Friday; 20 January, 1961~~~Inauguration Speech

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show...(the opening lines of David Copperfield as written by Charles Dickens;inspired by MTM). Or at least this ACCOUNT will, perhaps, have a reflection on whether I'm going to be the hero in my own life.


Ooh, her love is heavenly;
when her arms enfold me,
I hear a tender rhapsody...
but in reality, she doesn't even know me

Just my imagination -- once again --
running away with me.~~~TEMPTATIONS; Just My Imagination

It's remembered as a day chilled by "a Siberian wind knifing down Pennsylvania Avenue" and illuminated by "the dazzling combination of bright sunshine and deep snow."
On Jan. 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy began his presidency with a speech at once soaring and solemn. Fifty years on, we have not heard an inaugural address like it. Tethered to its time and place, it still challenges with its ambition to harness realism to idealism, patriotism to service, national interest to universal aspiration.

The above prose is so riveting, I had to borrow E. J. Dionne's opening remarks from his column dedicated to a moment in American History that today, still holds a captive audience. He, in effect, captures the very essence of this landmark moment in American history, and draws me in, to share his sentiments.
Fifty-years ago, this last Thursday was the anniversary of JFK's Inauguration Speech.

I can still recall, as a ten-year-old, the excitement; the anticipation. I mean---while I had no clue as to all of its significance, I can remember phrases like Camelot, being mentioned.

A big part of the excitement from a Roman Catholic standpoint, is that~~~John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the first, and so far only, Roman Catholic to become President
of the United States. And know that this was something that was made a contentious point of, during the election campaign.

Heavy snow fell the night before the inauguration, but thoughts about canceling the plans were overruled. The election of 1960 had been close, and the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts was eager to gather support for his agenda. He attended Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown that morning before joining President Eisenhower to travel to the Capitol. The Congress had extended the East Front, and the inaugural platform spanned the new addition.

Going to a Catholic grade school where the Sisters of Saint Mary of Namur were overjoyed that there was a handsome, young, Catholic boy now President, the sisters were very willing to bring this history right into the classroom.

I can't speak for the other 10; 11 year-old's around me, but I was thrilled, on this Friday, when the good Sister Mary Elizabeth, our Fifth Grade instructor, wheeled the cart with a TV on top, into the classroom. We were going to watch the Inauguration Speech~~~live!!

The speech was as rich with content and context, as anticipated. Its prose, its imagery, and its theme was at once~~~Branding & Defining this man.

We all can still recall...And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. This quotation will prove to be timeless.

The remark that I felt revealed His Presidency was...Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

These were not idle words; no grandstanding.

He put a blemish on his presidency early-on by taking bad Pentagon advise and committing a group of crack para-military personnel to the Bay 0f Pigs area of Cuba in a failed attempt to foil the overthrow of the Batista Regime in Cuba by a group of rag-tag revolutionaries lead by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

In the last two weeks of October of 1962, we saw this man reach near invincible stature. Kennedy deftly defused a dispute with the cold-war arch-rival---The Soviet Union, that had global conflagration written all over it regarding the Cuban Missile Crises.

And~~~in the midst of the infamous, divisive Berlin Wall, on June 26, 1963, he made his famous, "ich bin ein Berliner" speech.

While I was still so young, I had a sense that I was attached to a very profound moment in time; a sense that this was a pivotal moment in history. And just as Winston Churchill called on his Brits to show courage and defiance against Hitler as Germany was turning London into a holocaust with its bombing raids; the Brits heroism was being defined as England's Finest Hour~~~I think this Inauguration Speech could be heralded as one of America's Finest Hour's as well.

The below is the column that E. J. Dionne devotes his personal perspective to Kennedy's 1355-word epoch oratory. The column in effect, crystallizes it's meaning for me, and its significance for posterity.

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
It's remembered as a day chilled by "a Siberian wind knifing down Pennsylvania Avenue" and illuminated by "the dazzling combination of bright sunshine and deep snow."
On Jan. 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy began his presidency with a speech at once soaring and solemn. Fifty years on, we have not heard an inaugural address like it. Tethered to its time and place, it still challenges with its ambition to harness realism to idealism, patriotism to service, national interest to universal aspiration.
Theodore Sorensen, the speech's principal architect, was always modest about his own role, less so about the inaugural itself. "It certainly was not as good as Lincoln's second or FDR's first," Sorensen wrote in his memoir, adding that Kennedy thought it not as good as Jefferson's first.
By acknowledging what their joint product was not, Kennedy and Sorensen defined the historical company it still keeps.
A great speech includes lines so memorable that pedestrian orators eventually transform them into cliches. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." This muscular call for sacrifice has launched a thousand lesser speeches.
"Civility is not a sign of weakness" and "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate" - staple references whenever politics becomes particularly vicious.
"The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." And the torch gets passed again and again, whenever a younger politician is marking out generational territory.
It was a compact speech - at 1,355 words, it was less than twice the length of this column. Kennedy, wrote the historian Robert Dallek, insisted that it be brief because "I don't want people to think I'm a windbag." He needn't have worried.
Right and left still battle over Kennedy's words. Were they a call for resolve before the communist threat ("we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty") or were they a plea for negotiation as the answer to nuclear annihilation?
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Probably both. The classic realist's declaration that "only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed" was followed by this:
"But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course - both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war.
"So let us begin anew."
And so have we remained a nation forever in search of new beginnings, invoking, by turns, Lincoln or Kennedy to bless our fresh starts.
All writers take heart: Kennedy and Sorensen wrote and rewrote, often accepting changes proposed by friends. One fortunate fix came from John Kenneth Galbraith. The final address read: "United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures." The original draft referred to "joint ventures," which Galbraith thought sounded like a mining company.
They also took columnist Walter Lippmann's suggestion, changing "enemy" to "adversary." The less hostile word fit better with the speech's wish that "a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion" - a line the self-critical Sorensen saw as "a metaphorical stretch."
And Kennedy advisers Harris Wofford and Louis Martin won the insertion of six words and helped change history.
In the original draft, Kennedy declared that the new generation for which he spoke was "unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today."
To which Wofford and Martin got Kennedy to add, "at home and around the world," thus marrying the struggle for freedom abroad with the cause of domestic civil rights. There would be no turning back.
Perhaps I should acknowledge that I fell in love with this speech when I was young, purchasing a long-playing record of Kennedy addresses for 99 cents at the supermarket and listening to it over and over after Kennedy's assassination.
You might say that I still hear its trumpet summoning us again. And when Kennedy said, "I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation," I knew - millions of others felt this way, too - that he was speaking for me.

I thought I saw him[Robert] walkin' up over the hill,
With Abraham, Martin and John.(Dion)
--{-=@
Hickok
The Promise