Biden should lean on JFK example
Thursday of last week marked 58 years since John Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery, outside of Washington, D.C. He’s buried on the hillside just below the Custis-Lee Mansion, with its commanding view of the capital city.
Eight months (or, since stories vary, maybe it was two weeks) before his assassination, President Kennedy on a visit to Lee Mansion had remarked, in so many words at least, “I could stay here forever.”
And he has, and will. Forever enshrined. Forever dead.
Kennedy remains immensely popular today. The timing of his death certainly has something to do with this: he was gunned down in the midst of a cheering crowd at the absolute zenith of his power. Maybe it was his relative youth – he was 46 – and the idea of a still-promising life tragically unfulfilled. Or maybe it’s because he was good-looking. The camera’s eye loved him. In photos and newsreels, he remains strikingly modern.
For these and other reasons, including his deft handling of the presidency itself, Kennedy occupies a place in our collective memory that is uniquely his own. It is some mixture of celebrity-fan-worship and longing for an America that never was: an America of sweet harmony.
Those of us who who were youngsters during the Kennedy years are especially susceptible to the hype of a mid-century American dreamscape in which our problems were few and manageable and our happiness large and enduring.
Of course, this is not true. Public (and private) tribulations were many and varied. Kennedy, at the center of the maelstrom, knew this maybe better than anyone else. Still, the post-war years were ripe with hope, the war itself having demonstrated that America and its government could do just about anything, and Kennedy, a hero of the war, was the embodiment – the almost perfect embodiment – of this more confident America.
How this manifested itself in real time was captured by Michael A. Fucco, writing in the Post-Gazette in 2013. Fucco was 11 years old when his parents took him to see JFK at a campaign stop in Monessen in the fall of 1962, days before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“I was in awe,” Fucco, a veteran reporter, wrote. “He was handsome beyond description. He wasn’t just tanned. He glowed. … There seemed to be an aura around him.”
Fucco remembered being transfixed by the sight of some grizzled millworkers jumping or climbing from their perches on boxcars and running toward Kennedy and “smiling like young boys (hoping) to touch the hand of their leader.”
JFK’s magnetism was singular. In the often grubby world of politics, his personality was like a searchlight.
However, Kennedy wasn’t so unique that his example might not serve to teach a thing or two to politicians of today, especially Democrats.
Kennedy’s swing through Western Pennsylvania on Oct. 12-13, 1962, was emblematic of a period that today’s party must somehow return to: Democrats competed not just in the cities then, but everywhere.
Kennedy spoke in Pittsburgh in autumn 1962. In addition to Monessen, he also put in appearances in McKeesport, Aliquippa, and “little” Washington.
Busy campaigning that fall for Democratic congressional candidates, Kennedy traveled to New York City, Cleveland, and Chicago, as well as to Wheeling, W.Va.; York, Pa.; Bridgeport, Conn., and Muskegon, Mich.
In Kennedy’s day, Democrats embraced the full spectrum of American life – urban, rural, the suburbs. The Democratic Party was national in scope.
It isn’t today. It can’t win the countryside. (Then, again, Republicans can’t win the cities.)
And if he were to venture out to places that were once regularly inhabited by Democrats, President Biden would have the luxury of needing only the Kennedy speech cards to build on.
“I don’t blame any Republican congressman for objecting to my telling about their record,” Kennedy told the crowd of 25,000 in Monessen.
“What is the program (Republicans) denounce as socialist?” he asked rhetorically. It was Medicare.
“When I say” that the vast majority of GOP members of Congress oppose a minimum wage for workers, “I’m telling the truth. … Their forebears in the 1930s objected to 25 cents an hour.”
“The Republican party line was to vote ‘no’ on every measure, regardless of its importance …”
“I’m telling you (Republicans) are against progress, always have been, are now, and always will be.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.