4 DECEMBER 1964, Page 10

Looking Back on the Anniversary

From MURRAY KEMPTON

NEW YORK

All things fall down and are built again

And those who build them again are gay.—Yeats.

A Lin-LE less than a year ago Norman Mailer ,ftsaid something to the effect of how lonely he felt without Mr. Kennedy to quarrel with in his secret heart. The wound must have healed; for suddenly last week he was back to be cele- brated in the private mind.

Strangely enough, I remember him best from fifteen years ago, when I met him as a young Congressman. He had in those days extra- ordinary bones; they puffed up a little later with history; but then he was as God made him and quite simply the only really handsome man I have ever seen whose looks were not an offence to other men. There was always one boy at 'school who you knew was just better than you were and who was quite beyond envy. He was that boy. But even those of us who liked him most never expected him to be much more than that. There was never the, suspicion that he might be whirling off somewhere quite beyond com- parison, not just with us, but with what even he was at the moment.

He became a Senator. But it always seemed to me that he did not really get along with Senators, who are in the main better men than they look, but who wear fraudulent mannerisms as men who dig ditches wear callouses. Senator Kennedy would have been great to be with on a combat patrol, because there he would have understood what his comrades were doing and would have done it better than they Somehow there. was the feeling that he never quite knew what his colleagues in the Senate were doing; but then, it never was easy to know in the Fifties, We went to him then for comment and laughter; I suppose that was the John Kennedy we still think of on the British model. The British model dominates most reminiscences of him; the poems Mrs. Kennedy learned for him seem to have been all British. The friends 'whose memories were -broadcast ran disproportionately to schoolmates; and I have come to think of• school as a British memory, as the hearth is an Irish memory. Melbourne was his favourite statesman; and he talked of the Boston Irish very much the way Melbourne did of the Dublin Irish.

But, if he had been only the British model, nothing very much would have come of him over here. Then he seemed like a changeling and he always thought himself more Harvard than Boston. I remember a colleague saying in 1.957 that he could never be President' of the United States, and it was sad to think how he would begin to look in a few years when the hope began to slip but never to disappear, and the face would carry the wound like Harold Stassen's.

But then he went to the races and we began to understand that what we knew .of Jack Ken-

nedy was no more than we might have known about a rider from playing cards with him in the tack room. He went at that campaign the way a squire, at once mad and cool, might go at a fence.

We commenced then first to know what he meant to the' Irish in the United States. The New York Irish politicians gave him a great dinner after he had won the West Virginia pri- mary and was in sight of the party's nomination in 1960. He was brought on to the tune of `Fair Harvard,' and one suddenly understood what he meant to these men. He was the son they had sent to Harvard and the proof that they really lived here now. Congressman Charles Buckley of the Bronx made a wild and wonder- ful speech about how the bigots were beaten at last; and John Kennedy rose to say that the Protestants seemed to have forgiven him and, if Charley Buckley would forgive the Protestants, we could get on with the campaign.

He seemed then utterly detached from the old wounds of the immigrant generation; I do not think he could have run his course if he had not been. But his grandfathers had been immi- grants, and, in the narrow lexicon from which we used to draw our Presidential definitions, the name Kennedy and the designation Irish-Catholic were alike foreign terms. So for a Kennedy to be elected President was to heal our history. Frank- lin Roosevelt was the President who did most to teach the non-white, non-Protestant, non- Anglo-Saxons that this was also their country; but John Kennedy was the first to prove to them that it holds absolutely no limit for one of theirs.

I think that condition of our history explains most why England was so important to him. He was the grandson of Irish labourers; to be English must then have been for him a way to be American, because he set out to walk, all by himself, the whole long road that lay between his grandfathers and the founders of the Ameri- can Republic. The men who made our Revolu- tion were, after all, young men and Englishmen; theirs was your last Civil War.

Remembering him now, if I had to imagine Adams and Jefferson and Hamilton, they would walk the way John Kennedy walked, they would ask questions the direct way he did, and they would have his manners, the plain and gentle ones you would expect from the first leaders of men to appear in the eighteenth century who did 'not want to be treated as Kings needed to be treated. He made those men his ancestors and the sight of him made, them the ancestors of all of us once again.

Tire wild ride .of his Presidential campaign ended in Boston's Fanueil Hall, where Sam Adams made the Revolution. Boston and Harvard were 'together in his audience; John Kennedy was alone on the platform, school chairs behind him, talking quietly about this old republic and this new country. He 111I's both Kennedy and Adams; he had made' the great reconciliation; he and the Boston Irish had walked together back across to the years when the Yankees created the New England tradition; they had come not to replace that tradition, but to claim their piece of it.

He almost lost that election. The last polls he read had him falling back, and he asked : 'What is 'there about me which scares people in the last week of any campaign?'

What was scaring people, I expect, was that an iron had entered into him. The voice was suddenly too insistent and the demands too strenuous for comfort. But just as he grew more intense, he grew gayer somehow than he had ever been. Not wittier; just gayer. There is a differ- ence; wit is a device and gaiety an impulse. What

we remember as his wit was really his gaiety, which is a thing far more substantial. One part then was gay and one was earnest and both are qualities that scare people in a new man. He could hardly have been elected if the campaign had lasted another week.

And then he was President, whether a great one or not I cannot say, but a great presence all of us know, there to remind us that we lived awhile• in the company of a man moulded by his own taste and will in the model of the first years of this Republic and that, while he lived, Europe looked not at our power, but at our youth, and that, in him, we were again the New World.

, It is strange that the Kennedy whose filmed images evoke the memory the most is the Ken- nedy I never saw--the President with his children. There is in those pictures a gaiety and an ease, a kindness and a serious attention which

I had never seen before, mixed at once together with such intensity even in him, and which I know I shall never see again in another man.

St. Francis said that the great thorn of the vows to him was that he would never know what it was like to be the father of children. These pictures are among the few that I ever see which tell us just how much St. Francis had to regret. At least, I suppose they are; the only time I saw them, I found them unbearable and could not watch. The moment, then, when the last part of the wound is healed belongs not to us, but to our children. ,

The John Kennedy who walks that beach with that little boy is the John Kennedy whose image cannot perish from the mind of an American so long as there is left an American.

That is proper. Stanton said, when Lincoln died, that now he, belonged to the ages. But John Kennedy belongs to the children.