BY HARRY PINCUS | On Thurs., Oct. 20, 1960, I dragged my mother up to Eastern Parkway to meet John F. Kennedy.
The scene looked like a Hollywood premiere, with klieg lights and a platform, and banners of all of the great Democrats. Eleanor Roosevelt was there, and Mayor Robert Wagner, Averell Harriman and even old former Governor Herbert Lehman. They were flesh and blood back then, just people, like the thousands of us who stood freezing outside Dubrow’s Cafeteria, hoping to get a glimpse of the next president.
But the motorcade was late, and there was school the next day. I wept bitterly as my mother dragged me back from Crown Heights, down the cold and empty avenue to our little three-and-a-half-room Brooklyn apartment.
After a few blocks, we saw some lights and a caravan wending its way up Utica Ave. An open car carried the next president, perched atop the back seat, enormous, bronzed and glowing. There had not been a soul for blocks; only my mother, Blanche, and I were there as a welcoming committee.
John F. Kennedy loved kids. I think he loved people. I ran up to his car, jumping up and down, and his enormous smile lit up the cold night. He laughed and reached out to me, and his eyes touched me with a story of pain, and joy, and hope. His eyes seemed to tell me that I could do anything, as long as it was the right thing.
Kennedy had inherited great wealth as a child, yet he fought to serve in the military. The son of one of America’s richest men was assigned to command a small plywood PT boat in the middle of the Pacific with a working-class crew. When the boat was rammed and shattered by a Japanese destroyer, Lieutenant Kennedy placed a torn life-jacket strap in his mouth, tied the other end around a gravely wounded seaman, and towed him three miles through the Pacific to a deserted island, thus saving his life. Kennedy injured his already brittle back, and he suffered. He also had colitis and would later be diagnosed with Addison’s disease. He was told that he could never enter politics because he was too sick to campaign in a working-class district with flights of wooden stairs. But Kennedy wore a brace, and laboriously pulled himself up every flight, to show the working-class constituents that he was going to be working for them.
When President Kennedy discovered newly constructed nuclear missile sites in Cuba, the world came closer to annihilation than we knew. On a dark Saturday, during the crisis, a U2 spy plane was shot down over the island nation and an emergency cabinet meeting was called. The takedown of a U2 was supposed to require a retaliatory attack, and cold warriors such as General Curtis (“Bomb ’em back to the Stone Age”) LeMay sat around the president’s table and urged action.
The tape recordings of that fateful Saturday were released only a few years ago, and it’s chilling to hear virtually every one of the president’s men advise war. When they had gone around the cabinet table, it was time for the young president to announce his decision. There was a long silence.
“Let’s go to dinner,” said John F. Kennedy, thus saving the world from nuclear annihilation.
When the crisis was finally over, Nikita Khrushchev, who had survived the Russian Revolution, decades of Stalin, gulags, purges, World War II and the siege of Kiev, wrote a letter to the young president. Khrushchev signed it, “With Respect.”
Before Kennedy, the president was an old man who had led the greatest military invasion in history. He liberated the concentration camps, and warned us about a great military industrial complex.
“War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly,” Dwight D. Eisenhower said. “To seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.”
My parents told me about a president who could not walk, but led the nation out of a Great Depression and through a world war. This president was about to speak at a Democratic Convention, when he fell on his face and into a puddle of someone’s beer. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt rose to survey a troubled world, and inform the convention, and the nation, that they indeed had a “rendezvous with destiny.”
Ronald Reagan was the son of a small town alcoholic. He went to Chicago and somehow broadcast baseball games from a telegraph ticker. In Hollywood during the Great Depression, he “held [his] own with Errol Flynn and the Duke,” at least until his boyish charm faded, and he had to find another job. He became a union head, and when the winds changed again, he became a Republican. He learned to put rouge on his cheeks and make a good speech. But all the while, he had to work for bosses, and he had to work his way up. I didn’t vote for Reagan, but he had learned a few things by the time he met with Mikhail Gorbachev, because the two came to respect each other, and they made peace.
These presidents all were flawed. Roosevelt returned a ship full of Jewish refugees to Hitler. Eisenhower did little for civil rights. Reagan broke the unions and dismantled the social safety net built by Roosevelt. Kennedy was reckless, though I think he would not have pursued the Vietnam War.
But they all had jobs before they were president, and they tried to summon our better angels.
Some say that the new man can surround himself with great advisers, but Harry Truman said, “The buck stops here.”
As I write this at Spring St. and Sixth Ave., a small candlelit procession of Trump protesters are making their way beneath my window, en route to the nearby Trump Soho Hotel. Meanwhile, millions are mourning the passing of Fidel Castro.
“Fidel Castro is dead!” Trump tweeted. Then tweety bird pointedly trashed the aspirations of those millions, slamming Castro in a statement as a “brutal dictator.”
We had just recently been elevated in the eyes of the world for electing a man who, as a child, was chased through the streets of a Third World country, because of the color of his skin. Barack Obama hardly knew his father, yet rose to become a wise and honorable world leader.
They say that the new man doesn’t read his intelligence briefings. Surely, he will be tested by his peers, the other sensitive souls who sit atop mountains of skulls and deserts of bones. What will he say to Kim Jong-un in North Korea, Bashar al-Assad in Syria or Vladimir Putin in Russia? Will they accept his admiration and admit him to their club? Will he trade Estonia for a golf course concession?
In case of a problem, he could always defer to his vice president, Mike Pence, who does read, or his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, the great writer. Perhaps that renowned diplomat Rudolph Giuliani can be of assistance. Or that nice General Flynn. But what if they all disagree?
Ignorance is not strength, and perhaps this strongman is but a vacuum in a vortex of ambitious advisers, endless crises and daunting complexities. Perhaps we should sympathize with someone who sits alone in the wee small hours, tweeting his anguish from atop a leather-upholstered throne / toilet seat beside gold-plated faucets. A man who can only be the boss will now be a servant of fate.
Certainly, if there is still a prayer within us, we should pray for him.
We vote for a president who will inspire us, teach us, protect us and represent us, before the world, and in the eyes of our children.
So perhaps we should blame ourselves for creating a culture of bicoastal elites, who would forget the earth, forget the poor, the handicapped, people of color and the crapped-out rust bucket. We make idiotic art, violent, hateful films and obscene fortunes built upon the hot air of worthless speculation.
So why, we wonder, did they vote to bring our house down?
Pincus is an award-winning illustrator and fine artist. He lives in Soho.
