Letters to the Editor
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The Loss (and promise) of JFK
This is part of something I wrote a while ago:
The political debate in this country has become a badly worn fabric. For the past seventy years our national domestic political discussion has swung between just two poles. On the one side we have had the social safety net federalism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, while on the other, growing out of furious right wing opposition to the New Deal (in all its manifestations), what might be summed up in terms of its persistent, pervasive (and self serving) sub-text: the government is the great Satan.
By the 1960’s the New Deal had run its course. John Kennedy realized this and was known to privately tweak old line New Deal politicians for being old hat. I seem to recall that no less than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would then defend Kennedy to Liberals as having made a criticism of style rather than substance. But this was a moment in time when a criticism of style was a criticism of substance. We needed to move on to something new. We sensed it, and in Kennedy, with his youth, grace, energy and wit, we found someone looking to lead us in new directions (the New Frontier), even if neither of us knew just what those directions might be. For a short time he helped kindle within us a belief that we would discover a stance appropriate to, and fruitful in, the second half of the twentieth century. When he was killed, it all went away. Johnson, seemingly, led us back to the 1930’s and, ultimately, we arrived at Reagan and a temporary mooring around the second of our two poles. So, for the last seventy years we have been governed by two mind sets, formed in the 1930’s, and, since the 1960’s, persistently skew to our reality.
The problem for both parties has become how to disenthrall themselves from their fixations