Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a prolific author, 20th-century American historian, and intellectual discusses the historic speech he wrote for President Kennedy given at Amherst College in 1963 shortly before Kennedy's assassination. Interview by Michael J. Israels.
- Mr. Schlesinger, if I could start by reading you a paragraph from the October 28th edition of a newspaper called "The New York Post," which is rather a different newspaper from the "New York Post" of today, of course, October 28th, 1963. And it said this, "Long after President Kennedy's speeches on Berlin, taxes, Laos and the like have been forgotten, his address at Amherst College honoring Robert Frost and through him, all poets and artists, will be read, studied, and admired. The auditorial goes on to describe the speech as a unique presidential document. And the purpose of our conversation today is to hear your views about how it came about, how the President asked you to work with him to create the speech and what he told you and what you thought about the speech and its role as an unusual or even unique presidential document.
- I hope that the editorial writer of the "New York Post" is right, because I was charged with producing a draft about the role of art in a democracy. And JFK was very concerned, particularly I think that he was of Jackie, his wife. He was very much concerned with the role of the artist. He was concerned with the corruptions of power and the thesis of the speech is that power corrupts but poetry cleanses, and the role of the artist independently committed to the truth of his vision or her vision was a limit, a restraint on the abuses of power. And as I read Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture today, I felt that Harold Pinter, the English playwright, Harold Pinter, who was an old friend of mine, had exaggerated, but that he represented the role of the artists against the root power exercised by the United States.
- Yes, as President Kennedy said in his speech, and it was a phrase that particularly jumped out when I read your draft with his notes on it, which we were fortunate to have from the Kennedy Library, "The artist forever faithful "to his personal vision of reality becomes the last champion "of the individual mind and sensibility "against an intrusive society and an officious state."
- Yes, and JFK read that with emphasis. And he was totally sympathetic with the speech, but he used to kid me about Adlai Stevenson for whom I wrote speeches in the 1952 and 1956 campaign. He, Adlai Stevenson, is forgotten today, I suppose, but he brought in hundreds of thousands of people into politics in the 1950s, and he, with his reason and graceful iterations. I mean, Kennedy used to kid me about Stevenson's own inflection, which I would give it to his speeches, and editing on the plane up to Amherst on the October day in 1963, a month before Kennedy was killed, he reduced the elaborate Stevensonian, and without sparing the sentiment, he killed a lot of elaborate . But he was an editor. He was a very good editor, and I remember Kennedy on the plane said, when I put in Robert Frost was acquainted with the night, he said, I forget whether that survived the speech, but he said, Kennedy said, "Robert Frost what a wonderful line, "'acquainted with the night.'"
- [Interviewer] If I could ask you a little bit of background about how, do you remember how Kennedy came to first know Robert Frost? Was it at the time of his inauguration when Frost very famously was invited to read a poem? Did he know Frost before that?
- I think so, but I think Stewart Lee Udall, the Secretary of the Interior, was a old friend of Robert Frost and he proposed, Stewart Udall proposed that Robert Frost, I think my memory is, and Stewart Udall proposed that Robert Frost be invited to the nomination, to the inauguration.
- [Interviewer] To the inauguration, yes. And had they met before that, do you know? Had the president met Frost before that?
- Probably, because they were all New England types together and Frost was a great icon.
- [Interviewer] He was a bit reclusive though, I think.
- Well, he was a vain man.
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
- And he was an extremely intelligent and destructive man, but he was acquainted with the night, and he was a marvelous poet. Archie MacLeish, who was president at the Kennedy speech at Amherst, was a target of Robert Frost.
- [Interviewer] That's very ironic, 'cause he, of course, praised Frost a great deal and admired Frost, indicated he admired Frost.
- Yes, well, Archie MacLeish was a pretty good poet, but Frost was a great poet.
- [Interviewer] Yes. When did President Kennedy ask you to work with him on this speech, do you remember? Was it a long time before the speech was given or was it pretty recent?
- No, he was given a speech by another White House aide, and he felt that that draft was thin and stale. And he invited me, asked me to turn out a speech.
- [Interviewer] How much time did he give you?
- A couple of days, and he read the speech on the plane. The Kennedys were not long distance planners, but they were brilliant improvisers.
- [Interviewer] And he also invited you to go along on the trip?
- Yes.
- [Interviewer] Did he do that at the last minute as well? Was that an improvisation?
- Yes. He called me up the night before the Amherst speech that I recall and asked me to come along, and it was a great day.
- [Interviewer] I can imagine.
- Autumn in New England is wonderful and the sunny, crisp leaves had turned, and there was a gorgeous day.
- [Interviewer] Yes, I was there. I was 14.
- Yes.
- [Interviewer] And I didn't fly from Washington. I was in Amherst and with my parents, and my father was an Amherst graduate and had been invited to attend the speech, and he took me, because he said, "This is one of these events "that you'll remember all your life." And of course, he was certainly right about it.
- What do you remember about it?
- Well, the first thing I remember, and I remember many things about it, but the first thing I remember was that it was very... The weather wasn't nice at all at first, in the morning. And the president and his party worked late, and thousands of people sat in the hall for about an hour and a half and waited.
- Oh, really?
- For the weather to clear, so that his plane could land wherever it landed, I think Westover Air Force Base. And then, the helicopter had to fly to Amherst and all of this took a good bit of extra time, unplanned time, so we all just sat there and talked and wondered what would happen and when he would arrive. And then it was very, very exciting. I remember there was an academic procession, and I don't remember the music, but I've had a look at the program, it was Meyerbeer.
- [Arthur] Oh, really?
- And then the coronation march from the opera, "Le Prophète" and everybody walked in, but no president. And then there was a pause, and the music changed to "Hail to the Chief," and President Kennedy and President Plimpton of Amherst walked in together with, I don't know, three or four other people, probably Mr. MacLeish and Mr. McCloy. And I remember wondering the reasons for that and turning to my father sitting in the audience and saying, "Now why did they do that?" And my father said, "Probably security." Maybe also the choice of music was more appropriate to the president's office than "Meyerbeer." But then I remember the ceremony, a long but still pretty fascinating, even for a 14 year old. And I remember the line about power corrupting and poetry cleansing and a few other things from the speech. I must say, when I read it more recently, and listened to it, as you and I have before we talked tonight, it means a great deal more to me than it meant when I was 14, but still emotionally, it was an extraordinary experience. You were just about the president's age, and-
- He was six months older than I.
- I see, uh-huh.
- He was born in 1917 in May, and I was born in October. And his older brother was my classmate, Joe Junior. He died in the war.
- [Interviewer] Yes.
- Class of 1938.
- [Interviewer] At Harvard?
- At Harvard, and I was aware of JFK who had been held back by sickness, so he was the two years after me, class of 1940. But I didn't meet him until after the war. And then he became congressman from the district which I lived, Cambridge. And I first met him, JFK, at the home of Joe Alsop, who was a newspaper columnist, and I was immediately taken by him, and we became friends in the 1950s. I tried to get Stevenson to, in 1956, to take Kennedy off the ticket. Fortunately, I failed, because the blame would be attached to Kennedy for the loss, because of a Catholic on the ticket.
- [Interviewer] Interesting thought.
- Improbable, I mean we're now pending if the Catholics would have a majority on the Supreme Court. But in 1960, the fundamentalist felt that the Roman Catholic president would corrupt the American Democracy.
- [Interviewer] A lot's changed.
- Yes.
- Now we make jokes about it, but then I guess people really feared very seriously that there was...
- A fundamentalist-
- [Interviewer] Have an important impact on the government.
- Fundamentalists were the spies, the righted minority in the 1920s because of their anti-Catholic thing and their antisemitic thing. But they led the fight against Al Smith, the Democratic candidate in 1928 and led the fight against JFK in 1960. But then they got smart and forged an alliance with the right wing Catholics over abortion and they forged an alliance with the right wing Jews over the Holy Land. And they dropped the anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, and they gained a major of respectability and therefore 35, 25, 35% of the electorate are under fundamentalist control.
- You commented that it was against your inclination to work as a speech writer for President Kennedy, because you had moved on to other areas of issues, analysis, and advice and so forth. And yet, he wanted you to write, in spite of kidding you about sounding like Stevenson, he still wanted you to write speeches for him.
- Yeah, well, Ted Sorenson was the main speech writer, but Ted, speech writing wasn't our main job. And policy people, Ted Sorensen, Myer Feldman, Dick Goodwin, Arthur Schlesinger, and we were all substantive. The notion of the speech writer exclusively writing speeches was a latter day notion. And I think it's, I mean, Sam Rosenman, Bob Sherwood, FDR-
- [Interviewer] Joe Proskauer.
- Yes. They had substantive jobs, and they gave advice and worked on the legislation and so on, whereas speech writers today are huddled in caves. And I think, well, George Bush has a good speech writer, but I think the country has lost something for policy, because policy people do not write speeches.
- [Interviewer] There seems to be too much concern with polling, and the medium has become the message.
- Yeah.
- [Interviewer] How would you describe the process of writing a speech for President Kennedy? You've mentioned in some of our earlier conversation that he was a good editor, that he, of course, chose the words he wanted to edit and chose the authors that he wanted to edit with care and with pride. Tell me how it worked.
- Well, he would discuss the substance of the speech, the theme he would like to write, and particularly with Ted Sorensen, who was a proficient, brilliant writer and, but like McGeorge Bundy and me and so on. But then he would edit, he was a close editor, and improve it. And senators can't be trusted because they were so adapted to debate that they can't be trusted if you stick to the script, and JFK with confidence, his qualities of improvisation, like separating his speaking and particularly during campaigns, he would abandon the script much to the dismay of the speech writer.
- [Interviewer] It doesn't seem that many of his successors do that very often. I was amazed watching Kennedy's speech at Amherst that almost the first half of the speech appeared to be something he may have done from notes, he may have done some of it ad-lib, but it wasn't part of the plan as it were. It was kind of a separate theme about education and power and privilege. And then he started to talk about art and its relationship to power and government and the things that you and he had worked on together.
- I don't know where he got the first half of the speech. I've forgotten. It was, after all, 40 years ago.
- [Interviewer] Did you ever see a manuscript of the first part?
- Yeah, well, I must have, but 40 years ago.
- At the library groundbreaking, the president said some things, which again, if you listen to a tape, they sound more off-the-cuff or ad-lib, and I wonder if you know where some of those things came from. He said Frost told him not to let the Harvard in him get the better of him and things like that. He told some jokes. He said, "I'm now here "as Archibald MacLeish's classmate," and so forth. He liked to rib himself and to rib the situation he was in, in circumstances like that.
- I forget the groundbreaking, and I did not enter it in my diary, but he was confident in his mastery of press conferences and ad lib speeches, ad lib talk, and he was brilliant and charming.
- Well, he certainly was on that occasion. Everybody remembers it and from everybody of every age. I've spoken to other people who were there. I think I'm probably one of the younger people who I've talked to that was present. There must have been people younger than I who were present as well. And it's amazing to think that, you said President Kennedy was six months older than you, it's amazing to think what he'd be like if he'd been permitted to live. But it doesn't seem to me like that ad-libbing is something that presidents do very much of these days either, and perhaps that's a loss. Do you think that's because of the nature of people who seek the presidency?
- George Bush has been more open to press conferences recently, and I mean, I believe... The Iraq War seems to me a great fatal mistake, but I think he has given more press conferences. I'm ready to go.
- [Interviewer] Okay, this was great, thank you.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was a prolific author, 20th-century American historian, and intellectual. Schlesinger discusses the historic speech he wrote for President Kennedy given at Amherst College in 1963 shortly before Kennedy's assassination. Schlesinger also discusses his unique perspective on the Kennedys, as well as thoughts on the George W. Bush administration and the war in Iraq.
Michael J. Israels
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