They Just Don't Get Him

By RICHARD REEVES Political journalist Richard Reeves recently took part in seminars at several universities in connection with the publication of his book, President Kennedy: Profile of Power.

She was three years old on Nov. 22, 1963. "I knew it was the most important thing ever," she said to me, recalling the day John F. Kennedy died. "My mother was crying. I had never seen an adult cry." Now a graduate student in government at the University of Texas, she said she often thinks about that day 30 years ago. When I asked her what she thinks about Kennedy now, she said she doesn't really know much about him. Yet she shares with other young people a sense of loss and anger about something they never got to know.

The post-baby boomers, who were born after the 1960 presidential campaign, seem to have no clear picture of the man or his times. Camelot, the myth created by his wife and court after the assassination, means almost nothing to them. The political revisionism that followed, portraying Kennedy as a self- serving cold warrior, means little more to them because they know almost nothing of the history that was being so energetically revised.

The newest Kennedy myth is even further from reality than the first two. Devastated baby boomers and conspiracy peddlers seem to have put young Americans in a mysterious, alluring haze. The question I heard most often at universities was this: "What was it that J. Edgar Hoover had on Kennedy, so that he could never be fired at the FBI?"

When the editors of the Harvard Crimson asked me that question, I answered, "In 1960 J. Edgar Hoover was the most admired man in the U.S. He saved us from John Dillinger and Hitler, and now he was rounding up the dirty commies. Kennedy didn't even get 50% of the vote. He would have been nuts to fire Hoover."

The silence that followed was either polite or because they thought I came from another planet. Which of course I did.

In America, a nation that believes it transcends history, each generation can be a world of its own. We each have our own vision of Kennedy. The World War II veterans who were Kennedy's contemporaries. Me, who was in college when he was elected. Bill Clinton and the other baby boomers, who were in high school. The kids at Harvard and the University of Texas.

A baby boomer who teaches political science at the Austin campus said in a seminar that she felt she knew almost everything about Kennedy, from the big mistakes in governing to the big womanizing -- a word that bespeaks evil to generations sensitive to feminism. And yet when she hears the name or thinks about the man, "I just melt."

That was a brave thing to say in a roomful of presidential scholars. But other men and women in the room nodded, a bit rueful. Many Americans feel that way, I believe, because Kennedy passed the great test of democratic leadership: he brought out the best in most of his people most of the time.

Whatever one thinks of the political record or the political man, John Kennedy was a surpassing cultural figure -- an artist, like Picasso, who changed the way people looked at things. Kennedy painted with words and images and other people's lives, squeezing people and perceptions like tubes of paint, gently or brutally, changing millions of lives. He focused Americans in the directions that truly mattered -- toward active citizenship, toward the joy of life itself.

The most important thing about Kennedy was not any great political decision, though he made some, but his own political ambition. He did not wait his turn. He directly challenged the political system he wanted to control, understanding that the most important qualification for the most powerful job in the world was wanting it. After him, no one else wanted to wait either -- neither young Negroes in Nashville, Tennessee, nor young charmers in Arkansas -- and few institutions were rigid enough or flexible enough to survive. When he was asked early in 1960 why he thought he should be President, he answered, "I look around me at the others in the race, and I say to myself, 'Well, if they think they can do it, why not me?' Why not me? That's the answer. And I think it's enough."

For those who lived during his times, Kennedy seemed to be the beginning of the new, though perhaps he was just the end of the old. The U.S. was beginning to burst its seams economically, technologically, culturally. When Kennedy took office, the American economy was growing at a little more than 2% a year. By the end of 1963, the growth rate was nearly 6%. He came to office in the days of carbon paper, mimeograph machines and flashbulbs. Three years later, jet airliners, interstate highways, direct long-distance telephone dialing, and Polaroid cameras were speeding up people and life. New things and words were appearing almost every day: ZIP codes, Weight Watchers, Valium, transistors, computers, lasers, the Pill, LSD.

In 1963 Lawrence of Arabia won the Academy Award as best film, but another nominated picture seemed to move America more, To Kill a Mockingbird, about race and justice and hope in the South. The music of young Americans was changing from perky love songs to stuff of a different romance. If I Had a Hammer and Blowin' in the Wind were melodic calls for justice and freedom all over this world. America was rich, and its wealth was shared by many millions. A lot of this was new, and people did not quite know what to do with it or how to act. But the Kennedys would show them! The young and restless rich, well educated and well mannered, gaily presiding over the White House, the world really. Watching the Kennedys was educational, teaching that most American of endeavors: self-improvement.

That was the way we were. But why do our children and their children care about all this? The extraordinary thing is not what each of us remembers or believes, but that everyone remembers or cares at all.

"We know all the bad stuff," said one of the Harvard twentysomethings with typical anger. "But Kennedy represents good things that we never got to share. It doesn't seem fair that there was optimism then. He symbolizes idealism and service, an era when people could do things. When things got done."

"Look at MTV and this election," he said. "The slogans they used were Kennedy: 'ROCK THE VOTE!' 'CHOOSE OR LOSE!' We want our Kennedy too."