J.F.K.: A Hidden Life by Cross Robin

Author:Cross, Robin [Cross, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2021-01-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Mr President

The inauguration of an American president is a solemn and austere affair. The raw winter weather in which it is held chills the body and concentrates the mind. Arthur Schlesinger began his memoir of Jack Kennedy by setting the scene for the ceremony: “It all began in the cold. It had been cold all week in Washington. Then early Thursday afternoon came the snow. The wind blew in icy, stinging gusts and whipped the snow down the frigid streets.”

On 19 January, the day before the inauguration, eight inches of snow fell, blanketing the green dye which had been sprayed on the lawns around the Washington Monument to invest the ceremony with a suggestion of imminent spring. As the temperature plummeted, 3,000 servicemen worked through the night with plows to sweep the thoroughfares clear of snow. In dawn’s light, army flame throwers were used to melt the remaining ice on the streets and sidewalks. The inauguration, watched by an audience of 20,000 people gathered outside the east front of the Capitol, began at midday, 20 January 1961. It lasted a little over fifty minutes, twenty-eight of which were taken up by the prayers of four clergymen, the most long-winded being the old Kennedy ally, Richard Cardinal Cushing, whose benedictions were accompanied by wisps of smoke sent up by some faulty wiring in the lectern. The aged cardinal was followed by the 86-year-old poet Robert Frost, an earnest of the cultural ambitions of the new occupants of the White House. In the primary and presidential campaigns Jack had often rounded off a speech with a geographically appropriate paraphrase of a Frost poem:

Iowa City is lovely, dark and deep

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep

For the inauguration Frost had written a few lines of Laureate-like doggerel, but blinded by sun on winter snow, he recited from memory an earlier poem, The Gift Outright .

At 12.51 the oath was administered by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Then Kennedy stepped forward to deliver an inaugural address which electrified all those who heard it and reverberated around the world.

He had been working on it since the election. Suggestions had been solicited from the great and the good by Ted Sorensen, and a mass of helpful advice had poured in. including selected Biblical quotes from Billy Graham and Isaac Frank, director of the Jewish Community Council in Washington, neither of them, as Henry Fairlie observed, “the most obvious sources to which one would expect a Roman Catholic to look for scriptural inspiration”.

The guiding hand, as ever, was provided by Ted Sorensen, the meticulous technician of Jack’s rhetoric. The most important decision, taken on 16 January, was to confine the address to foreign affairs, with only a single oblique reference to the domestic issue of civil rights. The finishing touches were applied on the eve of the inauguration. Flying from Palm Beach to Washington on Caroline , Jack slipped the final draft into a drawer with the wry remark that “An early draft of Roosevelt’s Inaugural was discovered the other day and brought $200,000 at an auction”.

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