David Reisman:
It has always astonished me that the Civil War, obscured by the drama and nostalgia which surround it, has had so minimal an impact in reminding Americans of the violence endemic in our society. Nor did the shooting of President Lincoln (one among a number of assassinations and attempted killings) jar the complacency of many Americans that ours is fundamentally a manageable and peaceable society. Despite the fashion in small circles to proclaim one’s tragic sense of life, it has been difficult for the reasonably well-off in America fully to appreciate the precariousness of civilized life here at home: the lights go on, the jets take off, the daily agenda of noise and imagery provided by the omnipresent media set before us an apparent continuity of experience. In the ancient world, the arson of the library at Alexandria by Heliogabalus symbolized how great can be the orbit of a single destructive, vainglorious act; with us, a man capable of boasting that he was the “youngest Marxist” appears to have perpetrated an act upon our Chief of State that symbolizes and brings to mind the case with which our whole society might be destroyed by the trigger-happy in this nuclear age.
When President Kennedy was elected, the surge of hope that went around much of the world seemed to me unduly optimistic about what a single individual, no matter how talented or courageous, could accomplish (for Europeans and Japanese, the surprise of the Cuban invasion was far greater than for many here at home). People in other countries, oppressed by the ham-handed or iron-fisted or flabby leadership of elderly non-intellectual men, looked to President Kennedy with admiration and even a touch of envy. For example, Englishmen of both major political persuasions saw him as either a Tory or a Labour patrician who could bring lucid intelligence and magnanimity in place of the Populist befuddlement which, during the Eisenhower era and long before that regarded polities as a somewhat shady spectator sport demanding no competence from the audience and little enough from the players. Americans like myself held to a more somber view: that no President, not even Mr. Kennedy with all his assembled intelligence and dedication, might be able to untangle the fantastic traffic jam of American political institutions, vested interests, ideologies, paranoias, and “don’t fence me in” chauvinism. We felt, moreover, that President Kennedy, though not given to posturing or demagogy, shared for worse as well as for better certain “American” qualities of impatience and the all-too-quick come-back; he was the heir, I suggested, not of Franklin D. Roosevelt (to whom he was superior in intelligence, knowledge, historical sense, and seriousness), but of Theodore Roosevelt. It was the latter who made intelligence and historical perspective politically acceptable by coupling these qualities with shows of virility and frontierism—a combination also to be found in some of our most distinguished writers.