Crossposted at the usual elsewheres:

I was eight years old when President Kennedy was elected. Up to that time, the president was a grandfatherly looking man who the older folk told me was a great general who helped to beat the Nazis in World War II. This was as much geopolitical history as I could swallow then (still trying to figure out more important things such as how a place called "Brooklyn" could move to another place called "Los Angeles.)


On the Big Brother Bob Emery show I watched while having lunch we drank a toast every day (with milk, of course) to President Eisenhower, but my parents moved our family away from Massachusetts before I could see whether we now drink toasts to President Kennedy. (When we went "home" to visit, I saw that the torch had, indeed, been fully passed). My understanding of the presidency was that while we did not always succeed, the idea was to have the smartest, best, or wisest person around to "lead our country" not they way a king would, but, well, the way parents might guide their family through the slightly less momentous problems it faced.

When I was ten, I learned why the president had to be wise. When he came on television one night, before my parents realized they did not want me to see this, President Kennedy looked straight at the camera and told us that the government had just learned about something that was very serious and very threatening. He told us that it was important for us to know about it, but that the government would do everything it could to protect us. My parents pretended to look re-assured. It worked for me, and through the days that followed, with anxious teachers telling us what to do in case the air raid sirens blew, the image of the calm but determined President telling us of the horrible problem, but that the government was working on it, made me feel as if this would not end badly, and, thankfully it did not.

But on November 22, 1963, a little more than a year after that scary speech and the difficult week that followed, President Kennedy was murdered. The new president, a man from Texas, told us things would be okay, but I was not quite as sure. I considered whether the fact that President Kennedy had been from Massachusetts, where I, too, was born, had something to do with the fact that his way of speaking had more of an effect on me that the man from Texas, but it seemed then, and more so now, that part of it was that though he seemed to be smart, and worthy of the presidency, he was not on the same level as President Kennedy.

The rest of childhood and all of my adulthood has been a prayer for a resumption of the hope and confidence of those days. Maturity and education has put those prayers in a slightly different perspective, but at its core their purpose has been constant. Unlike the Reaganites, yearning for a return to days that never existed except on film, my dream is for a country which admires its president, who has confidence in him as a leader, and is proud to see how the rest of the world views him (or her). And, with such a president, educated in schools, by reading history and by life experiences, comes a country confident as it was before its young president was murdered, feeling that there is nothing the world throws at us which we cannot overcome.

Aside from the President who took office on that sad day in November, 1963, only two Democrats have been elected since then and both were huge disappointments to me. I admired that, having grown up in the south, they had not succumbed to the illness of that region, the aftermath of the slavery it demanded the right to continue when our nation was formed and that all but tore the country apart until a war was fought which resulted in a grduging acceptance of its end. But the compromises both men made to remain Democrats when everyone around them abandoned their party after the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Acts were enacted in the memory of President Kennedy, made both Presidents Clinton and Carter too flawed a vessel to sustain all of my dreams.

They were both intelligent men, who meant well, but both their presidencies failed to live up to the promise inherent in their elections. When, for instance, President Clinton made "welfare reform" a centerpiece of his administration, my heart sank. Likewise, President Carter's most dramatic response to rising old prices, suggesting that we just turn down our thermostats and wear sweaters was not quite on a par with a presidential call for a program to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth within a decade.

This is not to say that neither had good points and did well. They did. President Carter was way ahead of his time in warning of the dangers from our dependence on foreign oil, for instance, and President Clinton appears to belong on Mount Rushmore today in comparison with his sorry successor and his not much better two predecessors. But neither represented to me the triumph of wisdom and intelligence that was what the presidency meant before a crook, an amiable fool, a movie star and hos well meaning but befuddled vice president took over the White House.

Today, we are, perhaps, on the verge of that restoration. The thought that the president himself could be the answer to our critics around the world, and an inspiration to many of them, and to us, fills me with extraordinary hope and great excitement. I cannot say that I have not felt that since November, 1963, but never as strongly. (My mind keeps etching a dateline, of some era, I guess, the one of Hope and Confidence, or of a New Frontier, I suppose, that runs from January 20, 1961-November 22, 1963, January 20, 2009-???)

It is both ironic but absolutely so that we have George W. Bush to thank for this moment, perhaps the only thing for which he deserves our gratitude. He has shown the country why competence, wisdom, patience, and education matter. He has steered our country into such a deep hole that it must again find a man, as it did with Franklin Roosevelt, with Abraham Lincoln, with George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and, yes, John F Kennedy, who can inspire us to find a new way.

I cannot say it any better than this:

All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.

Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are--but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.

It begins, again, Tuesday.