Inauguration--We've Been Here Before

I’ll never forget the Kennedy inauguration. The nation was agog with hope and expectation. Jackie and he were such a lovely image of America as it saw itself in 1961. The youth of America seemed to have left off the apathy of the 1950s. So much excitement; so much hope. “Change” was in the air.
It was as if nature tried to warn us. The day before, Washington got hit with one of the most hellish snowstorms in memory. A friend later told me that it took him four hours to travel four blocks only half a mile from the White House—before he ran out of gas and walked.
I was living in Manhattan at the time. I left Newsweek (where I was an editorial assistant in the Make Up Department) after dark. I walked down to Times Square. It was so strange to stand in the middle of the street in the midst of what bragged itself to be the busiest intersection in the world—and not see a single moving vehicle. The mayor had ordered all vehicular traffic off the streets of New York.
A day later I was back at Newsweek where we turned on the television to watch the swearing in. Frost was there. Hatless Kennedy was there (thereby changing men’s fashions forever). And the impressively massive looking Cardinal Cushing was there.
The old Cardinal looked like the kind of man you wouldn’t want to try to push around even if he weren’t wearing the black and scarlet of a prince of the church. He came up in the days when a successful Irishman went into politics or the church. His choice had been the latter—but he was as tough as any political boss ever minted.
(He is wonderfully depicted at the end of Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 novel, The Last Hurrah. In the book, the two choices for the Irish—church or government—are highlighted along with the rivalry this created between churchman and politician. If you haven’t read it, read it.)
He began to pray. The podium began to smoke. He gripped the edges of the podium, unmoved and unmovable, and continued to pray. No one but the Secret Service dared to move. They went ballistic. It was comic to watch them try to reach around the old prelate to get at whatever was billowing smoke. Cushing went on praying. The Secret Service tried to see past him. He did not move.
They crouched; they reached. He ignored. He finally finished his prayer and let go of the podium. Whatever smoked was now easily handled and Kennedy was allowed to give his inaugural address. “Ask not…,” and so forth and so on. But as for me, a chill went up my spine there in the Newsweek offices.
Is this what one calls an omen? I wondered.
Within weeks everything he had said about the “missile gap” in his campaign was exposed as pure fabrication (that Ike and Nixon could not refute with evidence they possessed because of National Security). In three months he stumbled cluelessly into the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
The Soviet leader, Khrushchev, found Kennedy’s action in Cuba so incredible that he literally summoned the young president to a summit in Vienna. Having access to a photo morgue with its hundreds of pictures of that trip was priceless. You could see the contempt on Khrushchev’s face grow.
Khrushchev, convinced that the young man had neither guts nor brains, put missiles in Cuba. This came as close to World War III as we ever got. Kennedy had no choice but to react. He finally did after months of warnings. He had to give important trade-offs to the Russians to get the missiles back out. If there had been no Bay of Pigs and no Berlin Wall—which Kennedy waffled over (Ike would not have)—there would have been no Missile Crisis.
Kennedy had normal to above normal smarts. He was a man of decent courage (PT 109), but he was just completely out of his depth. Eight years as a largely absentee senator had given him no experience. He spent two years blowing it—and nearly killed us all.
Do I see another Kennedy here? Smoke or no smoke, will this man fulfill all the hopes that are centered on him? I don’t see how a single human being can. I especially hope that Obama doesn’t believe his own press. We could be in real trouble if he does.
I am more nervous about this inauguration than I have been about any since the old Cardinal stood—against the Secret Service, the elements, and the smoking podium—and finished his prayers.
I’ll stand with Irving Berlin: God Bless America.