(21)
July 16, 1999
Seventy-five thousand people packed into every inch of Shea Stadium. It would’ve occurred just across town, but the Yankees were hosting the Braves, and as later observers would note, the Mets’ home park was a more suitable, neutral venue for such a fundamentally American event anyway.
There were posters: some homemade, some purchased from the flock of scalpers in the parking lots and near the subway stations. The scalpers sold a poster that even years later would fetch a commanding price as a collectible. A freelance photographer shooting for the Associated Press captured John in profile, glancing to the sky just as his father had in 1961 portrait. The image, transformed by unnamed artists, stenciled in red and blue with words like “HOPE” and “CHANGE” and “WHOLE AGAIN,” formed the basis of the posters, which fluttered around in the wind next to American flags and long, homemade banners with slogans like “WE <3 YOU, JOHN-JOHN,” and “KENNEDY IN 2000.”
There were megafans: Kennedy’s book,
Civic Courage, debuted to mixed reviews from the critics, but stood atop the bestseller lists for the first six months of 1999. Filled with moving (if, as the critics noted, rather empty) paeans to his fallen father, gripping autobiographical moments detailing his emotional reaction to the Boggs revelations (yet, as the critics noted, little of his actual
views of those revelations) and strange, if to the average reader incisive, asides about the underrated presidency of Chester Arthur, a certain highborn set joked that “most people bought it to read exactly two pages: the front and back covers, the ones with the biggest pictures of John-John.” Still, many waited in the sun clutching their signed copies as they waited for a glimpse of the man himself.
The crosstalk of tens of thousands can fill a space with ambient noise, but as the lights fell, the crowd went silent. A long, peninsular stage extending into the crowd began to light up along its edges and the first cheers went up. A man emerged from backstage; he was not Kennedy, but an aged singer in a beret with square-rimmed glasses. He walked to a stool and a guitar at the end of the stage and sat down, smiling at the crowd.
“I’m so happy to be with all of you tonight,” he said. He was Dion, a king of early 1960s doo-wop who later transformed himself into a
real songwriter, or at least that’s how he saw it. He’d arrived to sing the song he believed catapulted him into serious – from “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue” to a real social commentator.
“Well, let’s all sing it together now, huh?” Dion said, as the lights concentrated their focus in on him and the strings blared over the PA system.
Has anybody here
Seen my old friend John
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good, well, they die young
I just looked around, and he’s gone
Behind him, a massive screen lit up with the image of young John-John saluting to his father’s casket as it rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue, the little boy in his bright turquoise peacoat fighting back sadness with pure confusion. Now thousands were singing in unison, and Dion set his guitar down.
Has anybody here
Seen my old friend John
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good, well, they die young
I just looked around, and he’s gone
The older man stood up, leaned into the microphone, and exhaled. “Now, I need to go. It’s time for you to hear from my old friend John.”
The crowd roared. Once again, the lights went dark. Strings intoned over the PA system into the thousands waiting to hear. A single guitar’s riff cut through the layers, and a voice beamed in over it:
The heart is a bloom
Shoots up through the stony ground
There’s no room
No space to rent in this town
A few lights – signs of the main event! The front rows jumped with anticipation, and thousands stood from their seats.
You’re out of luck
And the reason that you had to care
The traffic is stuck
And you’re not moving anywhere
Lights went up to illuminate the campaign’s banners: “NEW LEADERSHIP FOR THE NEW MILLENIUM,” “CHANGE FOR ALL OF US.” The singing continued to pipe through the PA system:
You thought you’d found a friend
To take you out of this place
Someone you could lend a hand
In return for grace
Now all the lights leapt to life, beaming across the stage as fireworks flew off behind it. Drums thundered, and the choir joined in unison with the lead singer:
It’s a beautiful day
Sky falls, you feel like
It’s a beautiful day
Don’t let it get away
Across the stage, Caroline, Jack, Teddy, and countless other Kennedys walked to the fore, several locked arm in arm. The leaping crowd, an undulating mass of humanity before them, hollered with delight. The family waved to the audience, and after several minutes of rapt applause, John began to speak:
“Thank you, thank you! Thank you so much, New York! You are, and you will always be, home for me. I know so many of you traveled from far, far away and waited in the heat to be here today. I can only hope that the humble words I’ve come to offer to you – after all, I am many things, but I am not the speaker my father was – will have made it all worth your while.
“I have lived no ordinary life. When I was just three years old, I waved farewell to my father for the last time. My uncle – who also fell to the assassin’s bullet before my tenth birthday – said of my father, the late President Kennedy, that ‘his idea was that this country, that this world, should be a better place when we turn it over to the next generation than it was when we inherited it from the last generation.’ It was a herculean task for my father, but he maintained his strength because of you.
“You, the elderly, struggling to maintain house and home against mounting bills.
“You, the
citizens of this country treated as second-class citizens solely because you weren’t white.
“You, the poor, the workers, the middle class and all those struggling to reach it. You – the people. You sustained him. You gave him life. You gave him an energy so bright that no killer could snuff it out.
“And I know, Dad, that you are here with us today. Your courage sustained us then, and it sustains us again now.”
Applause shook the building.
“Thank you. Now, I must return to what Robert F. Kennedy so eloquently said of John F. Kennedy: that he believed our children and grandchildren should inherit a better country and a better world than the one we inherited.
“As we look around at America today, can we truly believe that we are leaving it better than we found it? Our children are turning to the twin scourges of drugs and alcohol – and their parents aren’t far behind. Our schoolyards are turning into battlefields. Just a few months ago, we witnessed the horrors of Littleton. So many young, beautiful lives, so much potential erased.
“Death and sorrow follow us everywhere. The lost and confused turn to false prophets who promise prosperity and salvation but deliver little more than an early grave, as so many innocents discovered in a New Mexico desert just a few years ago. Others seek salvation through destruction, as the bomber who struck in Dallas believed he could achieve.
“This decay – this despair – it is a symptom, not the disease. Ours is a disease of the
soul. It is what happens when a society loses hope, faith, a shared set of values. The values that turn a set of streets into a community and a set of laws and boundaries into a nation.
“We are as prosperous as we have ever been. Some would claim we’re
more prosperous than ever. But what
is prosperity without
purpose? Without a sense of higher obligation, a commitment that extends beyond self-indulgence, that says to one’s fellow human being, “you are my brother, my sister – you are a person of worth,” without these things, we are rudderless.
“How can we rebuild that sense of shared responsibility – that
trust – with the people we have in power today? I speak not only of the figureheads whose personal failings we can
see, like the White House that dragged us deeper into Somalia to preserve its poll numbers, or the men who said, “read my lips” and “I never told anybody to lie.” I speak of the tens of thousands of nameless, faceless bureaucrats with the power to change lives – or, as we’ve learned, to erase them – with the single stroke of the pen. The state beneath the state.
“We have the power to begin our country again, but only if we welcome a new generation. A generation untainted by the cynicism of the old. A generation filled with the optimism and the promise of all the goodness of the human spirit, tempered by the storms of experience, yet never yielding in its faith that a better tomorrow is possible. It is time for that next generation.
“And so, my friends, I am here to tell you that I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Junior, am seeking the office of President of the United States.”
The lights and pyrotechnics that followed were later criticized as a bit ‘over the top,’ but in the moment, it felt as close to a rockstar performance as any could imagine. When the joyous cheers faded, Kennedy got down to business.
“As your president, I will offer a new agenda for the American people.
“One: we must transform the federal bureaucracy, modernizing and professionalizing the engines of government as brave, forgotten leaders did a hundred and twenty years ago. We will impose new standards for accountability and new punishments for those who exceed their legal authorities. Nowhere is this action more needed than as regards our intelligence community, and nowhere will the action be swifter and stronger than it will be for the intelligence community.
“As a wise man named Hale Boggs once said,” Kennedy began to roars of the crowd at the mere mention of the elder statesman’s name. “’We have granted to the elite and secret police within our system vast new powers over the lives and liberties of the people.’ Those powers have gone too far if they treat the constitution as a suggestion and sanction murder without repercussion. I will supplement the work of the Special Commission on Assassinations with a new one dedicated to concrete policy reforms. And if our new commission recommends it, I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind.”
Cheers turned into a crowd rendition of ‘America the Beautiful’ illuminated by the lights of thousands of lighters – and an increasing number of cellular phones.
“Second, we must channel our nation’s energy and its economic might to a higher purpose. Our technological prowess in the world is unmatched, and we must use it to demonstrate American leadership. For the source of our greatness – the thing that makes us the envy of the world over – is not just our military might, but the economic, the scientific, the technological greatness that inspires all.
“So as my father pledged we would set foot on the surface of the moon in ten years, I pledge that we will return to it by 2010, setting up a permanent home for research and exploration. As the Democratic Party pledged a great program of public works to overcome the scourge of economic malaise, I pledge to reinvest our coming budget surplus to combat poverty, transform our schools, and build a new, clean energy-powered system of transcontinental railroads to foster our transition to a healthier planet for all. We can do
great things, and we should do great things again.
“Finally, we must send the new generation forth into the world with a spirit of community, shared humanity, and volunteerism – to send the message that America is here to help. I will triple President Clinton’s commitment to the AmeriCorps program, one of the few bright lights in a painful four years. I will quadruple our commitment to the Peace Corps. These investments will ensure that the next generation moves hearts and minds, whether in East St. Louis or the nations of the former Eastern Bloc.
“These may seem hopeless dreams to a nation conditioned to think small. But we’ve never bent the arc of history with incrementalism. Rather than allowing the pain of the 1990s to destroy us, let it fuel us. If you’ll join me on this journey, I know we can slough off our fears. For as my father once said, ‘the energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it – and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
“Thank you, God bless you, and let’s get to work!”