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Dan Quayle, in his debate with Lloyd Bentsen, was heedless enough to bring up Kennedy's name. Bentsen, who has good reflexes, saw the opening: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." Michael Dukakis has been more dignified, but more relentless, about comparing himself with Kennedy, or at any rate comparing 1960 with 1988. Again and again, from the Democratic Convention on, he has told audiences, "Twenty-eight years ago, another son of Massachusetts and another son of Texas were our nominees . . ." Dukakis wants to borrow a small radiance of analogy. Ted Sorensen, the author of so many of Kennedy's speeches, including the Inaugural, is recycling the rhetoric for Dukakis. The Kennedy themes recur in Sorensen's Dukakis: "It's time to get the country moving again . . ."
In strange ways, 1960 is sacred in grainy national memory. Americans feel a wistfulness about that election, if only because it was a moment when they and the world were younger. Was the race a classic encounter between two smart and well-matched athletes working the game in its last good moment? Maybe. The drama lingers in images of black and white as a moment of moral sunshine for Americans, or of remembered innocence. The candidates, youngish veterans, connected them to the days of their last good war. The election of 1960 was the end of America's postwar political order and the beginning (starting 1,110 days later) of a long, tumbling historical free fall (assassinations, riots, Viet Nam, Watergate, oil embargoes, hostages in Iran, the economic rise of the Pacific Rim nations, on and on -- glasnost, China) that has created an utterly new world and left America searching for its place therein.
America used to be the New World. Now the world is the New World.
What has happened in the world as a whole between 1960 and 1988, and especially during the '80s, is analogous to what occurred in the U.S. in the years after the Civil War, between, say, 1875 and 1900. The railroads spreading west, the telephone, mass manufacture, elevators, a thousand other new items of technology -- all transformed America, opened its markets and shortened its distances. The world today is becoming a global society, and a much smaller planet, because of satellites, computers, jet travel, the interpenetrations of world markets, and the fact that Communism has grown cold in its extremities.
The nation is no longer moated -- economically, militarily -- by the Atlantic and Pacific. As Viet Nam instructed, what America touches does not necessarily become sacred -- an end of the Wilsonian illusion. America, which once cherished the conviction that God had endowed its national idea, began feeling lost in what might be called the Brownian motions of history -- Brownian movement being the term for molecules that fly about with no discernible pattern or reason. The American pre-eminence in manufacturing is gone. A thousand hypodermic needles are punching through the nation's borders.
Many Americans have been retreating to the shrine of national memory. Never have so many anniversaries been observed, so many nostalgias set glowing, as if retrospection were now the only safe and reliable line of sight. You are, among other things, what you remember, or believe you remember. The past has become a persistent presence in the American mind.