JFK remembered: “… the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought”

A little more than a year before he was assassinated, the 35th president spoke at the Yale University commencement. His speech that day was not so memorable, it was not front-page news or breaking news material. We are now learning, among other lessons, how much our leaders’ words matter, and how much we miss the times when their words were meaningful and deeply felt.

The death of JFK for many of us Baby Boomers was an enduring bookmark noting a time before which we were imbued with an infectious idealism, and after which we were infected with an even more enduring cynicism. November 22, 1963, was a day of demarcation unlike any other for a generation that would go on to experience earth-shattering events such as 9/11 and the fall of the Soviet Union. The assassination already occupied that space in our psyche reserved for skepticism and distrust. For many of us, the deluge of conspiracy theories and the prurient revelations of his imperfect private life have not dimmed the feeling of loss we shared.

November 22 is a day that brings it all back to us in a rush of memories. People still recalling where they were when they first heard the news; who informed them of the tragedy; our reactions and movements during that somber weekend. Most of us were in schools that Friday afternoon. I was in German class. His name was Duggan; I was glued, as most others were, along with our families to the TV.

I remember as if it were yesterday. I can recall with a special coldness that the German teacher, his name was Long, smirked for the briefest moment as he heard the news. He was a strange little man who was known as an ultra-conservative in my high school. He liked to play portions of Adolf Hitler’s speeches in class. After all, it was in German and der Fuhrer had a way with words.

The older I get, the more I realize that JFK was even more important to my own political formation and how it related to a moral vision of truth. For me, he was an American version of Plato’s, Philosopher-King, the kind of leader you could not help but follow :

“I need no longer hesitate to say that we must make our guardians philosophers. The necessary combination of qualities is extremely rare. Our test must be thorough, for the soul must be trained up by the pursuit of all kinds of knowledge to the capacity for the pursuit of the highest — higher than justice and wisdom — the idea of the good.”

— from Plato’s Repulic, Book VI

We are now living through an era that exemplifies the JFK quotation I cite in the title. There is a comfort in not having to question what we think. An ease to the satisfaction that groupthink was a safe, if not original, choice. A closer look at his Yale commencement address demonstrates Kennedy’s thoughtfulness and ability to express the framework for the progressive state he envisioned. He dismisses the real dangers to liberty as myths even more so than common and unadorned lies. The sentences that immediately precede my title excerpt are so relevant that they leap from the pages of what for other men might be a perfunctory graduation address. For Kennedy, few words were spoken without careful consideration, without thoughtful reflection:

“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

And so, here we are at a time when many of us enjoy affirming opinions of others without giving them a thoughtful review- finding comfort believing in myths. Kennedy went on in his speech that day to enumerate those he found so damning.

He calls out the oft-repeated conservative myths regarding the size of the Federal Government and the need to resist it “bigness,”

… for the fact is for the last 15 years, the Federal Government — and also the Federal debt — and also the Federal bureaucracy — have grown less rapidly than the economy as a whole.”

He also takes on the myths perpetrated on fiscal policy and public debt. His response dismisses the easy explanation of those who would choke the government to force it to shrink. Kennedy instead speaks to complexities and the responsibilities of government:

“The truth about big government is the truth about any other great activity — it is complex. Certainly it is true that size brings dangers- -but it is also true that size can bring benefits… it may be proper for me to note one great and little noticed expansion of government which has brought strength to our whole society — the new role of our Federal Government as the major patron of research in science and in medicine. “

Kennedy’s view of effective governance was nuanced and evolving. In my opinion, our nation has suffered due to his foreshortened leadership and the consequential political upheaval that followed. We are haunted by a time when the mettle of our leaders converged with the promise of our founding ideals. Those days have sadly passed with our present leadership whose dispositions converge solely with their own self-interests.

In a speech delivered long before he was a presidential hopeful, at a time when his career was just beginning and when we could be sure his words were unaffected by ambition, a young Kennedy demonstrated a nimbleness of mind that belied his 30 years of age. It was given in 1947 at a “Why I am an American” Day event. In it, Kennedy asks his audience a simple rhetorical question: where does our love of liberty begin? His answer is to quote Justice Learned Hand, a noted juror who is one of the most often quoted by legal scholars and Supreme Court justices :

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. No constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

John Kennedy’s legacy will always be overshadowed by what might have been had he lived to serve a second term. In an era in which we are confronted by politicians and a president whose legacies are mired in corruption and betrayal, we are saddened by the knowledge that there was a time when our leaders were as good as we thought we were, and, at least, no worse than that. On this day we mourn our loss of innocence as a nation and the knowledge that there once was a time when we all cried when our president was gone.

Originally published at https://vincerizzo.substack.com.