The Senate Document Room in Days of Yore
The varied assessments of the presidency of John F. Kennedy
published during the week memorializing the fiftieth anniversary of his
assassination left me with a variety of impressions, two of them personal. The first is of my antiquity. Every pundit in America found it
necessary to reminisce about where he or she was precisely at the moment the terrible
news arrived, and where they were was
usually in Mrs. Higgenbotham’s third-grade classroom or some such. I was already a college instructor.
However, their infantile perceptions remembered after half a century seemed to
offer them a sufficient platform from which to announce confident and sweeping
views about the mood of America in 1963 and President Kennedy’s role in
creating it.
Though
I remember those times vividly, I cannot recall that there was a national mood. In my experience life’s complexity is
fairly constant. So I have no field theories to
propose. I can offer by way of a
second impression only one quite small and specific point. I had to conclude that none of the
pundits talking about the Kennedyesque “Camelot” had the slightest idea what or
where Camelot is or was—though the more astute among them connected it to a
Broadway show. Medievalists rarely
appear in prime time, so let me take the opportunity to remind you that Camelot
was the legendary place that was the legendary seat of the legendary medieval
King Arthur, and that it was somewhere vaguely off in the West—meaning the West
of England, of course.
I
suppose it is natural that a figure so attractive, indeed charismatic as
President Kennedy would attract mythic comparison, but I am not sure that popular journalism has picked up the
right myth. The idea that the
thousand days of the Kennedy administration created a Camelot on the Potomac is
one that I, at least, cannot fully
endorse. It is not simply the
matter of the inexactitude of the parallels, significant though they be. (For example, in the real Camelot it
was the queen, not the king, who was the adulterer.) It is more a question of mythic tone. Broadway musicals are not big on
ambiguity. Medieval poets were
much better.
Of
Arthur at his Christmas feast at Camelot the great author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight writes
thus:
Þis
kyng lay at Camylot vpon Krystmasse….
He watz so
joly of his joyfnes, and sumquat childgered:
His lif
liked hym lyȝt, he louied þe lasse
Auþer to
longe lye or to longe sitte,
So bisied
him his ȝonge blod and his brayn wylde.
We don’t know for certain what the key adjective childgered means, but it is probably
closer to “childish” than “child-like”.
The restlessness, I think, has to be borderline pathological: Royal
Attention Deficit Order is my guess.
Anyway the king’s appetite for action sure gets Gawain in a spot of
bother. Young blood and wild brain
make for hair-raising adventures, but they are hardly presidential.
I
have one personal and trivial Kennedy anecdote that is perhaps worth
recording. I spent the summer of 1958
in Washington, working in the Senate Document Room. In the old days (and for all I know, still) each piece of
legislation proposed in either of the houses of Congress was printed in a large
number of copies at every stage of its discussion and amendment for the
consultation of interested legislators and staff members. The Senate Document Room stored these
papers and distributed them among the senators on demand. I was a well paid summer clerk in this
office. The duties were not
taxing, and I had plenty of time to enjoy Washington. What a wonderful way to spend a summer between graduating
from college and sailing off to Europe!
Senator J. William Fulbright in 1965
The
instigator of this boondoggle was Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Arkansas). All the senators had a certain number
of patronage jobs at their disposal.
Some may have gone to
political cronies, but several of the senators sponsored “promising youth”, a
category into which I once plausibly fit.
Bill Fulbright, one of the genuine American statesmen of the last
century, took a special interest in Rhodes Scholars elected from Arkansas. He was still doing that ten years later
when he patronized Bill Clinton.
Among
my summer friends in the Document Room was a smart guy who later became an
American historian at the University of Wisconsin, where I ran into him again. We both regarded the Senate as though
it were an all-star baseball team and we card-collectors. There were many highly prized cards,
but for this fellow the Jack Kennedy card, had there been one, would have outranked
the T208 Honus Wagner. One hot,
bright afternoon after work we were walking near the Capitol vaguely
in the direction we both lived when Senator John F. Kennedy drove right by
us. We were not twenty feet away. He was driving a red
convertible car with the top down.
In the passenger’s seat at his side was a good-looking blonde. She could have been some latter-day
Daisy Buchanan. They were both
laughing.
Religious
rapture is rare this side of baroque painting, but my friend’s affect surely
must have approached that of Saint Helena when she saw the Vision of the True
Cross. We had seen Kennedy often
enough on the floor of the Senate, but this was entirely different. I myself was thrilled. “That man,” he said with oracular
solemnity, “is going to be President.”
He didn’t tell me that he would be President even before I got back from
Oxford. Thus it is that I have in
the book of memory two images of
President Kennedy in an open car.
One, shared with a whole horrified world, comes from the home movie of
Abraham Zapruder. The other is a
much more limited edition. Kennedy
as Royal Victim. Kennedy as Prince
Charming, somewhat childgered.
