R. Bruce Anderson
Summer arrived suddenly within a couple of days of returning from Germany and before I knew it, I was back in the swing of things. When I get home, I look forward to even a short break to reflect on the year, relax on my back deck, and catch up on all the books I didn’t have time to read during the semester.
I was delighted to learn that Doris Kearns Goodwin had a new book out just as I was working on the reading list for my fall freshman course on the American presidency. Goodwin, the historian whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book LBJ and the American Dream was (and remains) central to the story of the modern presidency, had just published Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.
“Unfinished Business” is both an autobiography and a biography of the Goodwins. Dick was a speechwriter for both Kennedy and Johnson, and she was a presidential fellow in the Johnson administration. It’s a commentary on the presidency at a critical time in an election year, and it raises some important points at a time when most Americans, especially younger voters, feel disengaged, exhausted and jaded.
The period from 1960 to 1988 seems to me like a watershed moment for the highest office. We had the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Reagan. People on both sides rose and fell in dramatic ways. There were deep tragedies, great comedies and astonishing advances — but in each case, inspirational ones.
Today, Carter’s harrowing word “malaise” comes to mind.
That is why there is no such thing as a “youth vote.” The next generation is apathetic to politics and bitter about what politics and policies can achieve. They have never seen it happen.
In sensitive prose, Kearns recounts the idea for the Peace Corps and the speech JFK gave to University of Michigan students in Ann Arbor. It was not planned; Kennedy “deviantly deviated from his usual speeches,” Kearns writes.
“How many of you are willing to spend your days in Ghana?” Kennedy asked the crowd. “How many of you are willing to serve as diplomats and spend your life traveling all over the world? Whether you are willing to devote a part of your life to this country, not just to serve a year or two, I believe will answer the question of whether a free society can compete.”
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In the days that followed, first in Michigan and then across the nation, student petitions exploded calling for Kennedy’s off-the-cuff remarks to become reality, and the Peace Corps was born.
Imagine being a kid growing up in a Democratic home, experiencing the last gasps of the Eisenhower Administration when JFK called on his kids to join him on the “New Frontier.” Imagine being a kid growing up in a conservative home, enduring Jimmy Carter’s “malaise.” Imagine being a kid when Ronald Reagan came on the scene with a lucid plea for a major overhaul of the role of government and, four years later, asked us to envision “Morning in America.”
Johnson’s Civil Rights Bill. Nixon’s opening up of China and easing of tensions with the Soviet Union. Has the new century seen the loss of political imagination?
We need to rediscover America. We can’t just “build it back better” or “make America great again.” Where is the vision? Where is the passion? Where is the hope for the future? Where is the patriotism to build a better world?
The people I teach, learn and inspire on my field trips are the people of the future. It is clear to me that with the right motivation, their passion, their interest and their genuine patriotism, they can ignite like a firehose. For them, ideology and political party are not as important as vision.
Once this horrific election is over, we must find a way to move away from the punitive, negative charlatanism that pervades American politics at all levels.
R. Bruce Anderson is the Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. Endowed Professor of American History, Government and Civics and the Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and a political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF radio in Lakeland.
