R. Bruce Anderson
The summer sort of sneaked up on me and took over about two days after our return from Germany. On return, I look forward to a break, however brief, to reflect on the year, find my back deck, and read some stuff I’d not been able to find the time for during the academic year.
I’d seen that Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new piece was now out, happily at the same time I was grappling with a reading list for my fall first-year colloquium on the American Presidency. Goodwin, a historian whose Pulitzer-prize winner “LBJ and the American Dream” was (and is) central to any story of the modern presidency, had just released “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.”
“Unfinished…” is at once an autobiography and a biography of the Goodwins. Her husband, Dick, had been a speechwriter for both Kennedy and Johnson, while she had served as a Presidential Fellow in the Johnson White House. It is a commentary on the presidency that raises some critical points at this pivotal point in this election year, where the vast majority of Americans are completely disinterested, exhausted, or disgusted – young voters most of all.
The period from 1960 to 1988, it seems to me, was a watershed for the highest office. It contained the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan: people from both sides of the aisle that rose and fell in dramatic fashion – deep tragedy, high comedy, incredible progress… but in all cases, inspiration.
Today, Carter’s disastrous phrase, “malaise” comes to mind.
And that is why there is no “youth vote.” The next generation is moribund on politics – and bitter about what politics and policy can accomplish. They’ve never seen it happen.
In her delicate prose, Kearns tells the story of the idea of the Peace Corps – of a speech that JFK gave in Ann Arbor to University of Michigan students. It was not planned. Kennedy “swerved from his stock speech,” she wrote.
“How many of you … are willing to spend your days in Ghana?” Kennedy asked the crowd. “… How many of you are willing to work in the foreign service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer — whether a free society can compete.”
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In the days that followed, student petitions exploded first at Michigan and then across the country, for Kennedy to turn his spontaneous remarks into reality. The Peace Corps was born.
Imagine being a kid growing up in a Democratic home, living through the final gasps of the Eisenhower administration, when JFK called on them to join him on the “New Frontier.” Imagine being a kid in a conservative home, enduring the “ennui” of Jimmy Carter, when Ronald Reagan burst on the scene with his clarion call for a massive revision of government’s role – and, four years later, calling on us to envision “Morning in America.”
Johnson’s Civil Rights bill. Nixon opening China and reaching détente with the USSR. Did imagination in politics stop with the new millennia?
We need to re-find America. “Build Back Better” (back?), “Make American Great Again” (again?) will not do it. Where’s the vision? Where’s the passion? Where’s the hope for the future? Where’s the positive patriotism in creating a better world?
The people I teach, on field trips, learning and thinking, are the future. It is obvious to me that they have the enthusiasm, interest and raw patriotism that can be turned on like a firehose when properly motivated. Ideology and party, to these folks, matters less than vision.
Once this dreadful election is over, we simply must find a way to get out of the punishing, negative hucksterism that is so current in American politics at every level.
R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay, Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio in Lakeland.
