Chief of the Secret Service Urbanus E. Baughman noted that television had given Michigan’s 20 votes to Kennedy, to make a tentative 285 and a tentative majority. It was now too late to wonder or doubt any longer, for his responsibility was clear, and at 5:45 Baughman telephoned Inspector Burrell Petersen in Hyannisport at the Holiday Heath Inn and instructed him to establish security at the Kennedy compound. . . . The candidate and his staff still slept as the sixteen agents in their borrowed cars set out in the night for the compound by the beach; by seven in the morning, security had been established and the President-elect was walled off, as he would be for four or eight years to come, from all other citizens and ordinary mortals.”

Later that day, as White told the story, the newly-arrived agents looked on in horror as the Kennedys indulged in an all-afternoon game of touch football that often left the President-Elect of the United States at the bottom of a pile of laughing, tangled bodies.

If nothing else, this president was fun.

White concluded with a section “The View from the White House,” surveying the state of the nation in the winter of 1960-61. He was extraordinarily prescient:

“In the sixties, the office of the Presidency, which John F. Kennedy held, was above all an intellectual exercise. For the courage and skill required in the sixties in war and peace was no longer the simple manly courage and skill that dominated war from the days of the caveman to the last screaming combat of American P-51 and Japanese Zero over Okinawa. Of this old courage and skill, this new President of the United States had much. . . . But such courage and nerve is, in modern war, all but obsolete. This old kind of courage may possibly be reflected in an ultimate decision over the telephone console to trade the death of New York for the death of Moscow, the death of Los Angeles for the death of Leningrad, the death of Washington for the death of Peking. But it would require greater courage and exertion of mind to decide to change the rules of the new chess game, and greater skill to persuade his adversaries and friends, at home and abroad, to abandon dogma and meet him on the plains of reality.”

Less than two years later, Kennedy survived just such a test. With authority from his handling of the missile crisis, his speech in Berlin and his relationship with Khrushchev and Congressional leaders, he signed the Limited Test-Ban Treaty in the summer of 1963 and was riding the waves of public opinion and world affairs like very few before him and none since.

Though only nine years old, I loved this president. This smiling, confident, radiant, Roman Catholic man was my President. He is my President still. It is his flag and the flag of his clan that I have followed.

I only saw Robert Kennedy once, in the parking lot of a shopping center in Mt. Prospect, Illinois. It was a dreary overcast day in October of 1966. He appeared with Senator Paul Douglas who was to lose a few weeks later to Charles Percy. Both men spoke briefly. Robert Kennedy, although suntanned and fit, seemed short, shy and almost infinitely sad, even when smiling. We had to strain to hear him. Only when Senator Kennedy of New York reached out to shake hands did the crowd come alive, surging forward, women squealing, hands reaching over hands like one writhing organism striving to touch him.

I saw Edward Kennedy speak at Harvard in the mid-nineties. He was warmly welcomed by a capacity crowd in the Kennedy School of Government. What I remember most from that now distant afternoon, aside from how proud I was just to be there, was the apparent absence of security other than one Harvard University policeman. There must have been a plain-clothesman somewhere. But the courage of Ted Kennedy to get up in front of a crowd year after year touched me then as it touches me know.

Then there was his voice. The most Irish-looking of them all, large and ruddy-faced, looking more like a Daley of Chicago than a Kennedy, he sounded like a Kennedy. Watching any of the Kennedys on old videotapes often gives me a lump in the throat, but it is the voice that does it, that wonderful tenor, eloquent, plaintive, inspiring. I will never forget how Ted Kennedy’s voice broke during his eulogy of brother Robert in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in June of 1968.

I find it hard to imagine a world without him, one of the last living links to the thousand days; those days when we were touched by fire.

For years to come shall their names be familiar in our mouths as household words:
Jack the President, Bobby and Ted
Sorensen and Salinger, O’Donnell and O’Brien -
Be in our flowing cups freshly remembered
These few, these happy few, this band of brothers.