Four decades on: nominating a JFK, but not a Kennedy
Four decades on: nominating a JFK, but not a Kennedy
By CRAGG HINES
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
BOSTON -- It's amazingly eerie, at least for a child of mid-20th century America, to walk through the hotel in which John F. Kennedy may have given his first political speech -- a robust foreign-policy address in November 1945, soon after returning from World War II and with his eye already fixed on a national political career. Even the suggestion of such a wispy historical link is at least passingly exciting.
Cheap nostalgia, unrelated to the presidential campaign at hand? Perhaps. But certainly not unrelated to the Democratic National Convention that begins here Monday.
Camelot may have been a post-mortem invention of glossy magazines and bereft, sometimes bitter, keepers of the flame, but the continuing impact of Kennedy, at least on his party, seems beyond question. "There's still that resonance 40 years later..., the idealism that drives Democratic presidential candidates," Thomas Maier, author of The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings, said in a recent interview.
The phenomenon operates on several levels.
There is the almost mythic connection with Kennedy that some Democrats keep alive.
Only Thursday, in a speech to the National Urban League at Detroit, a latter-day JFK (John Forbes Kerry) recalled Kennedy's words as he kicked off the fall campaign of 1960 in that city's Cadillac Square: "I am confident that in November you will make a choice for progress, not for standing still. We want America to move again. If we stand still, freedom stands still."
"Those words ring even more true today," Kerry insisted.
There are even direct links, no matter how tenuous or momentary.
Just as Bill Clinton had an iconic photograph showing him as a youth reaching out to shake hands with President Kennedy (a sort of Democratic version of Michelangelo's Creation scene from the Sistine ceiling), Kerry has a slightly earlier, less evocative picture of himself with President Kennedy as part of a group sailing aboard a Coast Guard yacht in Narragansett Bay.
Kerry also has the support of the family's reigning lion, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.
"Clearly Ted has probably been as supportive to Kerry running for president as (he has been supportive) to anyone outside the family," Maier said. He included Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law who was George McGovern's stand-in running-mate in 1972.
As Bay State senators, Kennedy and Kerry, or at least their highly competitive staffs, have had differences, but EMK remains one of Kerry's most effective intraparty surrogates.
"You use him to rally the troops but not to convert the undecided," observed William G. Mayer, a political scientist at Boston's Northeastern University. "He's a very partisan figure."
The Kennedys and Kerry, even as fellow Democrats, comes from different parts of the Massachusetts political establishment. The Kennedys, although by the turn of the 20th century well-off and well beyond even "lace curtain," are still, as Maier's subtitle has it, "the ultimate Irish-Catholic family." They are also organization Democrats.
While Kerry is a Roman Catholic (with Jewish ancestry), on his mother's (the Forbes) side, he is Boston Brahmin with colonial roots. Within the state Democratic structure, Kerry has been something of a loner.
"He has not, to date, had a really strong impact on the state party...,"Northeastern's Mayer said.
With the exception of EMK's son Patrick, a U.S. House member from Rhodes Island, the family's once-heralded political future seems to have dimmed. And the more variegated, often tragic, consequences of the extended Kennedy family is another issue.
"Subsequent generations haven't panned out very well," Mayer said. "It doesn't look like it's going to be much of a dynasty."
But still JFK remains, as biographer Maier said, "the most common touchstone" of the political party gathering here in the family epicenter.
Kerry's long-term impact? "It depends on whether he wins or not," Mayer said. Just look at one of Mayer's Northeastern colleagues, not-former-president Michael Dukakis. "The bottom line was, he lost," Mayer said.
Hines is a Houston Chronicle columnist based in Washington, D.C. (cragg.hines@chron.com)
