JFK on Poetry and Power

  

 

   When I walked across Regent's Terrace of my college  campus that day in late November 1963, I encountered a student I knew from high school, and he told me he had just heard that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.  There was already a crowd around the television in the student lounge and café.  Everyone was mute.  The four days that followed were a national wake.  But it was unremittingly sad.  No celebration of a life.  No joyous reminiscence.  Very un-Irish. I tried to remedy some of that when we returned to campus after the long stunned weekend; I put together a photo exhibit for the University with captions and quotations that captured "Jack's" wit and wisdom. 
      I was 20 when President Kennedy was killed.  He was a hero to my family and myself.  The first Irish Catholic President. His election in 1960 was almost as exhilarating  to us as Barack Obama's was to many ethnic groups in 2008.  My parents had such affection for and loyalty to Kennedy that they provided me with the most dramatic experience I ever had in church as a teenager.  Our parish pastor was an extreme conservative not only in matters theological, but also on the political spectrum.  For example, he named the high school after two historical figures, a Jesuit saint, Robert Bellarmine, and an American founding father, Thomas Jefferson.  One Sunday before the election, he gave a sermon attacking the Democratic nominee for President.  He started with the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, Joseph P. Sr.,, and then broadened his broadside to excoriate the evils of the progeny.  He was not a man of few words.  My father, mother and I were sitting up near the front of the church.  My Dad leaned over and said to my Mom: "I've had enough of this.  We're leaving."  Understand, my parents were loyal, devout Catholics.  I was amazed.  We stood up, stepped into the middle aisle, and walked out of the Church, our back to Monsignor Keating who was still ranting.  I was thrilled. Seventeen years old at the time, I thought our exit was super cool. (I still do.)

        In the aftermath of the assassination, I read many of the tomes on John Kennedy's death and life.  Later on as the years passed, I  became interested in spoken word recordings and listened to poets and public servants.  Dylan Thomas and Robert Frost among the former, and President Kennedy and Martin Luther King among the latter.  Of course, Kennedy and Frost were friends.  And the President's inauguration featured Frost reciting a poem of his from memory when the sun's glare was in his eyes, and the wind was whipping the papers on which he had typed a commissioned piece.  
       One month before Dallas, Kennedy gave a speech in honor of Robert Frost at Amherst College.  He spoke of Frost as a poet who understood the intimate connection between poetry and power.  The President brought his own facility for exposition and elegance to the topic, and illustrated the topic with reminders of the more serious and somber dimensions of  Frost's vision.  He makes more specific reference to particular poems in his friend's oeuvre than any President I can think of.  It's about six minutes. Give it a listen.  http://arts.gov/about/kennedy 

     I haven't watched much of the programming for this 50th (!) anniversary of the assassination.  And the truth is I still feel the heart-heavy weight of that time.  Many bad things in the body politic festered and boiled after the tragic death in Dallas. Also, some exciting revolutions in American social and political culture bloomed.  But for me, in my life, Kennedy was the President who moved me most.   I think of him when Hamlet says to Horatio, about his dead father,

                            He was a man, take him for all in all,
                            I shall not look upon his like again.