SUMMER OF '17

SUMMER OF '17

In the Summer of 1962, I was six years old.  

My father and mother took my sister and me to Cape Cod on vacation. We rented a small bungalow on the bay side, in Yarmouth Port.  In the late morning and early afternoon, we swam in the bay. At night we barbecued.  In the morning, my father went clamming.  

That was pretty much our daily schedule during this week long idyll.

Except on Sunday, when we had to go to Mass.  

And did.

But not just any Mass.  

This was 1962 and the most famous Catholic in America was hanging out only a few miles away.  So we packed into the Plymouth and drove to Mass in Hyannis Port.

It was hot and crowded.  

And in Latin.  

So I didn't understand a thing.  

Except at the end . . .  

When we stood outside the church and watched the President of the United States and his wife leave the church and hop into a car for their ride home.  

My father put me on his shoulders and there JFK was, distinctly red-headed, smiling at the crowd, elegant and, I knew,  important.

He wasn't important to me because of what he had said ("Ask not..."), or because of what he had done (become the youngest elected President in our history), or even because of the position he held. He wasn't important to me because he was taking us to the moon, or unleashing a new found enthusiasm among the young, or enlisting America's brightest to govern with vigor (or vig-ah, as he said it).

I was six and knew none of this.

He was important, someone to look up to,  because my parents told me he was, and then -- to prove it -- lifted me above a small sea of humanity for my bird's-eye view.

How many parents are doing that today?

President Trump thinks his wife is, as he has put it, "Jackie O. on steroids."  Perhaps so.  She is elegant and reserved and independent, with more than a hint of the Europe that produced her.  

But for all that Melania Trump might  resemble Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, we can say with complete certainty that Donald Trump is no John F. Kennedy. 

Kennedy was measured.  Trump is impulsive.

Kennedy was active and engaged.  Trump is lazy and bored.  

Kennedy respected his advisers.  Trump makes his nervous.  

Kennedy was eloquent.  Trump is bombastic. 

Kennedy disarmed his critics.  Trump insults his. 

Kennedy tried to tear down walls that separated peoples.  Trump wants to build them.  

Kennedy called out the best in us.  Trump nourishes our resentments.

And, finally . . .

Kennedy confronted Russian dictators. Trump embraces them.

Both of them, as human beings, were (in JFK's case) and are (in Trump's) flawed.  In fact, they were both very flawed, neither paragons of virtue in their personal lives nor unwilling to throw sharp elbows in their professional ones.  

They also share a common denominator of having mastered before all others the new media of their time -- television in the case of JFK and social media in the case of Trump. 

And both of them are  victims of hagiography, by third parties post-November 1963 in Kennedy's case and by his own hand in Trump's. They thus exist in worlds where truth runs up against nostalgia for a world that wasn't (JFK)  or one that cannot be (Trump).  Put differently, the nation in the early '60s was not as great as Arthur Schlesinger's JFK would have us believe it was, and today it will not ever resemble Trump's grandiose fictions, no matter how often he mouths the words "win" or "great".

The difference, however, is that Kennedy was aware of his flaws, tried to confront and tame them, treated sycophants with disdain and popularity with suspicion, and used new media to embrace and include.  Trump either boasts about his flaws or lies about them, retreats to his twitter account where he insults and divides, demands praise, and deifies polls even as he distorts them.

In the Summer of '62, I was held above a crowd to witness a President held high.

If that happened today . . .

There'd be nothing to see.