J.F.K. Revised

A decade of war, social upheaval and uncertainty has blurred and shifted the memory of that crisp, snow-covered day when the New Frontier began ten years ago last week. Not only on the college campuses and in the underground press, but also in liberal journals, John F. Kennedy's ringing Inaugural Address now seems hollow, even dangerous to some of those who once admired it.

Using the hateful and typical invective of the day, a student editor at the University of Wisconsin calls Kennedy "one of the bigger pigs," although he admits, "I cried when he was killed." Speaking for a growing "revisionist" view of J.F.K. in the New Republic, Gerald Clarke calls the speech "jingoistic, a Monroe Doctrine for the globe itself." The New York Times's Anthony Lewis notes, that Kennedy's promise to "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and success of liberty" appears, in retrospect, to have been the summons to Viet Nam. His subsequent promise to put man on the moon seems to many today an empty goal on a planet festering with pollution.

Says Washington Post Columnist Nicholas von Hoffman: "Ten years later, people finally heard the words; all they heard before was the music." Perhaps heroes are made and unmade too casually--and cruelly--especially by the young. How fair is it to judge 1961 by the passions of 1971? The most damaging evidence against Kennedy is the distance the nation has moved since his inauguration. The inescapable reply to the evidence is that John Kennedy never had the chance to move with it.

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