Magical Moment

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

While our politics were growing more fraught by the hour, with hurricane politics, Judge Roberts, and the United Nations on the boil, several dozen New Yorkers, from the right and left wings and in between, slipped out earlier this week for cocktails at the Carlyle. The occasion was the publication of Richard Tofel’s new book – “Sounding the Trumpet” – about President Kennedy’s inaugural address.

The reception turned out to be a magical moment. Mr. Tofel, a friend for years, is a lawyer turned newspaperman turned cultural entrepreneur (he is president of the International Freedom Center). His book is a beautifully crafted gem of popular history about the speech in which Kennedy spoke of the torch being passed to a new generation and asked Americans to ask not what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country.

It is a speech that those of us of a certain age can hear Kennedy delivering almost as if it were yesterday. A video disc of the speech is included with the book. It is the speech that voiced the spirit that led to the creation of the Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, and that inspirited many of the best and brightest to risk all for the idea of a free Vietnam. It was imbued with the spirit that led the president to telephone Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife as King lay in a Birmingham jail.

The eloquence of Kennedy’s speech seemed all the more magnificent against the bitterness of the election that elevated him to the presidency. Many believed Vice President Nixon had actually won the electoral vote only to have it hijacked by Mayor Richard J. Daley in Chicago, where Cook County delivered late for Kennedy. The election was every bit the kind of culture clash and electoral clash that erupted two generations later in the contest between Vice President Gore and Governor Bush.

Yet, earlier this week, when Mr. Tofel stepped up to the microphone, he astounded his guests – or at least me – by introducing not only JFK’s speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, one of the best wordsmiths ever to work in the White House, but also Nixon’s great speechwriter, Ray Price, who had been editorial page editor of the New York Herald Tribune and went on to write Nixon’s memoirs. Mr. Tofel got to know Mr. Sorensen in the course of writing the book and Mr. Price when Mr. Tofel was a student at Harvard and Nixon’s amanuensis was teaching at the, well, the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Mr. Tofel’s book illuminates something I first began to think about when I read of how President Reagan thought of himself. It was not as a politician but as an artist. Though often set down as an amiable dunce, Reagan turns out to have written copiously, including many of his own speeches. Churchill, who did time as a journalist, also thought of himself as something of an artist, a writer, and crafter of prose (when he wasn’t painting). No doubt Theodore Roosevelt had this streak; he wrote more books than any other American president.

JFK, while he had help from masters of the word like Mr. Sorensen, clearly had an artist’s feel for language. Mr. Tofel, in his book, provides column-beside-column comparisons of various drafts of the speech and how Kennedy actually delivered it. But Kennedy’s speech was remarkable not only for its combination of soaring style and crispness of expression but also its substance. And here the speech couldn’t be more relevant to the current fray.

On the eve of President George W. Bush’s second inaugural, the Sun published an editorial called “John Fitzgerald Bush,” speculating that the 43rd president would echo the 35th and quoting Kennedy’s famous sentence: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” The Sun editorial remarked on the irony that in the election just ended, “it was the Republican who, while so different in style, carried the substance of these sentiments to the voters, while it was the Democrat, Senator Kerry, who, while affecting so many similarities of the Kennedy style, campaigned to repudiate these sentiments.”

Mr. Bush’s speech received quite a negative reaction on the left and in Europe, where it was set down as threatening and dangerous and vainglorious. It turns out, as Mr. Tofel tells the story, that Kennedy’s speech also got a negative reaction in some quarters. Mr. Tofel quotes one scholar, William Carleton, writing in Antioch Review, as calling the speech “alarmist … historically off key … and more suited to the Stalinist era …” Senator McGovern called it “arrogant and extravagant.”

Mr. Tofel reminds that Nixon, in his own second inaugural, took on Kennedy’s speech. “The time has passed,” Nixon proclaimed, “when America will make every other nation’s conflict our own, or make every other nation’s future our own responsibility …” Yet there at the Carlyle were the author of Nixon’s words and the author of Kennedy’s, both aging gracefully, productively, and in exceptional good humor, and celebrating a book celebrating the moment when the trumpet, now in the hands of another young and idealistic president, was sounded.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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