The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [269]
As Jack spoke into the Dictaphone, he was displaying yet another piece, and one that did not fit easily among the others. As a political philosopher he stood apart from the practical man of power. This John F. Kennedy was a man of deep contemplation. There was a distance that Jack maintained from the rest of humanity, in part because of the natural isolation of power and its pursuit, but in equal part because of his very nature. And it was out of this distance, standing back from the shrill shouts, the pettiness, the rude exchanges, the duplicities, the preening ambitions of much of Washington life, that he observed what he thought to be the natural greatness of politics and a political life.
Jack was a public man who could speak extemporaneously in perfectly ordered prose. On this occasion he welded his sentiments into an essay, stopping periodically to find the precise words, speaking with such subtlety and nuance, even pausing to signify commas, periods, and underlining, that he could have been reading from a script. Jack began by pondering the fact that politicians were held in such low regard.
Politics has become one of our most abused and neglected professions. It ranks low on the occupational list of a large share of the American [public?]…. Yet it is … these politicians who make the great decisions of war and peace, prosperity and recession, the decision whether we look to the future or the past. In a large sense everything now depends on what the government decides. Therefore, if you are interested, if you want to participate, if you feel strongly about any public question … it seems to me that governmental service is the way to translate this interest into action…. The natural place for the concerned citizen is to contribute part of his life to the national interest.
When politicians are perceived as no more than a motley crew of corrupt careerists and cynical panderers, then the whole covenant of democracy is broken. Jack saw his colleagues at their most conniving and self-interested but he perceived an underlying nobility in the politician’s life. He saw himself as part of a tradition, as a scion of a race of Irish-Americans who had made politics the chosen avenue of their advance; he was the grandson of two politicians and the son of a man who had talked to him almost daily of politics and a mother who had put her little son on her knee and told him tales of American history. He had come late and hard to regarding the word “politician” as an honorable term, but he shouted the word loudly now and was proud to be called by that ancient name.
I moved into the Bellevue Hotel with my grandfather [in 1946], and I began to run. I’ve been running ever since. Fascination began to grip me, and I realized how satisfactory a profession a political career could be. I saw how ideally politics filled the Greek definition of happiness. “A full use of your powers, along lines of excellence in a life affording scope.” … How can you compare in interest … [a] job with a life in Congress, where you are able to participate to some degree in determining which direction the nation will go.
This was a Jack who celebrated a political life and saw it as a public man’s noblest pursuit. He may have fallen short in many ways, but that did not diminish the ideals he professed.
In looking back, I would say that I’ve never regretted my choice of professions, even though I cannot know what the future will bring…. Particularly in these days where the watch fires of the enemy camp burn bright. I think all of us must be willing to give ourselves to this, some of ourselves to this most exacting, to the most exacting discipline of self-government. The magic of politics is not the panoply of office. The magic of politics is participation on all levels of national