New Frontier Culture

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New Frontier Culture

By Michael N. Field

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New Frontier Culture

1. Beginnings

On a cold, bright day in January 1961, in Washington, D.C., a young man, or a man who at least was young for a major world politician, took the oath of office as president of United States. His hallmarks, shown in the recent campaign, were qualities such as a powerful aggressiveness which manifested itself in calls for sacrifice and commitment, a personal style replete with humor and sophistication, and a kind of preternatural clarity of expression which impressed, if not mesmerized many people. Beyond this, he presented himself as possessing a carefully structured personal perfection inachievable by most other individuals.

In the inaugural remarks he was about to deliver, he was expected to live up to the image which he had, for some very concrete political reasons, so assiduously constructed in his long campaign for the Democratic nomination, and in his race against his Republican opponent, outgoing Vice-President Richard M. Nixon.

His audience in Washington and around the world was not to be disappointed. The new American president made one electric declaration after another, challenging "friend and foe alike" and inspiring all who were young then, or who were born thereafter, to think about what standards they should aspire to, even if they did not know exactly what it was he was actually talking about.

Thirty-four months later, John F. Kennedy was dead, assassinated in Dallas, Texas, perhaps by a minor left-wing activist and possible intelligence informant named Lee Harvey Oswald, or perhaps by a conspiracy involving renegade domestic or foreign interests. What happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963 would have to said to be unknown to all certainty, with the possibility that Oswald was set up to be assigned the blame always to be considered.

As it happened, the period immediately following Kennedy's death began as one of great promise, particularly from the point of view of the liberal faction in American politics. Lyndon Johnson, vice-president under Kennedy, proved more able as president to get the liberal program through congress, and showed more strength as a consensus builder than his predecessor. But Johnson soon had the country involved in the Vietnam war.

As resistance to the war and the military draft grew, and American society was torn apart as a result of the failure of previous policy to address sooner the problems of racial segregation and the need to accommodate the large generation born after World War II, many people began to look back at the last seasons of the Kennedy presidency as an interlude of security and promise punctuating an otherwise threatening era.

Later, Kennedy became something of a fallen figure. Suggestions were made of questionable associations on his part, and a sordid pattern of extramarital activity, occasionally with potential national security implications, was brought to light.

These issues have little to do with the subject of Kennedy's station in history, however. People in America and around the world acknowledge him as a formative figure, as an individual who was, in a sense, the initiator of a new era.

He became this, in part, because he came to the presidency with more than an ambition to hold the office and a with particular view of policy. He also held a belief, if for reasons still poorly understood, that he should seek to exercise a motivational leadership which would be experienced personally by other individuals. In this aim, he succeeded well.

More importantly, Kennedy was the originator of policy system which defined both the challenges he believed were confronting America and its allies, and what actions were needed to meet these challenges. Foremost in his system was his belief in the central role of a charismatic, high-profile leader who would mobilize the free people of the world in their battle against the possibly superior forces of tyranny, represented in his mind, if not in reality also, by the Soviet Union and its communist allies.

By the time Kennedy was ready, at age 42, to make the race for the White House, the country was suffering from economic and social stagnation and a perceived decline in world position after two terms of President Dwight Eisenhower's do-nothing policies.

In Kennedy's own party, the dominant figure of the previous decade was two-time presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. In contrast to the dullard Eisenhower, he was intellectually brilliant and personally erudite. Nevertheless he was more out of the same mold as his rival than most people imagine. Like the more conservative Eisenhower, the liberal Stevenson was irremediably middle-aged, and like Ike, as Eisenhower was popularly called in conversation and in journalistic parlance, he saw politics and public policy as the business of those who were mature, emotionally sober and responsible, even when they might have what were termed in that day "honest disagreements" in their views.

This world was fertile ground for Kennedy's message of awakening and challenge, while the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union provided the arena in which he could play the role of the confronter of the dictators, much as his hero Winston Churchill had done a generation earlier.

Paradoxically, those who responded most strongly to Kennedy's exhortations were idealistic young adults who saw in Kennedy's rhetoric a vision of a world more based on understanding and cooperation between disparate peoples living very different ways of life than on confrontation and rivalry between different political and economic systems.

Kennedy was not without his deficiencies, the chief of which was his frightening inexperience. His constant challenges to the public at large to support and follow possibly dangerous courses of action sometimes degenerated into a sort of preppy-style goading. Some of his efforts at presidential initiative skirted the edges of buffoonery. Also conveniently forgotten is the fascination of Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, who served under him as attorney general, with the concept of counterinsurgency. What this meant was confronting Marxist-oriented revolutionary movements in third-world countries with an array of innovative military tactics, of which the Army's Special Forces, or Green Berets, were the most celebrated symbol, and Indochina the prospective testing ground.

Kennedy's great accomplishments, of turning around the mood of Cold War fear and psychological depression which existed in America when he took office, of declaring a commitment to a comprehensive federal civil rights law which, when passed in 1964, would end legal racial segregation in America, of committing America to the space program, and of negotiating the nuclear test ban treaty, tower above his failures, if only because his career was cut short and his potential failures came to be the failures of Lyndon Johnson instead.

The question of what Kennedy would have done, and how the world would be different, if he had lived to run for reelection cannot be answered. But the probability is, that, if nothing else, he would be less lost in myth if his life had run its normal course. Perhaps the public would have tired of the his carefully cultivated persona and grown immune to his urgings, eventually leaving him as a dated figure in landscape of American celebrity. Or, worse yet, Kennedy could have lost both reputation and self in the wasteland of Vietnam.

It was Kennedy's good fortune to find himself, as president, in a situation where his policy theories and view of the world seemed relevant and where the kind of leadership he wanted to offer would be responded to by others, even if the response was not for exactly the reasons he, initially, imagined.

Kennedy was one of several American presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Andrew Jackson coming to mind also, who sought to create a distinct presidential culture, or rather, a new national culture brought into being through the medium of leadership and initiative on a presidential level. Kennedy styled his presidential culture the "New Frontier", and invited America and the world to build its future around the New Frontier's invigorating challenges.

Of late, 40 years and more after his death, Kennedy's stock as a figure in history again is rising as the focus moves from his private life to his public doings. No doubt, the failure any potential imitators to duplicate even remotely his successes, and the failure of any of his successors to similarly capture the imagination of the world, have contributed to this reversal in fortune. But mostly, it is just time, and the changes in perspective which come with its passage, which have made us now willing to look at the career of John F. Kennedy and to seek his place in American and world history.

2. The Kennedy Persona

John F. Kennedy was the second of four sons of Boston millionaire Joseph Patrick Kennedy and his wife Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, daughter of a former mayor of Boston. The senior Kennedy was a conservative Democrat who was active in political affairs. His contributions to the presidential campaigns and administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt were rewarded when he was appointed ambassador to Great Britain in 1938. His greater ambition was to see one of his sons become president of the United States.

First, it was the oldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. who would be groomed for the highest office. When he died in World War II, the burden of presidential aspiration fell on John Kennedy, just as it would later go to Robert Kennedy, and, eventually, to Edward Kennedy.

Robert Kennedy, then 42 years old and a U.S. Senator from New York, was fatally wounded in 1968 following a critical victory in the California primary which seemingly had assured him his party's nomination.

Kennedy's principal opponents had been Vice President Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, a populist and one-time political outsider who had become the choice of many members of the party's establishment, and Senator Eugene McCarthy, also of Minnesota, who appealed to intellectuals, students and suburban voters. Kennedy had prevailed over Humphrey and McCarthy in a tough campaign where his ability to unite non-white minorities, working-class white voters and emerging anti-traditional elements in the big cities proved decisive.

How Robert Kennedy would have fared as an American president is another matter.

Because he had become more of a doctrinaire liberal than his older brother, many idealized him as the means through which far-reaching social, political and cultural aims might be realized. But it is nevertheless uncertain that he, as an American president, could have achieved the same resonant presence and world-wide following that John Kennedy had.

Robert Kennedy's successes in 1968 foreshadowed the future successes first of Jimmy Carter and then of William Jefferson Clinton in successfully uniting the same coalition. If he had lived to serve as president, perhaps he would have experienced the same failures as Carter and Clinton, particularly the failure of becoming the sometimes captive of erratic and extremist elements in his own party.

Later, Edward Kennedy's presidential aspirations were perpetually deferred and eventually abandoned in the face of a number of grave personal difficulties including marital problems, alcohol abuse, his role in an automobile accident in 1969 in which a campaign aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, drowned, and persistent questions about his character. The declining fortunes of liberalism in American politics and his desire to meet his family obligations also worked against his presidential prospects.

John F. Kennedy's political career began with his election to congress in 1946, at the age of 29, from a Massachusetts district which included parts of Boston, Cambridge and other towns around Boston. In order to eventually run for president, he first had to acquire and gain some seniority in an office considered to be a presidential stepping stone. This meant becoming a governor or United States senator, the latter being a more realistic option given his temperamental preference for ideas and issues over the details of administration. This he accomplished in 1952 when, as an underdog, and in the face of the Eisenhower landslide, he narrowly defeated incumbent Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge following a trademark campaign in which he and droves of relatives blanketed the state of Massachusetts.

Impediments to His Candidacy:

Once Kennedy was in the Senate, it then became necessary for him to begin the process of his development as a presidential prospect.

There were several impediments to a future Kennedy presidential candidacy which had to be confronted or overcome before he could be taken seriously as a presidential prospect. Among these were his Roman Catholic religion, his health, and, if he expected to become president while his father, then in his mid sixties, was still alive, his youth and inexperience.

Today, it is difficult for us to understand what the problem with a Catholic president was all about, but in Kennedy's time, this was the greatest barrier to his ambition far ahead of any other. Throughout the course of American history prior to 1960, and particularly after European immigration in the period from 1865 to the outbreak of World War I swelled the American Catholic population, the belief was widespread that an individual who was a Roman Catholic lacked the necessary national loyalty and was otherwise unfit to be an American president.

Although it is easy to blame this circumstance on the prejudice of the Protestant majority, the fact is, the Catholic Church itself did much to contribute to the view that American Catholics were a society apart, with their own special obligations and loyalties.

The American Catholic Church prior to the 1960s was an institution conservative beyond the imagination of those without a personal memory of it either through a Catholic upbringing or their association with Catholic friends and neighbors during that era. And it was conservative for a good reason, from the point of view of the church hierarchy.

Catholicism is a religion which emphasizes the progression of the individual through each stage of life as a member of the Catholic community. It is not the nature of the Catholic church to seek adult converts. Nor do many seek the Catholic church, except those who marry Catholics.

In an overwhelmingly Catholic society, such as once existed in a number of European countries, the inability of the church to recruit converts had not been a problem. But for the American Catholic church, this represented a critical difficulty. If individuals left the church before marrying or if they married non-Catholics and raised their children in their partner's religion, the loss in numbers for the church would be irreparable. For this reason, prior to the 1960s, the American Catholic church laid down strict rules for its members and relentlessly drilled these into American Catholics regardless of their social and economic status.

The purpose of these strictures was to maintain a separation between American Catholics and the rest of American society. Among the most severe and pervasive of them pertained to the issue of intermarriage between Catholics and non-Catholics. The church, of course, did not prohibit intermarriage, but it refused to sanction marriages between Catholics and non-Catholics unless the non-Catholic partner agreed to raise as Catholic any children that the couple might have.

The practical penalty for non-compliance was social ostracism and the alienation of violators from their families. This rule was not often disobeyed, at least by young adults still tied to their families and to the community where they were raised.

Nor did the church's control of American Catholic society stop there. The church, in earlier eras, discouraged education beyond high school for individuals not either clearly academically gifted or from already gentrified families. And it even subjected its members to dietary rules such as the stricture, now abandoned, against eating meat on Friday, all as a means of keeping Catholics separated from other elements of the population.

Protestant America was only too happy to respond in kind. In the nineteenth century and even later, newspaper features and editorials openly described Catholics as divided in their loyalty and allegiance to the United States, or even as primarily loyal to their church rather than to their country. No doubt, the dislike on the part of a Protestant majority predominantly of British and Northern European descent of Catholic immigrants of Irish, Southern European and Eastern European descent fueled some of this animus.

Beyond and below laid the fear, long since transferred to non-Whites and more recent immigrants, of eventual engulfment by an ever-burgeoning Catholic population ceaselessly expanded by intermarriage with non-Catholics, large family size, and the vigilance of the Catholic hierarchy in keeping Catholics in the fold.

In the political arena, this conflict reached its height in 1928, when the Democratic party chose the first Roman Catholic presidential nominee, New York Governor Al Smith, to run against the Republican nominee, Herbert Hoover. The subject of a Catholic's fitness to serve as president was openly discussed and on a partisan level, brutal anti-Catholic propaganda was launched against Smith. The depth of anti-Catholic sentiment in the American electorate revealed in this campaign made the idea of a Catholic on the national ticket unthinkable for a generation, and still doubtful even in 1960.

Nearly as critical was the issue of Kennedy's health. Although Kennedy, in 1960, promoted himself as the candidate of youth and vigor, in fact, his physical condition was precarious. The truth is, Kennedy suffered from a severe chronic disease which, if the character of it had been publicly known, might have put an end to his candidacy. Indeed, his public insinuations of physical vitality, in retrospect, seem, at least in part, if not in whole, a display of bravado intended to deflect attention away from his extensive physical problems.

It was known that Kennedy had undergone a dangerous operation in 1954, but the origin and dimensions of his medical infirmities were carefully concealed. Kennedy publicly maintained that this operation was for his back problems. This, by itself, was true, but, in reality, the operation was made dangerous by another condition he suffered from: Addison's disease, a formerly fatal affliction of the adrenal glands. Addison's disease occurs either when an infection, typically tuberculosis, destroys the adrenal glands, or as result of their atrophy over a long period of time. Kennedy's affliction evidently was due to the latter cause.

Kennedy's medical problems became more severe around the age of thirty, within a year after his election to congress in 1946. Indeed, they were often life threatening. The onset of Kennedy's disease occurred in September of 1947 during a European trip. He was diagnosed with the disease in London, and treated with a recently-developed synthetic hormone called DOCA.

Several years later, the synthetic hormone cortisone became available, and proved highly effective in controlling this disease. Nevertheless, the new treatments did not represent a cure, and Addison's patients, although they might have had their lives spared, continued to suffer physical problems.

So it was with John Kennedy, who, for the rest of his life, had to both hide his affliction and constantly come up with alternate explanations for the difficulties it caused him.

Kennedy's war service as a PT boat commander in the South Pacific during World War II, and his involvement in a wartime episode which allowed him to elevate himself to the status of war hero, served the interest of his presidential ambitions in several ways.

Kennedy's boat, the PT 109, was run over by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri on the night of August 2, 1943 in waters near the New Hebrides Islands several thousands of miles southwest of Hawaii. Although many researchers question Kennedy's captaincy of the PT 109, once the incident took place, there is no question his individual conduct was courageous and admirable.

Kennedy collected his crew together, and led them to a tiny island where they survived for a number of days until they were rescued by U.S. forces. Later, Kennedy ceaselessly promoted this episode and his combat service as both the defining event in his life and as the explanation for many of his physical problems. When, after the war, Kennedy began to develop the brownish complexion characteristic of victims of adrenal insufficiency, this was attributed to malaria contracted during the war.

Later, in the 1954, when Kennedy chose to undergo his back operation, made extraordinarily risky by his chronic condition, he again relied upon the implication that the risk of the surgery and months of confinement which followed it all devolved from his combat injuries in the PT 109 episode.

Also of concern to Kennedy as he began the process of building himself into a presidential contender was the need to disassociate himself both from New England's past tradition of political xenophobia and from his father's legacy of isolationism and possible fascist sympathies prior to World War II

Kennedy overcame these two problems with relative ease, actually, if either of them ever became issues at all. He had successfully staked out a position as an internationalist early in his adult life, even before America entered World War II. He was aided also both by his own perceived status as a war hero, and by the coming of age, after World War II, of a new generation of young adults to whom the issues of the 1930s were more obscure and the regional issues of previous generations often of little interest.

Kennedy's response to the totality of all of these concerns was an explosive synthesis which framed and moved his public persona. He promoted himself as individually vigorous and likewise promoted concepts of policy and plans for action which also were energetic in their conception and ambition, always implying that his relative youth, and the energy it imparted to him, were what were needed to make actual his challenging and urgently necessary program.

The Kennedy persona was, in part, a construction put together as a response to the difficulties facing Kennedy's 1960 presidential candidacy. But his persona was also a tool of policy and leadership for John Kennedy, who, as a presidential candidate and later as a U.S. president, truly felt the urgency of his own message.

Behind the staccato gestures and the careful enunciation of well-chosen words, behind the sophisticated demeanor and lively style, lived the mind of a true believer.

3. The Political System of John F. Kennedy

In 1940, young John Kennedy published a small book entitled Why England Slept, a study of British defense policy in the years preceding the outbreak of World War II in 1939. In this book, Kennedy reviewed the political decisions which had contributed to Britain's failure to rearm in the face of the increasing menace of Nazi Germany during the decade of the 1930s.

His father's influence and the name recognition Kennedy already enjoyed as the son of Joseph P. Kennedy undoubtedly had much to do with the fact that Why England Slept was published, and was paid attention to. Nevertheless, John Kennedy's book actually was quite well received and widely commented upon.

In this book, Kennedy outlined an interpretation of the events of the 1930s which would become the foundation of the political system, the system of political ideas, that is say, which would guide his rhetoric and motivate his actions throughout his postwar political career into the era of his presidency. Central to Kennedy's world view was the idea that the animating feature of world politics in the age in which he lived was the conflict between the democracies and the forces tyranny. By itself, this was not so startling an idea considered that world had just witnessed the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of war both in Europe and the Far East. Kennedy, however, was emphatic in his elaboration on this basic concept.

Kennedy held that the forces of dictatorship enjoyed an automatic advantage over free, democratic societies on account of the fact that a dictatorial regime could force individuals to commit their energy to the dictatorship's aims. Democracies, on the other hand, had to depend on the willingness of free citizens to contribute their support to the cause of preparedness against possible external threats.

Kennedy's telling answer to this problem, again borne out of his experience as an observer of the events of the 1930s, was to emphasize the need for a charismatic leader who would alert and energize the citizens of the democratic nations. Finally, and most telling of all, Kennedy believed that the democratic leader, with an aroused citizenry and a sufficient assemblage of force behind him, would have to the confront the dictator, and defeat him in a contest of wills.

To be clear, Kennedy's book was not primarily an essay on these topics. Largely, Why England Slept was an assemblage of facts and statistics related to the political situation in Great Britain during the 1930, and to the rearmament programs of the countries which became the principals in the world war, with these ideas scattered throughout it in the form of observations and asides.

The point, of course, is that Kennedy carried his ideas forward, almost on a verbatim basis, into the world of the postwar.

For Kennedy, this view of the world, as divided between two opposed forces entwined in a schematized conflict, became an encompassing metaphysic which defined and surrounded every other concern. Whether it was the great issues like the Cold War or the civil rights struggle in America, or subjects as trivial as the physical fitness scores of schoolchildren, in Kennedy's mind all things were subsumed into the matter of this vast conflict.

With Kennedy's inauguration came the clarion call, the notice to "friend and foe alike" around the world that a new and steeled generation of Americans would assume leadership on that day. Along with that came the exhortation to his fellow citizens, of America and of the world both, that they should prepare for a new world of challenge, opportunity and sacrifice. There would be hope for cooperation to be sure, but always the need for vigilance and awakening in facing the totalitarian peril.

To most people, Kennedy's inaugural address must have seemed a bolt across the sky. In actuality, except for the fact that Kennedy obviously had sought to make his inaugural remarks a masterpiece of articulation, there otherwise was little to distinguish what he said on the inaugural stand on January 20, 1961 from many of his public utterances either before or after he became president.

Twenty years or so is not a long time, not in the life span of a cycle of ideas as it works itself out in one person's mind. No more than that amount of time had passed from the era of Why England Slept to the era of Kennedy's presidency. In the 1930s, the issue had been the rise of Hitler and the challenge of German rearmament, and, more peripherally, the march of Japanese imperialism in the Far East. In the immediate postwar era, the issue was the conflict between Communism and the West. What had changed was that the destiny of freedom, which once had hinged upon the outcome of a struggle between great powers, now, in Kennedy's mind, depended as much upon the battle for the "hearts and minds" of the people of the world of the underdeveloped world as it did on the conflict between the Soviet Union and the West.

To Kennedy, the trumpet indeed was sounding again, and the fate of all things hung on every word and deed.

4. The Coming of the New Frontier

John F. Kennedy's political career began with his election to U.S. House of Representatives in 1946 as part of the legendary postwar political class which produced future presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford among other eventual luminaries. Because of his authorship of Why England Slept and the later Profiles in Courage, his family name, and his election to the U.S. House and advancement to the Senate in 1952, Kennedy was established as a national figure well before he sought a place on the national ticket.

Kennedy's debut as national aspirant came in 1956 when Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson refused to select his vice-presidential running mate, instead leaving the issue up to the convention. Two contenders quickly emerged, one of them Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and the other Kennedy. Although Kennedy - some would say fortunately - fell short on the first ballot, and the colorful, eccentric Kefauver won the vice presidential spot on the third ballot, the 1956 convention gave Kennedy a chance to begin the development of his future presidential machine; indeed to show that he had it in him the potential to be a formidable presidential contender.

After Kennedy was reelected to the Senate in 1958, his drive to secure his party's presidential nomination began. At that time, his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was still active, and a powerful figure behind the scenes in Democratic politics. Perhaps the senior Kennedy helped arrange the support of the big city political machines, particularly the Irish-dominated Daley machine in Chicago, but also party organizations in New York and many other cities with large Catholic populations.

Whatever aid John F. Kennedy received from his father and other power brokers, and whatever adulatory media coverage was arranged for him, Kennedy the presidential aspirant still had to face and win over primary voters across the United States before he could claim the nomination. His opposition was not exactly stellar. It included the politically superannuated Adlai Stevenson and fellow senators Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson of Texas. The populist Humphrey was a formidable campaigner who lacked organizational ability while Johnson, who sought to position himself as a possible compromise choice if the convention deadlocked, simply lacked appeal to the nation's primary voters, even though he would later become the defining figure of the 1960s.

The Kennedy persona, with its aura of energy and message of infinite challenge, was unveiled in all totality for the 1960 primary season. The real challenge facing Kennedy, apart from the general issue of winning over his party's primary voters, was the task of showing that he could win over blue collar Protestant voters in Northern states.

In retrospect, and looking at the numbers, it might seem that Kennedy had an easy time of it in the Democratic primaries. Outside of the several large states where the field apparently was conceded to so-called "favorite son" candidates, Kennedy received well over 50 percent of the total vote, with Humphrey far behind at less than 20 percent. The numbers belie the intensity and significance of the intraparty battles which took place in 1960. The key of these, because they spoke to core issue of Kennedy's electability, were the Wisconsin and West Virginia primary.

On April 5, 1960, Kennedy defeated Humphrey by comfortable margin in Wisconsin, a multi-ethnic state with a good balance between Catholic and Protestant and urban and rural voters, and adjacent to Humphrey's Minnesota. After that, heavily Protestant West Virginia loomed as the acid test for Kennedy's candidacy, and as the final stand for the explosive Humphrey. Kennedy's decisive victory May 10 in West Virginia opened the road to Democratic presidential nomination, which he received in Los Angeles on July 15.

The phrase "New Frontier" first appeared in Kennedy's rhetoric only in his acceptance speech at the national convention. But it was no casual turn of phrase. Following a retinue of partisan exhortations in which he castigated his Republican opponent Richard Nixon as unequal to the task of leadership in the coming decade and paid his necessary obeisance to the religious issue, Kennedy made the "New Frontier" concept the centerpiece of his campaign.

Kennedy outlined the perceived revolutionary nature of the world of the day, announcing in all clarity and earnestness, "The New Frontier is here whether we seek it or not." According to Kennedy, the challenges were myriad and connected together by one common thread. In each of them, the destiny of freedom, even of humanity itself, stood in the balance.

The issues which concerned Kennedy were not obscure or unfamiliar to people in America and around the world. They were the central issues of the Cold War then raging between the United States and the Soviet Union. The battle was for supremacy in space and for the hearts and minds of newly liberated nations.

To the American electorate, the New Frontier was a challenge to do more and be more. It was a challenge to embrace new modalities. Especially Kennedy promoted civil rights as a Cold War issue, suggesting to those who were unmotivated on this issue that if America failed to embrace racial equality, it would lose the faith of the emerging nations which were believed to be the critical battleground of the Cold War

Beyond that, the New Frontier was a battle against the long-time scourges of humanity, against poverty and "old fears and hates and rivalries", and against the threat to all humanity represented by the world's nuclear arsenals. If America failed to embrace this struggle also, it would lose the battle for the confidence of the world's emerging people.

"All mankind waits upon our decision," John F. Kennedy told his party's convention on that day. "A whole world looks to see what we will do."

Following a presidential campaign in which he made military preparedness a central issue, Kennedy would go on win a narrow and still controversial victory over Richard Nixon in November.

In January, 1961, he delivered his iconic inaugural remarks. For those who had read his seminal Why England Slept, had heard his acceptance speech, or listened to his campaign rhetoric perhaps the message was not new. For the rest of humanity, John F. Kennedy's inaugural remarks were a bolt across the sky, a stunning intimation that the world in those days was about to be made anew.

5. Exhortations

When his term as president began in 1961, few, either among the American public or within the elected congress, likely took the new president's campaign and inaugural rhetoric fully literally. For John F. Kennedy it was another matter. To him, his exhortations were the product of earnest belief, and the initiatives he intended to undertake in the name of creed an inescapable, if not sacred duty.

Kennedy, as he sought to bring forward into the postwar world the seminal ideas of Why England Slept, had expanded on them in one important way. The consuming conflict between freedom and tyranny was still the centerpiece, but the venue of the battle had changed. In the era of the 1930s, the issue had been one of preparedness on the part of the English and French democracies in facing the Nazi threat along the common European frontier between the allies and Nazi Germany.

Now, according to Kennedy, while conventional and strategic preparedness against the new adversary, the Soviet Union, was still critical, the struggle had become worldwide. It would be fought on many fronts, and the issue of the allegiance of the uncommitted masses in Asia, Africa and Latin America would be the determinant of the its outcome.

Kennedy believed that America and the West, but America individually in particular, would have to prove to the rest of the world the moral and material superiority of the free, democratic, capitalist system. To this end, Kennedy proposed a number of initiatives. Some were intended to challenge the perceived complacency of the American citizenry itself. Some were intended to strengthen America in its competition with the Soviet Union, both peaceful and strategic. Others were conceived as outreach to the uncommitted world.

The Peace Corp, intended to send idealistic, mostly young Americans into Third World countries to aid in local development projects, was one lasting legacy of the Kennedy presidency. Other initiatives did not fare so well. The Alliance for Progress, intended to promote economic growth as well as combat the spread of communism in Latin America soon passed from the scene a failure, if not for other reasons, then largely due to the endemic defects of Latin American social organization.

Domestically, Kennedy promoted several key themes, all of them intimately connected in his mind and in his rhetoric to the worldwide struggle, but vastly different in their ultimate significance. His efforts to convince American to build family fallout shelters, in retrospect almost comedic, set off an ethical debate, but produced little useful action. His physical fitness program, which he perhaps saw as a means of making Americans more capable of meeting the challenges of life in the new era, might have had some long arc of influence, but was never something of great significance.

Of great import were his support for civil rights, his support for federal aid to public education, and his support for the space program. All of these were promoted by Kennedy as Cold War issues. They were at once essential for the development of America's greater strategic potential, and, at least in the case of civil rights and the space program, equally essential as components in the battle for the allegiance of the world's uncommitted masses.

Of particular interest is Kennedy's civil rights advocacy. Kennedy may well have had a burning personal belief in the essential rightness of this cause, although some have expressed doubt. Most significant is that Kennedy, when he proposed the comprehensive civil right legislation in 1963, leaned heavily on the idea that America could not be credible in the eyes of world if it held some of its citizens in second-class status.

None of these initiatives would reach fruition under Kennedy. The comprehensive civil right act was enacted in 1964 under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson and his supporters in congress likewise greatly expanded federal aid for all level of education, most significantly taking effective steps to make higher education possible for all regardless of financial means. The space race which began with the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957 concluded when the America space program completed a successful moon landing and return in 1969.

In the minds of most people today, Kennedy's international outreach and his support of human rights at home and abroad, along with his support for expanding the boundaries of knowledge and discovery, comprise his enduring legacy. In his own time, his greatest interest was in the struggle between the West and world communism. With Europe divided along a fortified frontier held static by a nuclear stalemate, Kennedy's attention turned toward the Third World battleground, where, he believed, the outcome of the world conflict would be determined.

Kennedy intended to challenge communism in the Third World arena not only peacefully, but with force if necessary. To this end, Kennedy and his advisors developed doctrine of counterinsurgency, which represented a significant departure from the Eisenhower administration's more covert approach to this issue.

The counterinsurgency doctrine called for America to provide military and developmental aid to nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America which were threatened by ongoing communist-led insurgencies. To this end, the American military would be called upon to develop the tactical components necessary to implement this new strategy. In Kennedy's mind, however, simply pursuing counterinsurgency as a military strategy was not enough. For him, the final stage was to secure public support for this adventurous new approach to the problem of halting the perceived advance of communism worldwide.

Counterinsurgency became the most consistently - and certainly the most extensively - publicized theme of the New Frontier era. A small, elite Army organization called the Army Special Operations Forces was elevated to iconic status, and its catchy, though unauthorized green beret headgear decreed official and made into the visible symbol of the counterinsurgency crusade.

Meanwhile, the popular weekly news and public affairs magazines, always the favored Kennedy publicity mode, weighed in on the issue. The Green Berets were prominently featured, and the geopolitical subtleties of counterinsurgency doctrine were discussed in all nuance, with Southeast Asia already identified as the most promising future battleground for its motivated population and for its strategic importance as the supposed "rice bowl" of the Far East.

Through these key initiatives, Kennedy sought both to achieve long deliberated policy objectives, and to inculcate in the American public the sense of energy and commitment necessary to make the achievement of his objectives possible. Indeed, the development of what he had called, in the pages of Why England Slept, "an aroused citizenry" was, in and of itself, one of his principal policy aims.

Over the course of the first year and a half of his administration, Kennedy made the issues of international outreach, civil rights, the space program, and preparedness in the face of the challenges of insurgency and "brushfire" conflict into the leading of issues of the day. In doing so, he put the stamp of New Frontier culture on America society as surely as Jacksonian democracy or the New Deal had before, or the Great Society would do in the days which followed the Kennedy presidency.

6. The Hinge of Fate

When he came into office in 1961, John F. Kennedy already possessed an exceedingly well-developed view of the role he wanted to play as a world leader. As he sought to assert himself on the world stage however, the inexperience for which he had been derided in the late campaign became painfully, even dangerously some would say, apparent. The debacle of the Bay of Pigs, an attempted invasion of Cuba by a small, lightly armed force of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, might be dismissible as a characteristic mistake of a new president and as an event of only local significance in any case. Other events of the year 1961 were more ominous in their significance.

In June,1961, Kennedy met in Vienna with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Perhaps Kennedy had hoped that the summit meeting would give him the opportunity to show his adversary the strength of his will. Kennedy fared poorly in the Vienna meeting however, giving Khrushchev the impression that he was an inexperienced, and, more the point, a weak leader who could be easily bullied. Khrushchev may have misread Kennedy's resolve to prevail in any confrontation with a perceived tyrannical adversary. In any case, the Vienna summit set in motion a series of events which would culminate in the Cuban Missile Crisis little more than year later.

Immediately following the Vienna meeting, Khrushchev turned up the heat in Berlin. The status of the city of Berlin was one of the enduring issues of the Cold War. At the end of the World War in 1945, Germany had been divided into zones of occupation, with the United States, Britain and France in the west and the Soviet Union in the east. Berlin, the former German capitol, located deep within the Soviet zone, likewise had been divided into four zones of occupation. Ultimately, the Soviet Union set up communist governments in all of the countries behind its lines, including in the eastern zone of Germany.

From the late 1940s on, the Soviets consistently pressured the western allies over Berlin, sometimes demanding that the they leave Berlin entirely. Under Josef Stalin, Soviet forces blockaded Berlin for almost a year in the late 1940s, forcing the Americans and the British to supply the city's 2 million residents and the occupying forces entirely by air. A decade later, in 1958, Khrushchev demanded that the western powers acquiesce in making a Berlin a demilitarized city.

By 1961, Berlin had become a critical problem for the Soviet government and it East German ally. Not only had more than a decade of tension and confrontation failed to weaken the west's resolve to hold Berlin, indeed to make it into a prosperous showcase of western economic success and western democracy, but East Germany was losing a staggering proportion of its young adult population to the west through the open border between East Berlin and West Berlin.

Khrushchev's ultimate response was to close the border between east and west. Construction of the Berlin wall began on August 13, 1961. Although the Berlin Wall was unpalatable both to western governments and to western public opinion, the building of it had the effect of ending the perpetual state of crisis in Berlin. As the situation in Central Europe turned into an uncomfortable stalemate, the focus of the conflict began to shift to matters away from the line in Central Europe.

In the 1960 campaign, Kennedy had made an issue of the so-called "missile gap", but Khrushchev knew that the balance of strategic forces by far favored the West, in fact by a factor of about ten to one. After his success in forcing the West's hand in Berlin, Khrushchev took action on the nuclear front, announcing in August, 1961 that the Soviet Union would resume atmospheric nuclear testing following a voluntary moratorium which had been in effect since 1958.

In the spring of 1962, several months after the Soviet Union had completed a series of more than 50 atmospheric tests, Kennedy announced that the United States would resume atmospheric nuclear testing. These nuclear tests were undertaken for frank political motives on both sides, not because any change in the strategic balance of power would be brought about due to more testing. This was a fact of which Khrushchev must have been cognizant, knowing that the test series did nothing to increase the Soviet Union's arsenal of deliverable weapons. In response to this circumstance, Khrushchev made the decision to take material action to equalize the balance of power between East and West.

In July, 1962, the Soviet Union began a secret buildup of strategic forces in Cuba intended to include both medium-range ballistic missiles and nuclear-capable bombers. Over the summer and into the fall of 1962, intelligence reports trickled into Washington showing evidence of a Soviet military buildup in Cuba. This intelligence was largely ignored by the Kennedy administration until pressure both from within the congress and from within the executive branch, combined with the accumulating weight of evidence, forced Kennedy to take action.

Early in October, 1962, Kennedy ordered low-level reconnaissance flights over Cuba. These flights, carried out on Oct. 14, 1962, confirmed that Soviet missile installations on the island of Cuba were nearly operational.

On Oct. 22, 1962, Kennedy addressed the nation, revealing that the Soviet Union had, indeed, placed offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba. Kennedy's options were few, but extreme in their differences, ranging from an outright invasion of the island, to air operations intended to destroy Soviet strategic facilities, to the possibility of purely diplomatic efforts. Kennedy chose to put a naval blockade around Cuba in an attempt to force the Soviets to discontinue their strategic buildup in Cuba.

On the balance sheet, the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in accommodation. While the public crisis went on for some days in the form of a naval standoff in the waters around Cuba, behind the scenes, Kennedy negotiated a settlement which called for the Soviet Union to remove its strategic missiles, and also a projected intermediate bomber force, from Cuba. In return, the United States issued a public pledge not to invade Cuba. Several months later, in accord with a secret agreement which was key to resolving the crisis, the United States removed intermediate range missiles from bases in Turkey and Italy.

The Cuban Missile Crisis has been studied and written about very extensively. Although it seems clear in retrospect that the eventual removal of Soviet strategic forces from Cuba could have been secured by means which relied more openly on negotiation, Kennedy was widely lauded for pursuing a deliberative course in a situation which, in its Cold War context, called for a determined, if not extreme, response.

In his confrontation with the Premier Khrushchev, Kennedy lived out the stuff of his oldest reveries. In the wake of this event came a command of the office, along with a surging popularity at home and unprecedented prestige abroad. The hinge of fate had turned, and the promise of new world where negotiation would replace confrontation and hope would replace fear stood right ahead.

7. The Camelot of John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy's success in confronting the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis, along with his party's relative success in the 1962 midterm election, moved Kennedy into a new territory beyond the boundaries of his original conceptions, and gave him the seasoning and experience to exert himself as a visionary national and world leader. John F. Kennedy's legend was born in this final year in office, making him seem, in his sudden and shocking death, even if at the hands of a person or persons acting on bilious personal motives, a martyr both to his initiatives in civil rights at home and to his charismatic outreach to both the elites and the masses of people on every continent.

Kennedy's "Camelot" began with a modest initiative, the issuance, finally, on November 20, 1962, of a long-promised executive order banning racial discrimination in federally assisted housing programs. In December, 1962, the Kennedy administration reached an agreement with the Soviet Union pertaining to the peaceful exploration of space. Over the summer of 1963, the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain reached an agreement to ban nuclear testing in the atmosphere. Domestically, Kennedy expanded his commitment to civil rights, eventually proposing the future comprehensive civil right law, and, perhaps as importantly, definitively putting the prestige of the presidency then and for the future behind the principle of equal rights under the law.

As much as Kennedy had some serious accomplishments during his last year in office, his most enduring achievement was his coming into the singular position he held as a world leader. The American president was then, and still is, expected to be the leader of the "Free World", so-called, that coalition of prosperous democracies which rings the North Atlantic. In growing into this role Kennedy had to win over, among others, such redoubtables as French President Charles De Gaulle and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, both counted among the great senior statesmen of modern history. Even Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, ostensibly an adversary but also a man as volcanic in his humanity as he was in his anger, seemed to join in the spirit of the day in acknowledging that the generation which recently had come of age worldwide, and the one which would soon follow it into adult life, needed the influence of the vigorous civic inspiration which Kennedy relentlessly promoted.

As the year 1963 moved forward, Kennedy seemed to gather forces about him. An undoubted high point was his legendary "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, delivered on June 26, 1963 before a crowd of literally millions of West Berlin residents gathered along the face of the Berlin Wall. In his public speeches throughout the year, Kennedy was ever more expansive in his expression on behalf of the idea that world civilization had a worthy future ahead of it if only humanity would face the challenge of creating a new kind of peace - not a static design, but a dynamic process involving the diverse energies of all the world's peoples.

Perhaps there was a dark underside to Kennedy's year of triumph, found in the Kennedy administration's incessant machinations against the governments and leaders of non-Western countries, his fascination with armaments programs, in and in his secret underworld of dubious liaisons and associations. If this was so, it mattered little to the hundreds of millions in America and around the world whom Kennedy had made feel vital as no other political leader ever had before, or would after. By the time Kennedy went to Dallas and his appointment with a martyr's destiny in November of 1963, he was riding high in popularity both at home and in the eyes of the world community.

Of the concept of "Camelot" itself, the term came to be applied to the era of the Kennedy presidency at the behest of John F. Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, when, alluding to the popular Broadway musical of the same name, in an interview with journalist Theodore H. White, she expressed the hope that her late husband's presidency would be remembered as "one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot".

In the minds of the upscale Northeasterners who formed one of his core constituencies, perhaps it was enough to them that they could see the Kennedy administration as an oasis of sophistication within an otherwise endless succession of culturally undistinguished presidential epochs for the Kennedy era to thought a "Camelot". In history, however, John F. Kennedy, like other figures, has to be measured by what he was and what he did, and by his reach across the arc of time.

If John F. Kennedy has an importance in history and a reach across the ages, then he earned his place in that span of months in the summer and fall of 1963 when, sometimes, he became the bold angel of his own imaginings, and illuminated the landscape of the world like a second sun.

8. Before and After Kennedy

The outpouring of grief and passionate remembrance which followed the shocking event of the Kennedy assassination spoke to the estimation in which John F. Kennedy had come to be held, by so many in America and throughout the world. He remains thought a martyr for his perceived unflinching stand on the issue of human rights and for his iconoclastic international outreach. Still, some see him an unreconstructed cold warrior, even a dangerous man, for his blithe willingness to go to the brink of nuclear war in order to prove to his adversaries the tenacity of his will, and for his restless search for a battlefield on which to test the doctrine of counterinsurgency.

Since then, different individuals have represented Kennedy in different ways. Those on the liberal side sometimes have suggested that John F. Kennedy, at the time of his death, stood on the shores of some vast new world, prevented by an ugly conspiracy of corporatists and right-wing interests from achieving transformative aims.

On the conservative side, Kennedy's secret life was brought out into the light of day to the end of discrediting conventional liberalism, with some on the political left adding their voices to this chorus. More recently, conservative opinion has taken to crediting Kennedy and the Democratic presidents preceding him with being patriots, again to the end of discrediting the "popular front" liberalism of the post-1970 era.

All of this, of course, largely begs the basic question of what Kennedy's place in history actually is.

In a realm of narrative history, John F. Kennedy's accomplishments and possible missteps as can be enumerated in the familiar terms of issues such as the Cold War, civil rights, and the space program. The ultimate question, however, is not whether John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, was involved in watershed events. Rather, it is whether it is possible to speak of his short tenure on the world stage in terms of that elusive concept of "before and after".

No one, certainly not John F. Kennedy himself, anticipated the vast social changes which would sweep world society as each successive generation born following the end of World War II came of age. Kennedy developed and promoted the ideal of the committed world citizen, aware of all differences in heritage and mode of life, but impelled by brave ideals which could be shared by all.

If Kennedy's idea seemed not to have lasted long beyond his own days, perhaps it was due not to him, but to a change in world society. In a world where such masses of people have either disconnected themselves from the traditional aspiration to family, community and a better life, or embraced a fanatical rejection of modernity, it is hard to see how any unifying ideal could remain rooted. Or how it could serve to nurture a creative dialectic between rich nations and poor, or between the sides in any other division in the world.

If Kennedy's idea seemed not to have lasted long beyond his own days, perhaps it was due not to him, but to a change in the world society. In a world where masses of people worldwide either have disconnected themselves from the traditional aspirations which characterized the industrial era or have embraced a fanatical rejection of modernity, it is hard to see how any unifying ideal could remain rooted. Or how it could serve to nurture a creative dialectic between rich nations and poor, or between the sides in any other division which might afflict world society otherwise.

Many look at the arc of John F. Kennedy's career and see promise lost, although they might be at a loss to explain what that promise was. Particularly, those who were drawn themselves into idealistic ventures under the influence of Kennedy's outreach, such as service in the Peace Corp, were, and remain, most likely to imagine that the world would be vastly different if the Kennedy assassination had not occurred.

More likely, the story of John F. Kennedy is one of promise achieved. In the world of politics, Kennedy positioned himself as the leader who would awaken the world to the perils and opportunities of a new age, and prepare the world's peoples to turn the tide in the struggle between freedom and tyranny. As he and his contemporaries around the world understood those concepts, he succeeded well in those aims. Even with his great failings and his many secrets, he left behind a legacy of worldwide outreach which, itself, will last the ages.

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New Frontier Culture By Michael N. Field

New Frontier Culture

New Frontier Culture

By Michael N. Field