Courage
By: Rob Pierce
Tags: The Sixties, Racism, Courage, The American Mind, History

This is the third part of “Family Notebooks,” a work in progress that is a collection of memories and windows into the life of one family, and an aggregation of numerous passages from various writers, thinkers and others of the past who’ve seemed relevant as we’ve lived this life.

In 1955, John F. Kennedy co-authored “Profiles in Courage,” a book of short essays that were and still are, “not just the stories of the past but a book of hope and confidence for the future,” in the words of his younger brother Robert (who was assassinated at 42 years old in 1968 and had eleven children).

And Dick Goodwin, in “Remembering America,” wrtoe about Kennedy, “he seemed to embody the idea of America. Not the nation itself. That would be presumption. But the idea by which we have defined America, and by extension, ourselves as Americans.”

Goodwin goes on later to say that Kennedy, “expressed — in words, in actions, in manner — his own belief in America’s possibilities; that we were a nation with a large purpose, a mission, perhaps dangerous, certainly difficult but within our powers.”

Goodwin, along with Theodore White, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Gore Vidal were all writers who knew the Kennedys. The first three of these folks were speech writers at various points in Kennedy’s political life, and Vidal was a friend and relation being married for a while to a sister of Jackie’s.

After JFK was assassinated, they called his time in office, “Camelot,” as if it were a charmed fairy-tale — a characterization of a castle, chivalry, and courage. Kennedy was King Arthur and Jackie was Guinevere.

In White’s book, “In Search of History,” he writes that “More than any other President since Lincoln, John F. Kennedy has become myth.” Kennedy “was cut off at the promise, not after the performance, and so it was left to television and his widow, Jacqueline, to frame the man as legend”

“Quite inadvertently, I was her instrument in labeling the myth, because she was concerned about history and wanted me to help him be remembered — and so, after a long night’s talk, she urged my using the word, “Camelot” to describe it all. And her message was his message — that one man, by trying, may change it all. Whether this is a myth or truth I still debate.”

“She wanted me to make certain that Jack was not forgotten to history.”

It was likely still true of Jackie in 1978 when White’s book was published that “No single human being has ever endured more public attention, more of the camera-watching, the camera-angling, the microphones intruding, the tears caught glistening, the children’s hands curling in her own, than she had in the telecasts of the assassination and ceremonies. She had performed as people rarely do, flawlessly, superbly.”

Jackie embodied what Ernest Hemingway defined courage as, “grace under pressure.”

Was “Camelot” just a dream of what America could be? If the dream for some meant strength and power, and for others it meant equal opportunity, safety, and equity, could the dreams ever merge to one collective dream and ambition?

To a large extent, America’s narrative of itself reflects a certain innocence, an unwillingness to believe anything other than absolute certainty that we have a system in which anyone can become financially successful. This dream neglects all of the realities of true injustice and a lack of opportunity for many. It also relies on a lack of transparency into the realities of massive privilege and power for a small subset of the America’s people. It is in this context that every time something tragic happens in America, writers refer to “innocence lost.”

Assassinations, economic collapses, wars, massive public protests, and pandemics are all forms of insults to America’s so-called innocence.

In Schlesinger’s book, “The Cycles of American History,” he proposes that every thirty or so years, America faces situations that it’s faced before. And he writes about American innocence.

“We carelessly apply the phrase, ‘end of innocence’ to one or another stage of American History. This is an amiable flourish when not a pernicious delusion. How many times can a nation lose its innocence?”

In one of Kennedy’s profiles in courage, he noted that “Andrew Johnson, the courageous if untactful Tennessean who had been the only Southern Member of Congress to refuse to secede with his state, had committed himself to the policies of the Great Emancipator to whose high station he had succeeded only by the course of an assassin’s bullet.”

This is a remarkable passage, considering that it’s exactly how Lyndon B. Johnson took office after Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and LBJ pushed forward Kennedy’s efforts to establish the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Another Kennedy profile is on John Quincy Adams, the sixth U.S. president and son of second president, John Adams. In the essay, Kennedy notes that JQA’s self-assessment late in his life, despite all of his accomplishments which included, being a state senator, a diplomat, and Harvard professor, in addition to being a president, wrote that his life was a “succession of disappointments,” and he could not “reflect a single instance of success in anything that I ever undertook.”

JQA also was influential in the expansion and boundaries of these United States. He voted in favor of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the year before Lewis and Clark set out on their voyage of discovery, and he negotiated the Transcontinental Treaty with Spain in 1819 which designated a southern border for the country and added all of Florida to it.

It’s debatable whether JQA’s self-assessment emerges from humility or depression. Nevertheless, compare that to someone who praises just about everything they do. Such a someone happened to be the president of the United States in 2020.

But back to Kennedy writing about John Quincy Adams, “Yet the lifetime which was so bitterly deprecated by its own principal has never been paralleled in American history.”

In terms of what “noise” sounded like back in JQA’s time compared to the noise in the twenty-first century, consider this passage from Kennedy: “For everyday life is becoming so saturated with the tremendous power of mass communications that any unpopular or unorthodox course arouses a storm of protests such as John Quincy Adams — under attack in 1807 — could never have envisioned.”

That was Kennedy’s assessment from 1955. What can we say in 2020?

In Kennedy’s own words at the conclusion of his “Profiles in Courage,” he wrote that “stories of past courage can define that ingredient — they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.”

That’s precisely what Martin Luther King did in this same era, perhaps more greatly than any American in history. King had the courage to dedicate his life to peaceful and intelligent resistance to inequality.

“I’m more concerned about doing a good job, doing something for humanity and what I consider the will of God, than about longevity. Ultimately it isn’t so important how long you live. The important thing is how well you live.”

I sometimes wonder what Henry Adams might have thought or had to say about non-violent protest for promoting the freedom and equality for all people in America.

Henry Adams had both a presidential grandfather and a great-grandfather. He lived from 1838–1918 and was a true representative of the American mind that passed from one century to the next one. As a Harvard graduate and part of the distinguished Adams family, he had influential friends and mixed with elite society in the nation’s capital.

He took a strong stand about the treason of the Civil War. “I think that Lee should have been hanged,” he wrote.

“The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind — fit for medical treatment…They showed a young student his first object-lesson on the way in which excess of power worked when held by inadequate hands.”

Adams also made several notes about the ever-changing dynamics of society, especially in terms of advances in communication and industry, which effectively snapped his “historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”

Fast forward from early to mid 1900s and you have television.

Schlesinger wrote about the impact of “tv” in his book (from the 1980s) about the cycles in American history, saying that it “has dismally reduced both the intellectual content of campaigns and the attention span of political audiences.”

And in 2020 we had a president who “tweeted” incomplete and dishonest fragments of text to a base of millions of Americans over the wireless waves. And this figure called the most distinguished newspapers in America “fake news media” and millions of people were willing to follow him and believe him.

But the cycles of history include both good turns and bad ones, as Schlesinger’s book from 1986 describes: “Every innovation in modes of communication has added to the need for readjustment. Democracy along the way has absorbed the penny press, the telegraph, the movie and the radio. It will doubtless find ways of turning television and the microchip to its purposes.”

Schlesinger sounds optimistic where he wrote, “The power of American democracy lies in its capacity for adaptation.”

On the other hand, how is your optimism feeling after reading the following, as Schlesinger wrote it? “So far the electronic age has not notably weakened the democratic commitment to individual freedom and the constitutional state, nor the American capacity for administrative innovation.”

What people in the ’60s, like my parents saw in Kennedy is what people in my times saw in President Barak Obama: a smart, articulate, elegant man who was in many ways even more impressive than JFK in that Obama didn’t come from wealth and privilege to rise to who he became.

In Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” he reminds us that “in 1960, the year that my parents were married, miscegenation still described a felony in over half the states in the Union.” And toward the end of the book he wrote about the evolution of our laws that “records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its own conscience.”

Theodore White’s book about JFK rings true to both of these leaders: “He made us look at ourselves afresh.” Both of these leaders had a vision and strategy to try to end inequitable “myths and fossil assumptions.”

Even though what they sought and what they accomplished were widely distant, both men make me yearn for future leaders for the United States of America who are decent people.

As we approached the election of 2020, over 200,000 Americans had died in a pandemic. Millions of people were unemployed but somehow abortion and fear of the “far left” were important topics in politics to many Americans.

Obama wrote, “Endure — and make music that wasn’t there.” That sounds a lot like courage, doesn’t it?