On October 26, 1963, just four weeks before his assassination, John F. Kennedy visited Amherst College to pay tribute to an American poet. Robert Frost, who recited “The Gift Outright” at Kennedy’s inauguration, had died earlier that year at the age of eighty-eight. From now on, the college devotes a library to it. Kennedy arrived in Amherst by helicopter and, before an audience of students and scholars, paid tribute to the role of the independent artist in society and to Frost himself, “one of the granite figures of our time in America.”
“When power leads a man to arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations,” Kennedy said. “When power restricts man’s areas of concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the fundamental human truth which must serve as a touchstone for our judgment.”
The rhetoric and rhythms of the speech, penned by historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., are colorful, very much of the times. In “The Kennedy Imprisonment,” Garry Wills was particularly scathing of the New Frontiersmen and their urban self-fashioning, their determination to leave behind what they saw as the cultural edginess and poky suburbanism of the Eisenhower years. Kennedy’s circle, “the best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called it, vibrated with Ivy League self-esteem. Schlesinger recalled the early days of the administration in which “Washington seemed engaged in a collective effort to become brighter, gayer, more intellectual…Life seemed almost to fly by as one met Harvard classmates, war associates, faces seen after the war at ADA conventions.” » Kennedy’s language from the Amherst podium would be unimaginable in the mouth of any modern political speaker – say Barack Obama – not because Obama is incapable of understanding Kennedy’s complexity, but rather because he knows he would speak pass his audience as much as he spoke has them.
But aside from the blatant Kennedy-style elitism, his administration made a sincere effort to highlight the value of the arts. The Kennedys invited Pablo Casals to the White House, where he played Schumann, Mendelssohn and Couperin in the East Room. American Ballet Theater performed “Billy the Kid.” The Paul Winter Sextet performed “Saudade da Bahia.” André Malraux came to dinner. It was at a reception for forty-nine Nobel laureates that Kennedy said: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been assembled in the White House, except perhaps when Thomas Jefferson was dining alone.” »
Since the Eisenhower era, there had been a bipartisan effort to build a national cultural center in Washington, DC. After Kennedy’s death, LBJ renamed the center as the JFK Living Memorial. When it opened in September 1971, Leonard Bernstein created his “Mass: A Play for Singers, Players and Dancers,” and Judith Jamison, of the Alvin Ailey Company, performed.
As of this week, thanks to the self-serving efforts of the current president and his obedient subordinates and friends, the venue has been renamed the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The center’s board, now made up of loyalists such as Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo and Laura Ingraham, made the grave decision at the Palm Beach home of casino magnate Steve Wynn, whose wife, Andrea, serves on the board. When Trump, who had been broadly hinting at the tribute online for months, heard the news, he feigned gratitude and shock. “I was surprised by it,” he said, lying effortlessly. The board insisted the vote was unanimous, but one Democrat who has yet to be expelled from its membership, Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty, said she called the meeting but it was muted. “Everything was cut off,” she told Shawn McCreesh about the Times“and then they immediately said, ‘Well, it’s unanimous. Everybody’s for it.’ » Various members of the Kennedy family (but not the Secretary of Health and Human Services) expressed their grief. Maria Shriver, JFK’s niece, called the decision “beyond comprehension.” But, with respect, is this really beyond comprehension?
This week, the president and his administration managed to deploy a dizzying array of their most distinctive qualities. First there was the cruelty of Trump’s remarks about the horrific murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. Then came the chaotic revelations of his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who, in the course of no fewer than eleven interviews, confided to a writer from Vanity Fair that the vice president was a “conspiracy theorist” and that the president had an “alcoholic personality.” His indiscretions came amid closed-door meetings at the White House (Wake Up, Mr. President!) and Trump’s speech on the economy, in which he furiously assured citizens that things were just fine: “Geez, are we making progress!” Trump’s fulmination smacked of desperation. As his popularity has plummeted, many voters who might once have excused his myriad character flaws as the sordid price one pays for his supposed virtues now seem to be asking, “What the hell?” fake with this person?
