Kennedy by Molly Kazan

Kennedy
by Molly Kazan

I think
that what he gave us most was pride.
It felt good to have a President like that:
bright, brave, and funny and good looking.

I saw him once drive down East Seventy-second Street
in an open car, in the autumn sun
(as he drove yesterday in Dallas).
His thatch of brown hair looked as though it had grown extra thick
the way our wood animals in Connecticut
grow extra fur for winter.
And he looked as though it was fun to be alive,
to be a politician,
to be President
to be a Kennedy,
to be a man.

He revived our pride.
It felt good to have a President who read his mail,
who read the papers,
who read books and played touch football.
It was a pleasure and a cause for pride
to watch him take the quizzing of the press
with cameras grinding —
take it in his stride,
with zest.
He'd parry, thrust, answer or cluck,
and fire a verbal shot on target,
hitting with the same answer, the segregationists in a Louisiana
or a hamlet or a government in South East Asia
He made you feel that he knew what was going on
in both places.
He would come out of the quiz with an "A" in Economics, Military Science, Constitutional Law, Farm Problems and the
moonshot program
and still take time to appreciate Miss May Craig.

. . . It felt good to have a President
who looked well in Vienna, Paris, Rome, Berlin
and at the podium of the United Nations
— and who would go to Dublin
put a wreath where it did the most good
and leave unspoken
the satisfaction of an Irishman
en route to 10 Downing Street
as head of the U.S. government.

What was spoken
was spoken well.
What was unspoken
needed to be unspoken.
It was none of our business if his back hurt.

He revived our pride. He gave grist to our pride.
He was respectful of intellect;
he was respectful of excellence;
he was respectful of accomplishment and skill;
he was respectful of the clear and subtle uses of our language;
he was respectful of courage
And all these things he cultivated in himself.

... He affirmed our future.
Our future is more hopeful
because of his work
but our future is not safe nor sure.
He kept telling us that.
This is a very dangerous and uncertain world.
I quote. He said that yesterday.

He respected facts.
And we must now live with the fact of his murder.

Our children cried when the news came. They phoned and phoned
and we cried and we were not ashamed of crying but we are
ashamed of what had happened.
The youngest could not remember any other President clearly.
She felt as if the world had stopped.

With the passing of his hagiographers and the burroing of academic termites, the sunshine of Camelot has been cast into shade.

The excitement was the result, not of real promise, but of the willful turning of a blind eye. And the press is still doing it today - adulation for those about whom they should be skeptical and hate for those who bode some promise of reform.

None-the-less, Kazan captures that naive hope and despair in a way that vibrates half a century on.