Best not to forget

Those of us still alive all remember where we were on November 22, 1963. I was crossing the campus of Haverford College 50 years ago, green bookbag over my right shoulder, when a student came up to me and said the President had been shot.  It seemed distant:  Dallas was a long way away then, 18-year-olds couldn’t vote, and I didn’t have much confidence in what went on in Washington.  JFK was a Cold Warrior who had invaded Cuba and failed to deliver on promised domestic reforms, especially civil rights.  A student at Haverford already knew that he was sliding us into war in Vietnam.

Many of us on the left thought the assassination regrettable but inconsequential.  Kennedy had almost gotten us into war with the Soviet Union (he got little or no credit on the left for keeping us out of it).  How much worse could Johnson be?

I now see things in a different light.  President Johnson famously went on to get the Voting Rights Act passed and was generally more progressive than Kennedy ever considered being.  But Kennedy had things Johnson did not:  stature and charisma in particular.  Some would like to think JFK would have kept us out of Vietnam.  I doubt that.  But he was popular enough to be a two-term president.  It is hard to picture that he would have made Vietnam any worse than Lyndon Johnson’s repeated escalation did.

But it was not the Kennedy assassination alone that bent the curve of American history.  It was also the assassinations five years later of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.  They too had far more stature and charisma than their successors.  Ralph Abernathy never caught on the way King did.  I have a nephew who said he went to Martin Luther the King School.  Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, for all their fine rhetoric, could never create the kind of broad coalition King assembled.  Likewise, Hubert Humphrey, certainly the more credentialed liberal, was no Robert Kennedy.

The world we live in today has not forgotten the idealism of JFK, King and RFK.  We espouse it frequently but practice it rarely.  Even those who struck down vital provisions of the Voting Rights Act claim they did so because those ideals have been fulfilled.  But we are worrying far more about what the country can do for us than what we can do for the country.  Both sides of the healthcare debate claim they can make you better off, and both sides claim the other is motivated by greed.  Self-interest trumps self-sacrifice.

We remember Kennedy’s ideals but we have forgotten his opposition.  His idealistic message, amplified by King and RFK, was not universally shared.  It remains unfulfilled because there are people who oppose it.  That’s what is missing from so much of what is being said about John Kennedy today.  Celebration erases blemishes, though we’ve become remarkably open about his drug dependency and infidelities.  More important:  he was elected by the barest of margins and faced solid opposition in Congress.  We had blatant racists and white supremacists then.  They are mostly gone, but their legacy also lives on, in those who are trying hard to make it difficult for people to vote.

There are legacies on both sides of the political equation.  Best not to forget.