The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [446]
When the president arrived back in America and spent the Fourth of July weekend in Hyannis Port, he invited the entire family to watch his movie of the trip to Ireland. They all came over and watched as Kennedy provided running commentary. The next evening Kennedy invited them back to watch again, and since not only was he president but he so rarely liked watching or doing anything twice, they gladly returned and sat through it all again. Then on the following night he invited them back a third time, and this time they trooped slowly and dutifully into the living room to watch film that they had practically memorized. And he sat and watched as if he were seeing these scenes for the first time.
Kennedy could move within a few moments from the kind of cynical political ripostes that some men called realism to acts of the most rarefied, deeply felt idealism. His idealism was not merely expressed in service of his cynicism but was on a different plane and served nothing but itself. Kennedy had a profound belief in public rituals. He had grown up in a church whose ornate sacraments set its believers apart from the Unitarians and the Congregationalists, to whom simplicity was the mark of true faith. His mother had led her sons and daughters along the Freedom Trail, from Plymouth to Concord to the Old North Church, inculcating in Jack the idea that the patriotic faith of Americans had to be affirmed in shrines and rituals.
As a lover of England and Europe, Kennedy was a lover of history, not as a tedious recitation of the past but in part as a vivid tapestry of rituals. As a young congressman, he had participated in all the rituals of democracy, including Veterans Day. Each year the numbers in the crowds seemed to lessen, the cheers became more muffled, and more and more of the speeches echoed in half-empty auditoriums. He was seeing the beginning of the secularization of American life; Sunday would become just another shopping day, and many national holidays were ripped out of the calendar and set next to Saturday and Sunday so that Americans could have their three-day weekends. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kennedy revered these moments, and in the midst of his tight schedule he penned some ideas for the Fourth of July proclamation. This was usually a boilerplate document put together by a speechwriter, to be released under the president’s name and then forgotten, but not for Kennedy this year.
“Bells mark significant events in modern lives. Birth and death, war and peace are pealed and tolled,” he wrote in his own hand during his European trip. “Bells summon the community to take note of things which affect the life or death of a community…. On the Fourth of July when bells ring again—think back on those who lived and died to make our country and their resolve, achieved with courage and determination, to make it greater in our day and generation.”
To Kennedy, patriotism was a bell that resonated with all the sounds of American history, pealing forth the triumphs and tragedies, the deaths and dramas. It was a bell that had to be tolled repeatedly, and when it rang, those within hearing should stop and listen. To him, the heroes of the past, men like Joe Jr., lived on in the continuing history of the nation, their lives resonating in these sounds. “Heroes of the past are watching us,” he said in the proclamation. “If we remember them when the bells ring out … it will help us to live like heroes too.”
For Kennedy and his two brothers, the bell that pealed the loudest sounded out the name of their brother lost in war. They did not salute his name every day, but his life and, more importantly, his death rang through their own lives. To betray their brother’s sacrifice was to betray their country, their faith, their father, and their blood.
In September, seventy middle-aged men and most of their wives gathered in the South Ballroom at the Willard Hotel in Washington. These were the men of Navy Patrol Squadron