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Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.
Frost had caught just the spirit of the venture, with a confidence about the uses of power and ambition that now seems amazing. Kennedy took office with extraordinary energy and the highest hopes. He seemed in some ways the perfect American. As Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin points out, he exemplified two usually contradictory strains in American tradition. One is the immigrant experience, the old American story of the luckless or disfavored or dispossessed who came from Europe and struggled in the New World. Rooted in that experience is the glorification of the common man and the desire for a common-man presidency, a celebration of the ordinary. The other strain is the American longing for an aristocracy, the buried dynastic, monarchical urge. "Jack is the first Irish Brahmin," said Paul Dever, a former Massachusetts Governor. He had both Harvard and Honey Fitz in him. He was an intellectual who could devastate any woman in the room and devour Melbourne in a speed reader's blitz and curse like the sailor that he also was.
Kennedy's critics sometimes wondered whether he was animated by a larger, substantive vision of what he would like America to become, or simply by a substantive vision of what he wanted Jack Kennedy to become. His rhetoric was full of verbs of motion and change, but his idea of what America ought to be—other than wanting it to be an excellent place in all ways, not a bad vision to entertain—was often murky, crisscrossed by his own ambivalent impulses. When Kennedy came to the White House, his main previous administrative experience was running a PT boat. He had a great deal to learn.
One New Frontiersman who became a minor patron saint of the Kennedy revisionists was Chester Bowles, the career diplomat. He thought that he had located a central problem with the Kennedy Administration. He feared that it deliberately, almost scornfully, detached pragmatic considerations from a larger moral context. To discuss the morality of actions was evidence of softness, and intellectuals with power in their hands cannot bear to be thought soft. Everyone carried the Munich model around in his head. One talked in laconic codes, a masculine shorthand; one did not, like Adlai Stevenson, deliver fluty soliloquies about the morality of an act. After the Bay of Pigs, Bowles wrote: "The Cuban fiasco demonstrates how far astray a man as brilliant and well-intentioned as President Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point."
Kennedy's Inaugural Address bristled with a certain amount of cold war rhetoric, tricked up in reversible-raincoat prose ("Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate").
To a nation reading it from the far side of the Viet Nam War, the most alarming passage was the one in which Kennedy promised to "pay any price ... to assure the survival ... of liberty." The revisionists have always seen that line as a precis of the mentality that brought on the war. But both Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen reject the notion that the Inaugural speech was a prelude to cowboy interventionism. "It was," says