An Awareness of Feelings

Given its addiction to sensationalism, one would expect most of the mainstream media to have deliberately looked away from the significance of the auction at Sotheby's this April of part of the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

So the media's display of false astonishment that some people would pay so much for items of such small monetary value wasn't surprising. Indeed, if the media is "our national nervous system," as Tom Wicker, the former New York Times columnist, wrote in a 1983 article looking back on the Kennedy years, then its anxious effort, in this period when many still consider it good to be selfish and greedy, to escape examining the emotions which the auction made manifest is understandable.

Dozens of people tendered bids, and countless bought copies of the $90 hardcover catalog and $45 softcover catalog describing items for sale. That desire for material proof indicates that the Onassis estate auction confirms what was proved by the reaction to the death of Mrs. Onassis two years ago--that the fascination with John F. Kennedy '40 and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and with the early 1960s, will endure well into the next century.

That some bidders and buyers were more interested in preening themselves before the world does not diminish the ardor which was plainly evident within, and more significantly, beyond, Sotheby's showrooms.

That longing for this man and this woman, which remains even after--and perhaps, even because of--the revelations of his flaws, transcends borders, generations and political ideologies.

Marcy Mousavi '99, a student in my course this spring--of course, today's students are largely the children of the adolescents and youth of the 1960s--told me that her parents have been rock-ribbed conservative Republicans all her life; and so she was astonished last summer to discover packed away in the basement of her home a rug into which was knit the visage of John F. Kennedy.

Stunned, she asked her parents, "What gives?"

Her parents were silent for a moment, then said just three words: "Kennedy was different."

The widespread feeling that John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, both then and in the years after his death, were transcendently different, is what we saw expressed in monetary terms in New York this spring.

In this instance, unlike at many other high-profile auctions, money was not a substitute for feeling, but a manifestation of feeling.

This is not to romanticize the early 1960s nor to obscure either Kennedy's personal flaws or the fact that his actions sometimes didn't match his soaring rhetoric. But that rhetoric still resonates because it put forth a faith that the highest duty of government, and of us all, was to improve the common weal. It was rhetoric which helped energize the nation because it was spoken by a politician who said proudly that "I do have a great liking for the word 'politics'.... It's the way a president gets things done."

Imagine, a public figure who is willing to declare that the practice of politics can be an honorable calling.

John F. Kennedy's words called the American people to service, as the students who graced my Expository Writing class these past two years have so wonderfully put it.

Juan E. Garcia '99 wrote this spring that JFK, by promoting "hope and optimism, courage and sacrifice," gave the world "more than just a glimpse of his potential, [his words] evoked the potential of those listening." And Brandon Hofmeister '99, asserted in a moving personal essay that JFK's words still have the power to pull people toward him. "When I consider John F. Kennedy," Hofmeister wrote, "I am able to see the man, but I believe the myth.... My feelings are more powerful and more important than my dispassionate analysis of his accomplishments. This is not ignorance, it's awareness of feelings."

In effect, wrote Ann Nichols '99, in her final paper this spring, it doesn't "matter whether the Kennedys were really what they seemed to be. It was what they appeared to be that counted."

Richard Reeves, author of the 1993 study, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, has said this: "The final judgment of a leader of democracy [is] whether he or she brings out the best or the worst of the people. On that score, I rate JFK a great leader."

That is what most people, in this country and abroad, think. And, as we have seen, many are willing to pay a great deal of money to make that clear.

Lee A. Daniels '71 is a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. During the past two years, he taught a course in the Expository Writing Program on John F. Kennedy '40.