A Most Unstuffy Man
H. Stuart Hughes
The Nation, 14 December 1963, pp. 408–409
H. Stuart Hughes, author of Consciousness and Society and other works, is professor of history at Harvard University. In 1962 he ran as an independent candidate for the United States Senate from Massachusetts.
This has been a cruel year. In the space of six months we
have lost Pope John and our own President. Together they stood for a new and
better relationship between Catholics and non-Catholics—for the great
ecumenical hope that is hovering over us all.
This was the first of two changes that the
advent of President Kennedy epitomized. His election meant that our choice was
also no longer restricted by practice and unwholesome tradition to one
particular category of American citizens. Now that a representative of the
largest of our minorities had broken through the invisible barriers that had
confined our choice of leaders, there was no reason why others should not follow
him. In actuality now, rather than in civics-text platitude, the Presidency had
been thrown open to everyone, regardless of religion or color—or even of sex.
The second great change was the coming to
power of a new generation, the generation born during the First World War which
had fought the Second War together. For them—for those of my own age—the
President had suddenly and rather surprisingly become their contemporary. He was
no longer a father; he was one of us, whether friend or rival. For myself, I had
played football with him as a boy, and although life had completely separated us
in subsequent years, I could never think of him except as Jack, long before the
newspapers had made the nickname a national cliché. Even in death I find it
impossible to speak of him with the usual solemn formality, and I think he would
have preferred it that way. He was a most unstuffy man.
I will not here give a eulogy or recount a
life. You know it all—the papers have been full of it. Nor would it be quite
proper for me to do so; life cast me too often in opposition to him. Those of us
who in the past years were committed to the scramble of American politics were
too close up against the President to see fully who he was. Now that he is
gone—now that we compare him to others—we suddenly see a void and feel our
loss. It is as though we could appreciate his full stature only after his death.
So we should search our consciences. Were we always fair in judging him?—or,
beyond that, were we always charitable?
Like so many, I was in a public place when the news began to come in.
People did not know what to do—whether to go about their ordinary pursuits or
to give themselves wholly to their grief. These first moments were the most
impressive part of the first forty-eight hours—the disarray, the broken
phrases, the inability to say what one felt—before the TV sets began to grind
and the official mourning took over.
I heard just one expression of anger. A
Negro came by shaking his head and muttering in bitter irony: “Only in
America.”
His anger reflected what most of us at
first thought: that the crime had been committed by a Southern racist. Indeed,
if we look deeply into our souls, I think many of us will recognize that we were
disappointed to learn that such was not the case. As I have tried to meditate on
these matters, I have finally come to the conclusion that it is better this way.
Had the assassin been a Southern extremist, it would have fitted our own
prejudices and our own political commitment. Our grief would have been tinged
with a spirit of hatred and revenge. This way, our sorrow is pure: there is no
hate in our hearts.
Does this mean that what the President
experienced was no more than an ambiguous martyrdom—that he died a senseless
death? I do not think so. Nothing can take away the memory of courage and good
humor with which he went into the South—where he knew so many people hated
him—nor the sense of strength and mastery that he conveyed at the end. His
death stands as a dreadful warning against the violence lying just under the
surface of our bland and agreeable national character. Again and again in the
past months it had broken out in mad killings. We have tried to forget them, we
have tried to push it under the rug and to think of other things. Now it has
struck our President; we can no longer pretend it isn’t there. Now we know
that we can permit such things to happen no longer—that the blind killing must
stop.
As with Pope John, Jack Kennedy’s last
months were his best. As in the case of the Pope, he seems to have had a sense
that there was not much time left. It was now or never if he was going to leave
his mark on history. Jack Kennedy had been a hard-driving boy; as a man he gave
the impression of not being able to wait; of feeling that his every minute was
counted. So it was just at the end that he made his start in the two great
directions that emerged from the struggles of last summer and autumn—toward
peace with the test ban, toward human equality with the civil-rights bill. Both
were aimed against violence and hatred. They are his legacy to us.
Jack Kennedy died at the top of his form.
There was no loss of capacity, no diminuendo, no anticlimax. I think that was
the way he would have preferred to die. We saw him at the last at his very best,
bearing witness against the multiple evils that beset our world, his death a
symbol of our hope to still the violence and hatred in our hearts.
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