The JFK tapes

The other night I spent 15 or 20 minutes with Listening In, which contains selections from John F. Kennedy's White House tapes. (Didn't buy it.) There is a good deal here that will interest those students of the history of U.S. foreign policy who haven't already had access to the tapes (not sure of the details, but I think the Kennedy Library has now made a lot of them available online, though perhaps the audio is not always great; with this book, however, you get transcripts, Ted Widmer's comments as editor, plus a couple of CDs).

There are, among other things, sections on nuclear weapons, Vietnam, and the Cuban missile crisis. Looking through it quickly, I was particularly struck by a phone conversation between Kennedy and Harold Macmillan in which JFK several times calls the considerably older Macmillan 'Prime Minister', while the latter, without in any way seeming to give affront, manages to avoid calling JFK 'Mr. President'.

The book has a foreword by Caroline Kennedy, who refers to her father as the "first truly modern president." There are various ways in which I think that's true (one thinks here in terms of style, the opening of the White House to artists (e.g. the Casals concert) and intellectuals that was so much a part of the Camelot aura, and the fact that JFK was the first president born in the twentieth century ("the torch has been passed to a new generation, born in this century....")). However, it was during his predecessor Eisenhower's administration that the U.S. became recognizably 'modern' in some ways that persist (e.g., the centrality of the car, the rise of the suburbs).

As Widmer points out, the tapes would have been used by Kennedy as raw material for his memoirs, had he lived to write them. The fact that he didn't makes them all the more valuable to historians and the interested public.

The Pentagon Papers 40 years on

Sanford Ungar and Michael Beschloss brought back the memories on the NewsHour tonight in a quite interesting discussion (which I heard on the radio as my TV is not working). Beschloss mentioned in passing that in 1961, ten years before Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the NYT, that paper had acceded to the Kennedy admin's request not to publish material it had acquired about the prospective Bay of Pigs operation. Apparently Kennedy later said, after the Bay of Pigs turned out badly for the U.S., that he wished the NYT had published it.

What really strikes me is the realization that only one short decade separates the Bay of Pigs from the Pentagon Papers. That was one heck of an eventful ten years. I'm not old enough to have many reliable first-hand memories of the U.S. in 1961 (and was only living here briefly then anyway, between my family's overseas domiciles), but I have a sense of what the early '60s were like from photos, movies, some things I've read, etc. The early '70s, of which I definitely do have memories, seem a long way away from the early '60s, which is, partly, a testament to how much happened in between and to how much 'the 60s' changed the tone (for lack of a better word) of American life and politics.

The Kennedy administration and the arts

This Jan. 18 Wash. Post article details the many events that the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is staging to celebrate the arts legacy of the Kennedy administration. On Jan. 20 there was a star-studded concert to mark the 50th anniversary of JFK's inauguration. On Jan. 25, Yo-Yo Ma recreates the famous Pablo Casals concert given in the White House in November 1961. That concert is, of course, sold out (I just checked).

Reading the article, it occurred to me that the promotion of the arts by the Kennedys (JFK and Jacqueline) may stand as one of the most important accomplishments, if not the most important accomplishment, of that administration. Partly because it was cut short and partly because of Kennedy's own caution, the administration did not have many notable achievements in domestic policy. In foreign affairs, the avoidance of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis was of course a major achievement, but it was something bad avoided rather than something good brought into being. So the legacy of the Kennedy administration is mostly the aura, the myth of Camelot, the remembrances of what David Rubenstein, chairman of the Kennedy Center's board, calls "happy days" in a quote in the article. Those "happy days" were a subjective phenomenon rooted less in the existential reality of the U.S. in the early 1960s and more in the minds of those having the experience. At least that is my impression at two removes, as I was a young child in the early 60's and was living outside the U.S. for most of that period.

Caroline Kennedy is quoted in the article as saying she does not remember those famous White House musical evenings but remembers hearing about them "all my life, especially from my mother. For me, these concerts are reconnecting to those memories with her...." It's nice that the Kennedy Center is allowing those memories to be revivified and recognizing the Kennedys' contribution to the arts. It emphasizes a side of the late president and first lady that coexisted with the hard-nosed, occasionally ruthless politician that JFK also was. If the razor-thin election of 1960 had gone the other way, Richard Nixon would have been inaugurated in January 1961 and the world might have been incinerated in a nuclear war in October 1962. And Pablo Casals would not have played in the White House and Yo-Yo Ma would not be playing on Tuesday. Change a few votes in Chicago and one or two other places, and a lot of things would have been different.

P.S. Apart from the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the setting up of the Peace Corps, JFK's foreign policy was nothing to celebrate. But that would have to be the subject of another post.

A bit more on the '60s

Further to this post: I just became aware of a 2007 book by James Piereson called Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter Books).

Though I've not read the book, its thesis, as expressed in the subtitle, leaves me somewhat skeptical. To the extent that there was a "liberal consensus" on foreign and domestic policy in the '50s, the Vietnam War and the convulsions of 1968 had a lot more to do with "shattering" it than Kennedy's assassination, or so I'd be inclined to argue. (Don't forget that some of the greatest domestic triumphs of liberalism, such as the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, occurred during the Johnson administration. Not bad for a supposedly "shattered" movement.)

An artifact from the early 1960s: The Duke's Men of Yale on the New Frontier

Some time ago, a friend who is an alumnus of two Yale a capella groups, the Duke’s Men and the Whiffenpoofs, gave me a multi-CD compilation that he had produced of recordings by “Da Doox” going back to the early 1950s. One of the songs on the first disc is “New Frontier,” which pokes fun at JFK, Camelot, and (of course) Harvard, and which the Duke’s Men first recorded in 1963. The song is interrupted by a monologue in which one member of the group does a more-than-passable Kennedy imitation. Although the flavor of the song cannot be captured entirely by the lyrics alone -- indeed, the music and the lyrics are very well matched -- I thought the lyrics in themselves were clever and evocative of the period. And in light of what happened in November 1963, the last lines take on a certain poignancy. So here are the lyrics.

New Frontier
First recorded by the Duke’s Men of Yale in 1963
Music and lyrics by
Carl Kaestle and Gurney Williams
(Lyrics reproduced by permission)

We sing of the pioneers of old
Who ventured forth so brave and bold
Far from their rightful homes so dear
They slept beneath the stars on the old frontier
And the rocky campground’s peaceful glow
Cheered the hearts and souls of the men below.

But the old frontier is dying
The old frontier is gone.
Yet behold the low clouds passing
To hail another dawn.
Yes it’s a new frontier
Put your money on the sunny boy from Hyannis
Hail to the sod where Kennedy trod
A hunter on the new frontier.

Oh we love the walls of ivy
That surround the new frontier
[JFK monologue]
Jack is the king of the new frontier
Jack is the fellow who makes folks cheer
Massachusetts' favorite son
Hah-vad moved to Wa-shing-ton.
And though he began as the un-der-dog
Now he's considered a vi-tal cog.
Let John Harvard fade a-way
Jack Harvard's here to stay.
It’s young Jack Harvard so shout hoo-ray Hooray-hoo_eee.

JFK and the jelly doughnut

Did JFK really say he was a jelly doughnut in his famous Ich-bin-ein-Berliner speech? A recent post at the NYT blog Paper Cuts finally sorts it all out... well, sort of. The link is here.

p.s. The Newbolt follow-up is coming this weekend. Stay tuned.