The Presidency: He Asked Me to Listen to the Debate

He was the greatest actor of our time, dimming those mere celluloid performers like Ronald Reagan. He was on a stage as wide as the world and in a drama of the centuries. He commanded with Marlborough and debated with Churchill; he dined with Jefferson and rode with Sherman to the sea. He was a practical romantic who sought the company of the great, both in his fantasies and in real life. He urged America to follow this youthful adventure of mind and body. That is why John Kennedy lives among us yet today. In death he found a place in the caravan of history's great whose thoughts and words he used, whose actions he revered.

When he flew north from Palm Beach in January 1961 to take over the presidency, Kennedy scratched away on a yellow pad, fashioning phrases for his Inaugural Address. He wanted them to equal those of Franklin Roosevelt, Wilson and maybe even Lincoln. What did I think, he asked, tossing the pad in my lap, fixing his bemused gaze on me to measure enthusiasm or lack of it. I couldn't read his handwriting and said so. He took the pad back, a little disgusted, and intoned a couple of his lines. Nice, I said, not at all convinced, since the cabin of the family plane, the Caroline, was hardly the environment for greatness. He wanted to tell the nation, he went on (abandoning any hope that I would rise out of my seat in ecstasy), that the American revolution continued, our greatest days lay ahead.

How well he succeeded with that message I realized three days later, clinging in the winter air to one of the columns on the Capitol front and watching Kennedy's shoulders below me sway and surge to the cadences of his address. He was listening to distant bugle calls; he was talking to John Adams and George Washington.

Kennedy decided to go to the moon late on an April afternoon, a short while after the Soviets had humiliated us with their first man in space and just 48 hours before the disastrous Bay of Pigs began. He had asked me to listen to the debate among his science and budget advisers. It was not a happy discussion. His space men wanted to go, but his budget man, David Elliott Bell, cautioned about spending $40 billion. Science Adviser Jerome Wiesner was not certain we could beat the Soviets to the moon even in ten years. I can still see Kennedy's profile as he put his feet on the edge of the Cabinet table and tilted back, brow deeply furrowed, fingers nervously tapping his bared teeth. His face was clouded through most of the discussion. But something stirred him toward the end. He concluded the meeting, re-entered the Oval Office and 15 minutes later sent word out: "We are going to the moon." Kennedy had heard the poets. He was beyond politics and dollars.