“Strong, oddly cautious, a bit common (how cd he not be with those parents?) but unemotional, terre à terre, tough, quick, independent, ruthless, soulless, gifted, serious, anxious to pick up whatever he can.” So wrote Isaiah Berlin to his wife after meeting John Kennedy. The letter appears in Building: Letters, 1960 – 1975 and is reprinted in the most recent issue of the New Republic. The occasion was a dinner party in Georgetown. The date was October 16, 1962, when earlier in the day McGeorge Bundy told the President that the Soviet Union had placed missiles in Cuba.
It’s all fabulous, not the Camelot myth, but the long lost world of postwar America. Fabulous, and very nearly unimaginable today. Who can imagine the President of the United States attending a private dinner party in a house in Georgetown? That’s impossible with the security envelope that now surrounds the President.
And the guests! Joseph Alsop and his wife, Phil and Kay Graham, Arthur Schlesinger, Chip Bohlen, and their wives, along with others. Journalists, publishers, and the president’s close advisors and spinmeisters talked politics and foreign policy, including apparently about the classified and explosive situation in Cuba, because Berlin knew when he wrote his letter the next day. That’s impossible today. The journalists would be tweeting to get the scoop. The spinmeisters would be working everybody 24/7 with tediously predictable talking points. Congressional hearings would be held to investigate the breach in national security.
It was a very different time. Although America had endured the slaughters of World War II and was engaged in a fundamental and potentially world-destroying Cold War with the Soviet Union, on a day-to-day basis people felt safer. And there was an Establishment that allowed very powerful people from different places in the system to have drinks, dinner, and conversation outside their official roles.
By the end of the decade much of that world had come apart, in some cases for good reason. Gain and loss. That’s history, I suppose.
February 7th, 2013 | 5:28 pm
I think I remember a similar party, hosted by George Will, at which President-elect Barack Obama met a number of opinionators who probably had not voted for him.
February 7th, 2013 | 5:35 pm
“Who can imagine the President of the United States attending a private dinner party in a house in Georgetown? That’s impossible with the security envelope that now surrounds the President.”
I wonder if that is true. It probably doesn’t happen much, but I would not be surprised to learn years from now that presidents do occasionally get a break like that. There would be value in the relaxation, but also the chance to bounce ideas off of intelligent people who don’t all exist in the Oval Office bubble.
Specific to the Georgetown scene, though, maybe Kennedy had more ties to DC cave dwellers than Obama does to their descendants. Ditto for Bush and Clinton. Kennedy had worked and lived there for years.
Your main point is good, though. It is hard to imagine the cone of silence being maintained today. I also love to read history and see the same names cropping up—David Bruce, the Alsops, the Grahams. I hope something like that continues to flourish under the radar, and we can read about it in diaries and memoirs one day.
February 7th, 2013 | 7:34 pm
“on a day-to-day basis people felt safer”
How old were you then? My experience was quite differnt.
I distinctly remember the scrambled fighter jets patrolling above during the Cuban missle crisis. Media depicted the areas of the US “within range.”
The blast radius of a typical warhead against the backdrop of a US city, usually New York or DC was commonly depicted.
Air raid drills for atomic attack were conducted monthly in schools and more than a few neighbors had backyard bomb shelters.
The general thought at the time was not “if” we went to nuclear war, but “when” and we should be prepared.
There were frequent articles in Time, Life and Reader’s Digest on atomic weapons, their effects on US citizens and our abilty to retaliate against China and Russia.
Themes in cinema and literature include Canticle for Leibowitz, Planet of the Apes, Dr. Strangelove, The Day the Earth Stood Still.
There was no sense of safety then. Things, believe it or not, are vastly improved.
February 8th, 2013 | 8:20 am
R. R. Reno may be referring to a sense, still present for some at that time, that the “center” composed of fundamental things – family, community, faith, love of country (not as perfect but as in need of constant pray that God would “mend our every flaw”) – would hold.
Many grevious injustices, sorrows, and afflictions were then as now part of human life. But the moral teachings of the Christian faith in continuity with its deep roots in Judaism were preserved as our rightful, living inheritance – not a set of dry and dusty rules but more a living entity in need of tending and protection.
People of good will were not so easily persuaded to abandon their hope that there are higher things; not so easily persuaded that the wisdom of the ages has nothing to offer; not so quick to forget that humility before human frailty and propensity to err protects us from too hasty actions leading to great harm.
February 8th, 2013 | 9:58 am
I remember, in the early 1960s seeing General and Mme De Gaulle attending a 6:30 am weekday mass at the Madeleine, about five minutes drive from the Élysée Palace.
A target for assassination if ever there was one, he was attended by only two burly men in ill-fitting suits, who hovered at the back of the church. hey wore sunglasses. There may have been others outside.
February 8th, 2013 | 11:20 am
Nicely put, A Reader. What happened in between then and now to make the difference?
February 8th, 2013 | 12:47 pm
“Iowa A”: Twenty years ago or more, PBS presented an interview during which a participant mentioned that the Marxist/communist movement would not have to fight us militarily. They would defeat us from within. I have never forgotten the sinking feeling, the sense of dread, that those words evoked. The process was at that time already underway.
I once heard Dr. Jill Kerr Conway, then president of Smith College, mention the “nobility of human personhood”. That idea and other elevated understandings of human potential have been reduced in many places (and in many minds) to struggles relating to “class, race” and gender” – struggles to gain “power” and to use that power.
Are you interested in names of books and/or authors who have written on this subject?
I hope that you will receive responses from the scholars at First Things. It deserves no less.
February 8th, 2013 | 1:23 pm
I am reminded of what I read once about Abraham Lincoln when he was President — a ordinary paper boy delivered the paper to the White House and every morning Lincoln walked out the front door of the White House to retrieve the paper.
February 8th, 2013 | 4:00 pm
This is true on a large scale but I think the connection between theories of the nobility of persons and a sense of safety is perhaps abstract –suggestions on two or three books would be welcome
February 8th, 2013 | 7:54 pm
To Iowa A: Your question is at the same time wonderful and difficult to answer, especially in the context of a blog post. Also my original post veered away from the political culture toward a more social/religious perspective.
I hope that you may find interesting references in “From Dawn to Decadence – 500 years of Western Cultural Life” by Jacques Barzun. The Index is extensive.
A google search for “How the World Lost its Story” by Robert W. Jensen will provide a link to a fine article in the First things archives.
Tomorrow I will enter a short quotation from R. R. Palmer’s “A History of the Modern World” in which he describes changes that took place with the advent of Christianity.
David Bentley Hart also describes those changes. I will post that title also.
Best wishes.
February 9th, 2013 | 6:37 am
To Iowa A: “A History of the Modern World” by R. R. Palmer is available at alibris.com. Look for 3rd, 4th, or 5th edition, esp. Chapter on “The Rise of Christianity” and the chapter on the development of towns as an outgrowth of the feudal estates.
“Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies” is by David Bentley Hart.
One tactic of those “enemies” has been mockery and ridicule of certain areas of serious endeavor: Dedication to the humble yet beautiful arts of faithful marriage, homemaking, motherhood and fatherhood, support of the household as a building block of civilized life are not suitable for an intelligent person or deprive one of a “life of one’s own,” whatever that could possibly mean.
Entertainment, celebration of celebrity and/or business success, self-centered hedonism, premature immersion in sexual activity (with resulting diseases and unwanted conceptions) are overtly and covertly praised and admired.
This is only one part of “what happened in between then and now.”
February 9th, 2013 | 12:07 pm
Odd, I was fifteen when JFK was elected, in college for the missile crisis, had crouched under a desk in air raid drills and had a cousin called up for Berlin. I don’t recall any pervasive fear of nuclear war. The fellow who built a bomb shelter in a Jersey back yard was thought of as a nut. On the other hand, living in the heart of Greenwich Village we never locked our doors, played without fear in the park, rode subways at all hours. Then about 1970, the sixties kicked in. The likes of Manson were far more unnerving than the Russians.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact