That opening ‘finally’ must make the speechwriter cringe: we’re only halfway through. It is the final part of its own section but it still sounds the only false note in the writing, which is otherwise perfectly controlled. The credit for that is due to Sorensen, who acted as editor-in-chief of the many contributions that Kennedy commissioned. Solicited suggestions came in from the columnists Walter Lippmann and Joseph Kraft, civil rights advisers Harris Wofford and Louis Martin, and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, along with a pile of unsolicited material. Secretary of State Dean Rusk added phrases. Billy Graham sent a list of possible biblical quotations, as did the leader of Washington’s Jewish Community Council, Isaac Franck. Sorensen held the pen, though, and Galbraith, in particular, was disappointed that so few of his resounding phrases made the final cut. Years later he rather forlornly claimed that among the surviving words of his contribution was the simple refrain: ‘Let us …’
This is the passage in which Kennedy moves the argument on from rigid Cold War binary opposition. The speech does contain plenty of counterpoints to his deliberate show of strength – ‘civility is not a sign of weakness’; the United Nations is ‘our last best hope’; and the need for ‘a grand global alliance’ against ‘the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself’. It would therefore be wrong to read this speech as nothing other than a resilient text of a cold warrior, although that is the essential context. In 1957 the Soviet Union had launched the first space capsule to orbit the earth. West Berlin had been threatened by a Soviet ultimatum. South Vietnam had been menaced by a guerrilla campaign from the communist regime in Hanoi. America felt ill-equipped for the challenge and wanted a strong response. That speech about the peril is in there certainly, but so too are the caveats and the entreaties. Kennedy’s message to Khrushchev is clear. He will stand against armed encroachments, but he wants to lower the temperature with negotiations and cooperation.
In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe. Now the trumpet summons us again – not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need – not as a call to battle, though embattled we are – but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’ – a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself. Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?
With the claim that the future rests in your hands rather than mine, Kennedy drops the first hint of the line that will forever after be the title of this speech. It is notable that citizen action has not featured thus far. Suddenly the speech switches focus, from the world to America, from the president to the citizen body. This was a regular Kennedy theme. The president was irritated by his party’s comfort-zone tendency to argue that government will fix social problems. He thought the Democrats were too ready to reach for the state. The speech he had given at the Democratic Convention, which became known as his ‘New Frontier’ speech, was notable for this reason. ‘The New Frontier of which I speak’, he said on that occasion, ‘is not a set of promises – it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.’
Kennedy dramatises this switch, and this focus, in the writing. He made a conscious decision during the drafting to strike out all uses of the word ‘I’. He also eschews one obvious course, which is to make himself the embodiment of the new generation. Instead, new times will be defined by a compact between the governor and the governed. This is the irony in the existence of the prestigious John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard: an academy devoted to the craft of using state power is named after the president who is famous for wanting to devolve his power to the people. This evocation of ‘we’ over ‘I’ leads perfectly to the theme of his peroration, which is that power is dispersed. Power resides with the people. This is a way of asking for popular support and a reminder of the central virtue that democracy exhibits over other forms of government. It is only in a democracy that the people would be asked to contribute. In other forms of polity they would be told.
This was also a way of diverting attention from Kennedy’s relative youth and inexperience, which had been a problem for him during the presidential campaign. The era of Eisenhower, De Gaulle and Adenauer was fresh in the memory. By making a speech of such gravity, and by drafting the people as partners, Kennedy is, in effect, saying that he is ready to serve in dangerous times.
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavour will light our country and all who serve it and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
The famous chiasmus comes at the end of the speech. In this formulation the words will last, but this was by no means their first airing. This was another line that had been tested on the road. In a televised campaign address in September 1960 Kennedy had said: ‘We do not campaign stressing what our country is going to do for us as a people. We stress what we can do for the country, all of us.’ By the time of the Inaugural, Kennedy has polished the words for effect. He told Sorensen that he was worried that the ending sounded very much like the one he had given in a recent speech in the Massachusetts legislature. Three other campaign speeches, in Anchorage, Detroit and Washington, had all included a variant of the same idiom.
The famous line – ‘ask not …’ – was an echo of Jefferson’s belief, which he took from the ancient governments, that taking part is an important aspect of American citizenship. The words were an instant inspiration as soon as it was uttered. Legions of young Americans joined the effort to fight poverty in America’s inner cities. The Peace Corps took many volunteers overseas. By the end of Kennedy’s presidency, more than 7,000 mostly young Americans were working in underdeveloped countries around the world.
For all that it is a wonderfully poetic sentence and a fine sentiment, and at the risk of heresy, it is a slightly odd conclusion to a foreign policy speech. What can any individual really do, in the context in which this advice is offered? This would have been a more comprehensible counsel in a speech about domestic policy, where active citizen engagement is part of the solution. Quite how the individual was to affect the conduct of the Cold War was less obvious.
However, it didn’t feel like that at the time. The 1961 Inaugural shows how occasion matters to the verdict of greatness. This speech is not as important, historically, as the televised address from October 1962