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I find the prose of Hunter Thompson irresistible, and (or, as Hunter would write, "&") I find the music of Fleetwood Mac irresistible, and so the two seem to go together.

Fleetwood Mac's music "goes with" Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72.
And for some reason, upon investigation and experimentation, Jim Croce's music was found to "go with" Watergate.  "Was found to" by me, that is.  All those songs from the greatest hits album were written by Jim Croce during the years when Watergate and related events were evolving.  Or -- devolving, 1971 - 1974. 

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Because November 22nd this coming Friday will mark 50 years since the murder of President Kennedy, I had a desire to write things about him when he was alive, and to "stay away" from the assassination.

And I love to think about music, too, so one day I researched popular music from the main decades of JFK's life -- the 1940s to the early sixties and selected songs to put with excerpts and stories about him.  Had a whole list -- and then, when it came to writing about President Kennedy, I couldn't "get into" using music.  It just did not seem to fit. 

I don't mean to deprive President Kennedy of music.  He listened to music.  But when I discuss him here, Music just doesn't seem to fit in.

So I have this whole list of songs with nothing to do with them...Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, The Andrews Sisters -- aahhugh!

In The New Yorker on Nov. 4, 2013, Jeff Shesol wrote an article titled "Talk Not:  J.F.K. And The Case For Quiet"-------------------- [excerpt] --------------------- "As for TR," Schlesinger wrote his father,

JFK said he talked a lot but didn't do very much.  He could not see why TR rated above Polk or Truman.  What is most interesting is that his criterion is obviously that of concrete achievement rather than political education.  People who educate the nation, without achieving all their goals, like Wilson and TR, evidently seem to him to rate under people with a record of practical accomplishment, like Polk and Truman, even if they do little to transform the intellectual climate of the nation.

The irony is how precisely this anticipates one of the critiques of Kennedy's Presidency:  that he talked a lot but accomplished little.  This is plain wrong,

as Alan Brinkley, Robert Dallek, and many other historians have established.  Kennedy's achievements were institutional (the Peace Corps, the space program) and existential (the narrow escape from nuclear war), and his effect on the public mindset, on everything from religious tolerance to public service, cannot (or at least should not) be understated.  Yet there can be little denying that fifty years after his death, J.F.K. is remembered more for what he said than what he did....

...Kennedy began his political career as an ineffective speaker

(one of his early speechwriters complained that after all he had labored over a draft, J.F.K. "would not do it justice" at the podium, draining it of life and rhythm),

but he worked assiduously at it for more than a decade: 

studying recordings of Churchill, consulting a voice coach, and devouring, again and again, a volume of great speeches that Sorensen had given him, marking passages for future use.  The power of political oratory was, to Kennedy, self-evident.

Still, he retained a certain skepticism.  He liked to quote from "Henry IV, Part I":

GLENDOWER:  I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR:  Why, so can I, or so can any man.
But will they come when you do call for them?

A speech, to Kennedy, had no inherent, incantatory power.  He never believed, as romantics do, that oratory is alchemy....Speech was, instead, an augury, and precursor of action, never a substitute for it, and Kennedy was disinclined (sometimes, as in the case of civil rights, much too disinclined)

to say anything until he was ready to do something. 

Otherwise it was just "talk" -- and talking too much, he once cautioned Sorensen, would only bore the public (and, one suspects, Kennedy himself)....

Words alone are not enough," Kennedy planned to say that day in Dallas, in a speech he never had the chance to deliver.  "If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself.  If we are weak, words will be of no help."  Polk could not have said it better himself.

In this (as in remarkably few things), Kennedy seems a relic of a distant age. 

Our Presidents, like T.R., talk a lot. 

They talk, they tweet,

they offer daily color commentary on international affairs, congressional negotiations, pop-cultural events, and national anniversaries.  To choose a month at random, in October of 2011 President Obama honored the 1985 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears and the 2011 N.C.A.A. women's basketball champion Texas A. & M. Aggies, issued statements on the deaths of Steve Jobs and Muammar Qaddafi, proclaimed Leif Erikson Day and National Character Counts Week, and appeared on "The Tonight Show,"

among numerous other examples of talking and not doing.

In fairness, presidents now inhabit a 24 / 7 news cycle; Kennedy had the benefit of an 8 / 5 one.

Presidents no longer have the luxury of going quiet.  For if they do, they create a vacuum their opponents rush to fill -- recall the Tea Party Summer of 2010.  At the same time, we have strayed farther than we need have from Kennedy's more restrained, more purposeful use of the bully pulpit.  We have allowed the connection between speech and action to attenuate.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., told me in the late nineteen-nineties that political speech had become "a particularly low form of rhetoric."  What he meant was not simply that the quality of writing had diminished since the Kennedy years, though it had; he also meant that the power of Presidential words had declined as their volume increased, cheapening the currency.

Of course, that devaluation is also due to the

erosion of faith in the institution of the Presidency (along with the institution of pretty much everything else) in the long wake of November 22, 1963 --

yet another reason this anniversary has resonance....

Let us evoke something of the era.  Let it not be Kennedy's clipped cadence, or the "reversible raincoat" sentences ("Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate")....  Let it, instead, be the idea that Presidencies are above all for practical accomplishment, and that words, by and large, ought to be reserved for moments of meaning.---------------- [end excerpt].

--written by Jeff Shesol
The New Yorker

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