Insight To Chaos

In 1964, one year after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a memorial edition of his book, Profiles in Courage was released with a special foreword written by his brother, Robert.  That same year, my father, in his senior year of high school, bought his very own copy for 75 cents.  18 years later, I found it on a bookshelf in Dad’s office.  My fascination with Kennedy’s political career and ultimate demise was already a few years old and, naturally, I was thrilled at the discovery of new material.  After my father explained what the book was about and how Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize for it, he gave it to me.  He told me that it was a fantastic book and how he felt it should be required reading for all students, interested in politics or not.  I was twelve.

Today marks the 46^th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination.  His words, his intentions, his hopes for the country and the world hold just as true today as they did then, perhaps more so. The following is the last half of Robert Kennedy’s foreword; the conclusion to an inspiring preface, equaled in relevance and worth to the words and profiles that follow.

Thomas Carlyle wrote, “The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently but to live manfully.”

On the morning of his death, President Kennedy called former Vice President John Nance Garner to pay his respects.  It was Mr. Garner’s ninety-fifth birthday.  When Mr. Garner first came to Washington the total federal budget was less than 500 million dollars.  President Kennedy was administering a budget of just under 100 billion dollars.

President Kennedy’s grandmother was living in Boston when President Kennedy was assassinated.  She was also alive the year President Lincoln was shot.

We are a young country.  We are growing and expanding until it appears that this planet will no longer contain us.  We have problems now that people fifty, even 10 years ago, would not have dreamed would have to be faced.

The energies and talents of all of us are needed to meet the challenges – the internal ones of our cities, our farms, ourselves – to be successful in the fight for freedom around the globe, in the battles against illiteracy, hunger and disease.  Pleasantries, self-satisfied mediocrity will serve us badly.  We need the best of many – not of just a few.  We must strive for excellence.

Lord Tweedsmuir, one of the President’s favorite authors, wrote in his autobiography:  “Public life is the crown of a career, and to young men it is the worthiest ambition.  Politics is still the greatest and most honorable adventure.”

It has been fashionable in many places to look down on politics, on those in Government.  President Kennedy, I think, changed that and altered the public conception of Government.  He certainly did for those who participated.  But, however we feel about politics, the arena of Government is where the decisions will be made which will affect not only all our destinies but the future of our children born and unborn.

At the time of the Cuban missile crisis last year, we discussed the possibility of war, a nuclear exchange, and talked about being killed – the latter at that time seemed so unimportant, almost frivolous.  The one matter which really was of concern to him and truly had meaning and made that time much more fearful than it would otherwise have been was the specter of the death of the children of this country and around the world – the young people who had no part and knew nothing of the confrontation, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else’s.   They would never have been given a chance to make a decision, to vote in an election, to run for office, to lead a revolution, to determine their own destinies.

We, our generation, had. And the great tragedy was that if we erred, we erred not just for ourselves, our futures, our homes, our country, but for the lives, futures, homes and countries of those who never had been given an opportunity to play a role, to vote “aye” or “nay,” to make themselves felt.

Bonar Law said, “There is no such thing as inevitable war.  If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom.”

It is true.  It is human wisdom that is needed not just on our side but on all sides.  I might add that if wisdom had not been demonstrated by the American President and also by Premier Khrushchev, then the world as we know it would have been destroyed.

But there will be future Cubas.  There will be future crises.  We have the problems of the hungry, the neglected, the poor and the downtrodden.  They must receive more help.  And just as solutions had to be found in October of 1962, answers must be found for these other problems that still face us.  So that wisdom is needed still.

John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Sam Houston, Thomas Hart Benton, Edmund G. Ross, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, George Norris and Robert Taft imparted a heritage to us.  They came, they left their mark, and this country was not the same because these men had lived.  By how much the good of what they did and deeded to us was cherished, nurtured and encouraged, by so much did the country and all of us gain.

And so it is also for John F. Kennedy. Like these others, his life had an import, meant something to the country while he was alive.  More significant, however, is what we do with what is left, with what has been started.  It was his conviction, like Plato’s, that the definition of citizenship in a democracy is participation in Government and that, as Francis Bacon wrote, it is “left only to God and to the angels to be lookers on.”  It was his conviction that a democracy with this effort by its people must and can face its problems, that it must show patience, restraint, compassion, as well as wisdom and strength and courage, in the struggle for solutions which are very rarely easy to find.

It was his conviction that we should do so successfully because the courage of those who went before us in this land exists in the present generation of Americans.

“We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution.  Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage – and 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 at home and around the world.”

This book is not just the stories of the past but a book of hope and confidence for the future.  What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us.

—Robert F. Kennedy

December 18, 1963