TIME: Almanac 1995

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ TIME: Almanac 1995 / TIME Almanac 1995.iso / time / portrait / kennedy / kennedy.08e < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1993-04-15 | 10.0 KB | 199 lines

<text id=93HT1305> <link 93XV0023> <link 93XP0207> <title> Kennedy: "All This Will Not Be Finished" </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--Kennedy Portrait </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> November 29, 1963 "All This Will Not Be Finished" </hdr> <body> A dignified top hat sat squarely upon his head, but beneath it a boyish grin showed that the young man was having the time of his life. On that day--Jan. 20, 1961--John Fitzgerald Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President of the United States. And when he had taken the oath of office, he stood bare-headed in a bitter winter wind and delivered an inaugural address that crackled with the gusto of youth, yet had an eloquence that was ageless. "In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hours of maximum danger," he said, as his breath steamed in the cold air. "I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people, or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world." High Judgment. Despite his narrow margin of victory, Kennedy's advent to office had raised hopes high. The rhetoric of his inaugural led to extravagant overpraise. But he had asked to be judged by the highest standards, and he died before achieving them. His nation was prosperous and at peace. But if a historical scoreboard would not record many errors, it would list a few hits and fewer runs. He was a subject of boundless fascination to his countrymen; yet he aroused no such passions of either love or hatred as did Franklin Roosevelt. In the long view of history his Administration might be known less for the substance of its achievement than for its style. Style he had. He was born with it, and he displayed it at every stage of his life--as the heir to a savagely competitive spirit and a million-dollar trust fund from his father; as the wartime hero of PT-109; as the student of power; as the driving politician who went from the House to the Senate to the White House. "Why do you want to be President?" he was asked in the summer of 1960. "Because that's where the power is," he replied. In his style was a tough wit. When he met Nikita Khrushchev for the first time in Vienna in 1961, he noticed a medal on the Russian's chest, asked what it was. When Khrushchev replied that it symbolized the Lenin Peace Prize, Kennedy snapped back: "I hope you keep it." Again, when he spoke at a big-money fund-raising dinner in Denver, he looked over the audience for a moment, then cracked: "I am touched by your attendance--but, of course, not as deeply touched as you were." Occasionally, his self-confidence amounted to cockiness. Just before he was inaugurated, he said: "Sure it's a big job. But I don't know anybody who can do it any better than I can. It isn't going to be so bad. You've got time to think--and besides, the pay is pretty good." Yet he was always the realist, and a year later he frankly admitted: "This job is interesting, but the possibilities for trouble are unlimited. It's been a tough first year, but then they're all going to be tough." Image. Kennedy made the rocking chair a viable seat of government. From there he would endlessly discuss how things looked from the most important office in the world. One day last spring he sprawled in that chair, fidgeted with the corset he wore for his bad back, and told a reporter: "In some ways the world is better. But in some ways it is worse. We are better off in our relations with the Soviets. But on the other hand, if the Red Chinese begin to gain, then we are worse off. I guess the people are frustrated some. They rather enjoyed the Cuban crisis, but that was an easy one and nobody had to go off to war. We didn't have thousands getting killed. The people tire of the long battle in the cold war. I don't blame them." To Kennedy, his "image" was all-important. Few Presidents have ever been so preoccupied with their public relations, and few so sensitive to criticism. He sometimes called newsmen in their homes to blast them for something they had reported about him. Yet he enjoyed the company of journalists, gave them bountifully of his time and confidences. Occasionally he would even take a reporter down to the White House pool, float on his back in the lukewarm water and talk--off the record--of his problems and prospects. During one such sojourn early in his Administration, a reporter, between splashes, asked him if he would want to serve as President for more than two terms--if he could. "It's against the law," said Kennedy. "Anyway, I don't want this job more than eight years. Look at it. Laos may go to hell again next week. There's this nuclear testing thing. Berlin, Vietnam--all that. Yeah, I know that's what makes it exciting, that's what makes it challenging. But eight years seems enough." The Fighters. Instead of eight years, he got 34 months and two days. During that period, President Kennedy may have made mistakes--but he made them with the same energy, the same activist style that was in a sense his greatest strength. In 1962, when he thought that Big Steel had double-crossed him by announcing a price raise, he reacted furiously, brought all the political and police powers at his command to bear on the industry, damaged almost irreparably his relationships with the nation's business community. His critics claimed that he placed politics over principle, that he became an all-out adherent of civil rights legislation only after the Negro revolution had placed a vote-getting premium on such legislation, that his tax-cut program was aimed more at the 1964 elections than at true fiscal reform. His relations with Congress, never good, deteriorated this last year--and the 88th Congress set a record for nonachievement. He was a fighter, and while upon occasion he might have seemed to hedge or retrench while under political fire, upon only one occasion did he really appear to wilt. That was during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and as the word of the debacle came into the White House, the President's natural aggressiveness, the competitive spirit that was his family hallmark, appeared to desert him almost entirely. An aide, watching him sink into indecisive despondency, remarked: "This is the first time that Jack Kennedy ever lost anything." Moments. But he also had his fine presidential moments--and to many the finest came in October 1962, when he set up a naval blockade that forced Nikita Khrushchev to remove the missiles that the Soviets had sneaked into Cuba. During that dramatic showdown, which both Kennedy and Khrushchev later said had brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war, Kennedy said: "This secret, swift and extraordinary buildup of communist missiles--in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the U.S. and the nations of the Western Hemisphere--is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo, which cannot be accepted by this country if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe." Kennedy made Khrushchev back down--although not so far as he, and certainly not his critics, would have liked. That was not the only time that President Kennedy stood firm before Khrushchev. In 1961, when the Communists sealed off the Eastern zone with the evil Wall in Berlin and seemed ready to block the Western allies from their access routes to West Berlin, Kennedy dispatched then-Vice President Johnson to the scene, sent 1,500 armored troops rolling down the autobahn and beefed up U.S. forces in Germany. Again Khrushchev backed down--and not for the last time. The Big Achievement. If President Kennedy himself were to have named the achievement of which he felt proudest, it probably would have been the signing of the nuclear test ban treaty. Hardly had he taken office than the Soviet Union broke the three-year-moratorium that had existed on atmospheric testing. Kennedy reluctantly ordered new U.S. tests in September 1961. Said he: "We have no other choice in fulfillment of the responsibilities of the U.S. to its own citizens and to the security of other free nations." But he hated to do it, and once confided to a close friend: "It really doesn't matter as far as you and I are concerned. What really matters is all the children." He worked constantly and with dedication to bring about the treaty that was finally initialed last July--and it was due far more to his persistent efforts than to the so-called "Spirit of Moscow" that it finally came about. Although at the time of his death domestic and international problems still bristled about him, what John Kennedy wanted more than anything else was to be re-elected next year. That desire did not spring from an unnatural greed for power, or even from his driving competitive spirit, but from his feeling that if he could be returned to the White House with a fresh and stronger mandate he would be better able to achieve solutions to the problems that beset his nation. He never got the chance. And because he did not, perhaps it was John Kennedy who, in that memorable inaugural address, best pronounced the historian's verdict of his own brief time in the presidency: "All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin." </body> </article> </text>