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Overview
In his renowned biographies Portrait of a President and The Death of a President, William Manchester intimately and meticulously detailed the life and death of President John F. Kennedy. One Brief Shining Moment is a celebration of that life, based on Manchester’s own recollections of his time with one of America’s most famous families.
John Kennedy first met William Manchester in 1946, beginning a friendship that would follow him to Washington and eventually the White House. But, beyond the closed doors of the Oval Office, Manchester enjoyed a close relationship with the Kennedys. Drawing on family gatherings in New England, trips along the campaign trail, and informal private talks with JFK himself, this is William Manchester’s personal account of the man behind the legend, someone he truly admired and was proud to call a friend.
One Brief Shining Moment provides a firsthand look at the thought process behind JFK’s most important decisions as president, his drive to move the country in a new direction, and his closest relationships. This is a book about a man, about a life, and about a triumphant moment in American history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780795350399 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Sales rank: | 59,003 |
| File size: | 517 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THEN
All this happened long ago, and millions of Americans now of voting age have no memories of the Kennedy years. They are startled when told that once there was a President — the youngest man ever elected to the office — who was the idol of American youth. Students of the 1950s had been written off as the silent generation; they had made it clear that they wanted no part of the political process. Yet by the third year of the Kennedy presidency, a poll of campuses reported that the Peace Corps was the country's "most admired institution" and the civil service reported a sharp increase in college applicants.
Students were not yet wearing their hair long — the arrival of the Beatles was a few months away — and student interest in hairstyles was largely confined to that of the White House occupant; the president of Chatham College told a reporter that students "can't help feeling some sense of identity with a Commander in Chief who has to have a special haircut to look the part." At the same time, high school girls studied his wife and copied her gestures, her style, her formfitting slacks, and her preference for pink (sometimes called "hot pink"). After Dallas all that would change. Lyndon Johnson succeeded to the presidency, but not to Kennedy's youthful constituency.
JFK's impact was not confined to youth. He inspired in countless Americans of all ages — and both parties — a zeal for achievement, a yearning to test the ancient Athenian maxim that genuine pleasure can be found only in the pursuit of excellence. Unlike most politicians, he never pretended to be a commoner. In his first Massachusetts election his opponents were introduced, one after the other, as Bostonians who had "come up the hard way." Jack took his turn at the microphone and began: "I'm the one who didn't come up the hard way." He was an elegant cum laude graduate of Harvard, a man both cool and concerned, witty and profound, profane and highly eloquent, a Pulitzer Prize winner with a subtle mind and a passion for cutting through clichés. In a single speech he would thread his remarks with quotes from Pericles, Swift, Emerson, Faulkner, and Goethe. He enjoyed playing host at small dinners for scientists, poets, musicians, and intellectuals — Isaac Stern, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Casals, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Paul Tillich, and Allen Tate. "What a joy," said Steinbeck, "that literacy is no longer prima facie evidence of treason." Like many national leaders, Kennedy was thin-skinned about criticism, but he encouraged dissent. If you called on the President one rainy evening in 1962, you saw an elderly scientist, the winner of two Nobel Prizes, picketing the White House in a Ban-the-Bomb demonstration. Inside the Oval Office you mentioned it to Kennedy. He immediately sent the pickets an urn of coffee, boxes of doughnuts, and an invitation to the demonstration's leaders to come inside and state their case. Shortly thereafter he presented the double laureate with a presidential award. Edmund Wilson was similarly honored — even though he had refused to pay his taxes in protest against Pentagon policies.
Abroad, a United States Information Agency poll reported, the prestige of the United States was at an all-time peak. JFK had been decorated for heroism in the war, and his courage was unquestioned; twice he faced down the Russians, over Berlin in 1961 and during the Cuban missile crisis a year later. But his foreign policy was what he called his "Strategy of Peace." In pursuit of it, he carried on a secret correspondence with Nikita Khrushchev, set up the "hot line" between Moscow and Washington, negotiated the test-ban treaty, and established the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In the Congo he played the role of peacemaker. Anticipating unrest in Latin America, he founded the Alianza, the Alliance for Progress. His great failure, of course, was Vietnam. But he repeatedly refused to send combat units, and particularly draftees, to Southeast Asia. In Kennedy's last two presidential years, fewer than sixty U.S. volunteer advisers were killed in Vietnam. After his assassination, 57,939 Americans died there, most of them conscripts. As Hegel observed, quantitative differences may be so great that they become qualitative.
Ironically, JFK was regarded as antibusiness. Actually, big business — represented by U.S. Steel's Roger Blough — attacked him. Kennedy had midwifed a contract with steelworkers, who withdrew demands for higher wages as a dike against inflation. Then the executives of Big Steel, sandbagging the President, boosted their prices by six dollars a ton. The workers felt betrayed; so did the President. He threatened antitrust investigations, the cancellation of tax relief for the industry, and the loss of Pentagon contracts. Three days later the manufacturers surrendered unconditionally. Subsequently, speaking at Yale, the President tried to dispel myths about hostility between industry and government, but the Old Blues simply glowered. They believed that he was robbing the rich.
In reality, Kennedy was enriching the rich, and doing it the only way that counts — by enriching the country. He had studied economics with Walter Heller, and his annual presidential budgets were less than $100 billion. His was the first administration to hold inflation to 3.5 percent while business boomed. During each of his thirty-four months in the White House, all economic indexes increased steadily and the stock market soared. U.S. trade expanded abroad. Ninety-four percent of the labor force was employed; mortgages were between 5 and 5.25 percent; a postage stamp cost a nickel; factory wages were at a new high. Some ninety thousand Americans were then millionaires — and each year the figure was growing by five thousand. Under Kennedy, U.S. investments abroad had leapt from $12 billion to $80 billion. But perhaps his most appealing legacy lies in his compassion. He belonged to one of the wealthiest families in the United States, and he had not seen the misery of rock-bottom American poverty until the West Virginia Democratic primary in the spring of 1960. Deeply moved, he made his first official act as President the issuance of an executive order doubling the food rations for four million needy Americans. Later he launched Medicare and strengthened social security.
His ultimate social issue became civil rights. After Martin Luther King had spoken at the Lincoln Memorial, telling his vast, rapt audience, "I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood," Kennedy welcomed him to the White House, gripped his hand, and said, "I have a dream — the same dream." He mounted a militant campaign to enforce desegregation laws, and when the governor of Alabama defied him, Kennedy called out troops. On June 19, 1963, JFK sent a comprehensive and far-reaching civil rights bill to Congress, thereby becoming the first President since Lincoln to put the full force of his office behind racial equality. Gallup reported that, as a result, his popularity plummeted to 59 percent. Kennedy ignored the backlash. He asked the country if when Americans claimed that theirs was the land of the free, they meant "that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race except with respect to Negroes?" The question, he said, was a "moral issue." Meeting with black leaders in the Oval Office he said: "This could cost me the election, but we're not turning back." Prodded by Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed the legislation during the national mourning which followed his death. But while Kennedy lived, it was a political millstone around his neck.
His last presidential days were strikingly different from the present time, illuminated by different celebrities. Konrad Adenauer, David BenGurion, and Harold Macmillan had just retired from office. Mme Ngo Dinh Nhu, the sharp-tongued sister-in-law of South Vietnam's despotic president, excoriated the Kennedy administration for its insistence on Vietnamese land reform and its refusal to defend her mandarin family with American marines and GIs. "The Tiger Lady," as the press called her, was particularly angry at David Halberstam, a young New York Times correspondent who was convinced that the Saigon regime was doomed. Halberstam's most eminent and most faithful reader was the President of the United States.
The same people who hated the President wanted to impeach Earl Warren, and their anger at the Supreme Court reached a new high when the Court outlawed reading of the Lord's Prayer or verses from the Bible in U.S. public schools. Another Court ruling held that lawyers must be provided for indigent defendants. There was a suspicion that the President and the chief justice were in collusion. They were. Both believed, in Kennedy's inaugural words, that "if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." All this had impact abroad. Kennedy's duel with Big Steel had left a deep impression on leftist reformers in Central America, who had believed that their only hope lay in guerrilla warfare. Anti-Americanism temporarily vanished in the European Left. In Berlin, Willy Brandt frankly patterned his political campaigns on those of the American President. Anthony Sampson wrote in the London Observer that "Nenni, the old Italian firebrand socialist, cannot now contain his praise for Kennedy."
These were locust years for Ronald Reagan. He was narrating The Truth about Communism, playing host for the weekly television drama "Death Valley Days," and appearing in his last film, a remake of The Killers. In the 1962 congressional elections Reagan had campaigned for John Rousselot, a leading spokesman for the John Birch Society. Richard Nixon, having lost the last California gubernatorial election, was also in political exile. On November 22, 1963, he was an attorney representing Pepsi-Cola. He had addressed a convention of bottlers in Dallas, and left Love Field just two and a half hours before the arrival of Air Force One, bearing the President and his party. Six months before Dallas, Nelson Rockefeller had been the GOP front-runner, but when he divorced his wife to remarry, the spotlight shifted to Barry Goldwater. Earlier in the week of JFK's Texas trip, Goldwater had declaimed that the New Frontier had produced "1,026 days of wasted spending, wishful thinking, unwarranted intervention, wishful theories, and waning confidence." Reporters asked the President to reply. "Not yet," he said, grinning; "not yet," but plainly he relished the prospect of running against the Arizonan.
The nation's First Lady had returned on October 17 from an extended cruise aboard Aristotle Onassis's yacht. Jackie's frequent travels had honed Republican wits — "Good night, Mrs. Kennedy, wherever you are" — and joining her husband on his Texas trip had been, in some respects, an act of contrition. Her elegance hadn't helped his campaigns for lesser offices, but voters plainly regarded her as a magnificent First Lady.
The big stories of 1963, before Dallas, were the March on Washington by 300,000 blacks and whites supporting civil rights; the President's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in the shadow of Walter Ulbricht's infamous wall; Gordon Cooper's twenty-two orbits of the earth; the four-straight World Series victory of the Dodgers over the Yankees; the tremendous harvest of American farmers and the failure of Soviet crops; and the tracing of botulism deaths to canned tuna.
Selectric typewriters first appeared in 1963; so did Valium, postal zip codes, Weight Watchers, Webster's Third, Instamatic cameras, polyethylene, Polaroid color packs, Detroit models featuring sleekly sloping rear windows — "fastbacks" — and the expansion of a chain of hamburger shops called McDonald's. Julia Child appeared on television for the first time; so did the new "Tonight Show," with Johnny Carson. Direct distance dialing was available to less than half of Bell subscribers. The first issue of the New York Review of Books appeared on September 26, coincident with a report that Manhattan pollution was approaching toxic levels. Color television was still a rarity — four years would pass before the networks switched to full color. On September 2, 1963, however, CBS Evening News increased its nightly show from fifteen to thirty minutes, and NBC followed suit a week later. These developments were to have profound implications for news coverage of the coming Vietnam War.
But in 1963 all that lay in the future. It was a time of whimsical, ingenious TV commercials. Piels beer was presenting the Return of Bert and Harry. Hertz dropped drivers into convertibles. Popular songs were "If I Had a Hammer"; the Beatles' first success, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"; and two Peter, Paul, and Mary hits: Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," and "Puff the Magic Dragon" ("A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys"). Americans were reading Silent Spring, The Group, The American Way of Death, Franny and Zooey, Thunderball, Catch-22, Calories Don't Count, and Victor Lasky's paste-up philippic, JFK: The Man and the Myth. In movie theaters they were enthralled by Tom Jones or bored by Last Year at Marienbad.
In London a cabinet minister named John Profumo faced disgrace; he had lied to the House of Commons in denying his sexual romps with Christine Keeler, 1963's most distinguished prostitute. (The story fascinated President Kennedy; he couldn't get enough of it.) Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, having fallen in love during the filming of Cleopatra, were divesting themselves of their spouses and planning an early wedding. Look, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post were flourishing, but in none of them would you find the words hippie, superstar, Super Bowl, freak out, mind-blowing, joints, roach, tune in, turn-off, put-down, rip-off, love-in, flower power, Day-Glo art, psychedelic, or vibes. The Watergate office and apartment complex was under construction near the State Department in Washington. President Kennedy's funeral procession would pass it on Monday, November 25, 1963.
* * *
The country, having lost a President, mourned, then healed. But if you had been close to him, if you had lost an old friend as well as a President, you were permanently scarred. You never knew when a pang would come, or what would set it off — a young woman dressed in black, perhaps, or a little boy playing soldier; a sailboat, a yelping game of touch football, a rocking chair — any of these could touch off the pain, and in your nightmare's memory you would hear the broken roll and dreadful stutter of the muffled drums, the harsh voice of the old cardinal from Southie as he rasped the ritualistic
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem.
The years of grief were ineluctable. Yet the time has come to grope for the meaning of that shocking, endless, deeply moving four-day weekend when we each died a little. The President's death was tragic, but his life had been a triumph, and that is how he should be remembered, and celebrated, now.
CHAPTER 2WE HAPPY FEW
His first hurrah was heard in Boston less than six months after the war. Jack was one of ten candidates in a free-for-all primary, running for Jim Curley's seat in the Eleventh Congressional District. Old, broke, down on his luck, and under a court order to repay forty-two thousand dollars he had stolen from Boston, the "Purple Shamrock" — a.k.a. "The Master" — had decided to resign from Congress and repossess his office in Boston's city hall. On November 2 the Shamrock won the mayoralty in a landslide. Through some unfortunate misunderstanding he was soon back in the dock, however, accused of using the U.S. mails to defraud. Convicted, he governed the city from a cell.
Some grasp of Boston's traditional Irish politics is necessary to understand what Jack Kennedy was up against. During the nineteenth century, in one eight-year period, 1,186,000 immigrants arrived from Ireland. The economy couldn't digest them. Employment agencies hung out signs: IRISH NEED NOT APPLY, or HELP WANTED — NO IRISH. Even after the newcomers had been established for a generation, newspapers carried two society pages, one for Yankee Protestants and the other for Irish Catholics. President Kennedy was the first Irishman to be appointed a Harvard overseer — his father, also a son of Harvard, had been unsuitable — and even the President was ineligible for membership in Boston's Somerset Club. Once at a Beacon Hill cocktail party you remarked to a Kennedy sister that the cobblestones in Louisburg Square were charming. "Those aren't cobblestones," she said bitterly. "They're Irish heads."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "One Brief Shining Moment"
by .
Copyright © 1983 William Manchester.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AUTHOR'S NOTE,
THEN,
WE HAPPY FEW,
OUR FRIENDS WERE DEARER THEN,
HIMSELF,
THERE THOU LYEST,
