.
prepared before delivery.
At the end, Lincoln elevates the pitch even further. The question is now not just the ending of slavery but the very survival of democratic representation. Government of, for and by the people: the whole subject in one memorable phrase. It probably wasn’t Lincoln’s coinage, though. The prologue to John Wycliffe’s first English edition of the Bible in 1384 includes the phrase: ‘This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people’, which seems too close not to be the source.
Lincoln’s language may seem biblically dramatic to us now, yet it is considered to be a turning point in the nature of public speech. Before Gettysburg, orators tended to speak like Edward Everett, who said, among many purple passages, ‘standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labours of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature’. There were 13,000 words in that vein. Here is the ancient battle between the Attic and the Asiatic styles, brought forward twenty centuries onto a battlefield in Pennsylvania. Oratory changed that day and Lincoln, in a speech far plainer than Everett’s grand-style classicism, changed it.
Not that the speech was wonderfully received. Lincoln was heard in silence. Not many listeners realised they were in the presence of a speech that would be one of the first in every anthology. It took time for the verdict to settle that Lincoln had delivered a lapidary masterpiece. Its brevity, which had caused consternation on the day in Gettysburg, has since come to be seen as poetic concision rather than short-changing the audience. Lincoln gave meaning to the terrible sacrifice of battle. He defined again the purpose of the United States of America. He gave voice to democracy and equality, the foundations of the nation which he had laid once again.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You
Washington DC
20 January 1961
John F. Kennedy (1917–63) feeds the American desire for myth. In life he defined American modernity, an image that death petrified and preserved. His assassination in 1963 produced the first tumult of conspiracy theories which, half a century later, threaten to overwhelm the quest for truth. More Americans believe that Kennedy’s death was the result of a conspiracy than disbelieve it.
In 1960, at the age of forty-three, Kennedy had become the first child of the twentieth century to become president, the second-youngest man to take that office after the 42-year-old Theodore Roosevelt. Kennedy remains the only Roman Catholic to have been president and the only president to have won a Pulitzer Prize, for Profiles in Courage.
Kennedy was one of nine children born into a Massachusetts family of Irish lineage that had gone into state politics. In 1938, he came to London with his father, who had been appointed as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s. He was in London on 1 September 1939, the fateful day that Germany invaded Poland, and attended the debates in the House of Commons in which war was announced. His Harvard thesis, about the British role in the Munich agreement, became a best-seller under the title Why England Slept.
The war changed Kennedy’s life. His first attempt to enter military service was scuppered when he was disqualified for service due to chronic lower-back pain. It was only after months of exercise to strengthen the muscles that he joined the US Naval Reserve in September 1941. War service gave him a stature that cannot be earned any other way. In August 1943, Kennedy’s navy patrol boat was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer near New Georgia in the Solomon Islands. The crew abandoned the boat and swam to a small island three miles away. Kennedy injured his back in the collision but still towed one of his men, who was badly burned, through the water with a life-jacket strap clenched between his teeth. Kennedy was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and the Purple Heart Medal. On 1 March 1945 he was honourably discharged from the Navy Reserve with the full rank of lieutenant.
The war changed Kennedy’s life in another way too. The mantle of future president had always been laid on his oldest brother, but the death of Joe Kennedy in 1944, killed on a mission over the English Channel at the age of twenty-nine, meant that his father’s hopes for high office were transferred to Jack. Kennedy’s first job after the war, arranged by his father, who knew the proprietor William Randolph Hearst, was as a special correspondent for Hearst newspapers. In that position he was in Berlin, the scene of his own later triumph with a speech (see chapter 2), to cover the Potsdam Conference.
Kennedy returned to America and set out on his political course. He represented Massachusetts in the House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 and in the Senate from 1953 until 1960, in which year he became the Democrat nominee for president. In the general election of 1960, Kennedy won a tight victory over his Republican rival, Richard Nixon. The young president came to power bearing vast domestic hopes. He had plans for ending privation and poverty, for action in the cause of equal civil rights, federal funding for education, medical care for the elderly and a programme of economic stimulus, most of which would fall to his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The 1964 Civil Rights Act passed in part because Johnson invoked the memory of his slain predecessor.
Kennedy’s short time in office was dominated, as the tenure of most presidents is, by foreign affairs. His first error was to overreact to a Cold War speech by the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in early 1961 which poisoned the atmosphere of the Vienna Summit that year. Kennedy announced in Vienna that any treaty between Moscow and East Berlin which affected American access rights in West Berlin would be regarded as an act of war. The Russians proceeded nevertheless, and the prelude to war, with the threat of nuclear confrontation, began.
The next site of the struggle with communism was Cuba. Following Fidel Castro’s victory against the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in January 1959, Kennedy approved a plan he had inherited from President Eisenhower and ordered the invasion of the island using CIA-trained Cuban exiles. The landing at the Bay of Pigs on the night of 16/17 April 1961 ended in humiliation when the invaders were killed or captured. What took the world to the brink, though, were the events of the following October 1962, when the CIA took pictures of ballistic missile sites being built by the Soviet Union in Cuba. Against the advice of some hawks on the National Security Council, Kennedy settled on a naval quarantine. The world trembled on the cusp of nuclear war, but after a perilous period the Russians backed down and removed the weapons.
The next domino to fall was Vietnam. Kennedy vastly increased American involvement in Vietnam, but found no lasting solution and handed on an unresolved problem to his successor. It is still disputed, and will never be settled, whether America’s entanglement in Vietnam would have happened had Kennedy lived longer.
Everyone remembers where they were on the day that C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died. It was 22 November 1963, the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, shot by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. After just two years and ten months in office, he became the youngest president to die. Perhaps because of that early death, Kennedy remains an icon of American politics.
The light has flooded in on his private life since his death. News has spread about his alleged infidelities, such as spending a week at Bing Crosby’s house with Marilyn Monroe, and his illnesses, which were at times critical. Perhaps Kennedy’s brief presidency would not have been possible in this more prurient age. There are plenty of commentators on American politics – Gore Vidal and Arthur J. Schlesinger, for example – who date the decline in trust in the political establishment to the death of John F. Kennedy.
None of the revelations appear to have besmirched his reputation. The Kennedy White House exists in a sepia reality in which hope is forever young. The culture and the politics never seemed so well aligned. Kennedy’s approval rating remains the highest of any American president. It is now impossible to read the speech that follows without a retrospective sense of foreboding. This was Kennedy’s only inaugural address, and it cannot be read now, as is also the case with Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, free from the shadow of what is about to befall him. On his grave at Arlington Cemetery in Washington DC there is a plaque on which many of the lines