Fifty years on.
January 20, 2011, 9:16 am
Posted by Grant Gallicho
From E. J. Dionne’s latest column, just posted to our home page:
It’s remembered as a day chilled by “a Siberian wind knifing down Pennsylvania Avenue” and illuminated by “the dazzling combination of bright sunshine and deep snow.”
On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy began his presidency with a speech at once soaring and solemn. Fifty years on, we have not heard an inaugural address like it. Tethered to its time and place, it still challenges with its ambition to harness realism to idealism, patriotism to service, national interest to universal aspiration.
Could a president give this kind of speech today?
In our proud little parochial school. we watched television then, I believe, in hope and inspiration and delight… and then those tragic days in November nearly three years later, we watched again in horror and anguish and disillusion… Yet I believe that these words captured this era — coupled with Good Pope John and the unknown, but felt energies of Vatican II — to chart a course for many of us… yet I believe, collectively, we have not lived up to the legacy… so nostalgia and bittersweet feelings… yet… gratitude, faith, and even in this gloomy time, some longings for hope…
Sadly, as NPR pointed out today, his speech could not be given today
Instead, we have a bunch of GOpers making up Kennedy speeches for a program about him for the History Channel, which then refused the program after a number of historians criticized it.
That’s the flavor of non-inspiration, us Americans against them today.
Kennedy had style. We had never seen anything like him as president. He gripped the whole nation. But for Catholics he was the sign that they arrived. Just the fact that he was Catholic was enough for many Catholics. He knew what many presidents forget that a president must give people hope. His inaugural speech was truly historic.He made his share of mistakes but no one moved the country the way he did. The country was torn when he became president and it became worse. But great things happened for civil rights. He was wrong on Vietnam and was exploitive of women. Below are some quotes from the Time magazine article in 1983. A pretty good summary of JFK.
“The death of John F. Kennedy became a participatory American tragedy, a drama both global and intensely intimate……he knew the limitations of everything, including himself. His instruments were sensitive to the bogus. He might even have had some mordant crack to make about that Eternal Flame. ……..But the myth of John Kennedy will undoubtedly outlive the substance of what he achieved. History will remember not so much what he did as what he was, a memory kept in some vault of the national imagination. In the end, the American appreciation of Kennedy may come to be not political but aesthetic, and vaguely religious.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952258-1,00.html
Read James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.
Let us Pray that in this hour, we have “the energy, the Faith, and the devotion”, to take up the torch and begin anew so that” God’s work will truly be our own”.
Apropos of this, for those in the Washington, D.C. area, Col. Colburn will be conducting the Marine Chamber Orchestra in a program which I believe is titled “Camelot: A 50th Anniversary Tribute to the Kennedy Administration” at Northern VA CC this Sunday at 14:00. Admission is free and the program appears to be able to appeal to a rather wide audence.