On October 26, 1963, simply 4 weeks earlier than he was assassinated, John F. Kennedy travelled to Amherst School to honor an American poet. Robert Frost, who had recited “The Present Outright” at Kennedy’s Inauguration, had died earlier within the yr, on the age of eighty-eight. Now the school was dedicating a library in his identify. Kennedy arrived at Amherst by helicopter and, earlier than an viewers of scholars and students, paid tribute to the position of the unbiased artist in society and to Frost himself—“one of many granite figures of our time in America.”
“When energy leads man in the direction of conceitedness, poetry reminds him of his limitations,” Kennedy stated. “When energy narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and variety of his existence. When energy corrupts, poetry cleanses. For artwork establishes the fundamental human fact which should function the touchstone of our judgment.”
The rhetoric and rhythms of the speech, which was drafted by the historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., are high-flown, very a lot of their period. In “The Kennedy Imprisonment,” Garry Wills was notably scathing concerning the New Frontiersmen and their urbane self-fashioning, their willpower to depart behind what they noticed because the cultural enervation and poky suburbanism of the Eisenhower years. Kennedy’s circle, “one of the best and the brightest” as David Halberstam would name it, vibrated with Ivy League self-regard. Schlesinger recalled the early days of the Administration by which “Washington appeared engaged in a collective effort to make itself brighter, gayer, extra mental. . . . One’s life appeared nearly to go in evaluate as one encountered Harvard classmates, wartime associates, faces seen after the warfare in ADA conventions.” Kennedy’s language on the podium at Amherst can be unimaginable within the mouth of any trendy political orator—say, Barack Obama—not as a result of Obama is incapable of Kennedy’s complexity however, somewhat, as a result of he is aware of that he can be speaking previous his viewers as a lot as he was speaking to them.
However alongside the flagrant élitism of the Kennedy model was an earnest effort in his Administration to focus on the worth of the humanities. The Kennedys invited Pablo Casals to the White Home, the place he performed Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Couperin within the East Room. The American Ballet Theatre carried out “Billy the Child.” The Paul Winter Sextet performed “Saudade da Bahia.” André Malraux got here to dinner. It was at a reception of forty-nine Nobel laureates that Kennedy famously remarked, “I believe that is essentially the most extraordinary assortment of expertise, of human data, that has ever been gathered on the White Home, with the doable exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
Because the Eisenhower period, there had been a bipartisan effort to construct a nationwide cultural middle in Washington, D.C. After Kennedy was killed, L.B.J. renamed the middle as a dwelling memorial to J.F.Okay. When it opened, in September, 1971, Leonard Bernstein premièred his “Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Gamers, and Dancers,” and Judith Jamison, of the Alvin Ailey firm, carried out.
As of this week, because of the selfish exertions of the present President and his obedient underlings and buddies, the place has been renamed the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts. The middle’s board, now loaded with loyalists reminiscent of Maria Bartiromo and Laura Ingraham, of Fox Information, made the grave choice on the Palm Seashore manse of the on line casino magnate Steve Wynn, whose spouse, Andrea, sits on the board. When Trump, who had been hinting broadly for the tribute on-line for months, heard the information, he feigned gratitude and shock. “I used to be stunned by it,” he stated, fibbing effortlessly. The board insisted that the vote had been unanimous, however one Democrat who has but to be booted from their midst, the Ohio congresswoman Joyce Beatty, stated that she had known as into the assembly however had been placed on mute. “The whole lot was reduce off,” she informed Shawn McCreesh of the Instances, “after which they instantly stated, ‘Effectively, it’s unanimous. Everyone is for it.’ ” Varied members of the Kennedy household (although not the Secretary of Well being and Human Companies) expressed their chagrin. Maria Shriver, J.F.Okay.’s niece, known as the transfer “past comprehension.” However, with respect, is it actually past comprehension?
This week, the President and his Administration managed to carry out a dizzying array of their most distinguishing qualities. First got here the cruelty of Trump’s remarks concerning the horrific homicide of Rob Reiner and his spouse, Michele Singer Reiner. Then got here the chaotic disclosures of his chief of employees, Susie Wiles, who, through the course of a minimum of eleven interviews, informed a author for Self-importance Truthful that the Vice-President was a “conspiracy theorist” and that the President had an “alcoholic’s character.” Her indiscretions got here amid some heavy-lidded conferences within the White Home (Get up, Mr. President!) and Trump’s rant on the financial system, by which he furiously assured residents that issues had been simply nice: “Boy, are we making progress!” Trump’s fulmination had about it the whiff of desperation. As his reputation has sunk, many citizens who would possibly as soon as have excused his myriad character deficiencies because the sordid value one pays for his alleged virtues now seem like asking, “What’s unsuitable with this individual?”
