Freedom Day: America at 241
The black and white footage flickers intermittently, grainy with age, occasionally shifting out of focus. Large auditorium doors swing open as a tall, man in a sober dark suit strides in. He carries himself with easy grace, left hand in a trouser pocket, his right clutching some rolled up papers. His full, handsome features radiate youthful confidence accentuated by a plentiful shock of hair, sparkling eyes brimming with fierce intelligence and just the hint of boyish mischievousness. He flashes a wide, toothy grin that the world will soon get used to.
This is President John F. Kennedy, giving the first ever live televised press conference on January 25th, 1961. As he fields questions from the press corps assembled in the State Department’s amphitheatre-like briefing room, his voice with its Boston accent and measured cadences, projects confidence, wit and easy charm. The answers he gives are generally considered, forthright, credibly belying the fact that he was (and is still) the youngest elected president (at aged 42) and had squeaked through the recent election by the slimmest of margins (117.000 votes out of 69 million cast).
Over the next one thousand days JFK will grow into the role of president and mature into a commander in chief under whose leadership the world will avoid nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. He will navigate the dangerous waters of Cold War politics, avoiding military conflict over the Communist-encircled powder keg of besieged Berlin and from near-calamitous confrontations produce the atomic bomb test-ban treaty. He will challenge scientific America to send astronauts to the moon, confront the simmering racial divide, promulgating the Civil Rights Act, and come tantalizingly close to pulling the US out of Vietnam as he saw sending more troops as embroiling his country in a quagmire.
Like many grandchildren of immigrants in nations all over the world, I was brought up with a special reverence for America. The country was not to be taken for granted -- it was not like all the others.
As a child, I devoured history books presidential biographies where the arc of Oval Office lives was presented as a lesson in character as much as ambition, punctuated by bits of useful wisdom. All were flawed, but taken together the presidential pantheon formed a kind of reassuring firmament over the American story.
Ever since European explorers blundered their way to the New World, the lands and people that form that country have seemed unique, as if there's something in the ground that makes those who walk on it truly American. The myth, reinforced by countless books, films and television shows have indoctrinated much of the world with the conceit that this country uniquely fosters certain admirable aspirational values and character traits within its borders.
On what has come to be known as Independence Day, the Founding Fathers, who presumably had those selfsame American values and character, rebelled against Great Britain, cutting the "political bands which have connected them to one another," as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.
The war for independence is aptly called the Revolutionary War, but it was revolutionary only in the sense that Americans fought against the "establishment of tyranny." It was not a revolution of rapidly changing ideals in, as other revolutions have been.
In contrast to other revolts like that of France, which resulted in the tumultuous horrors of the Directorate and the Terror, both American independence and the uprising that put it in place were necessary not because the revolutionaries and their leaders wanted everything to change. The revolution was about upholding timeless ideals. America itself was a new idea, but the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are those with which humans have been endowed by our Creator since the dawn of time.
This centennial birth year of JFK is also the first Fourth of July under President Donald Trump, and the patriotic jingoism feels a bit forced this year. In less than six months, the global community has been compelled to confront the reality of a president uniquely uninterested in uniting the nation, a reflexive divider who is quick to attack critics while making nice with strongmen worldwide. He is a master of bluster and in-your-face marketing but you can’t graft heroism or character on his life story as easily as Kennedy’s. Normally, the Oval Office ennobles the occupant (albeit, for however briefly), but Trump is governing just the way he campaigned: as a celebrity quasi-demagogue whose disregard for facts or conventional decency is compounded by his ignorance (or is it disdain) of policy and American history.
One need only compare JFK’s news conferences with Trump’s. Kennedy grew more confident with each performance, his wit and candour progressively winning over a wary press. Trump, in contrast, has presided over a deterioration of relations with the media, retreating to the relative safety of pro-administration networks and outlets. In him the US has a president who eschews press conferences, rails at “fake news,” and sprinkles Twitter with childish rants, insults, and memes of him beating up CNN.
The differences run deeper. Kennedy was an intellectual rationalist who saw the world as it was in all its contradictions. He made pragmatic decisions, often under great pressure, based on hard fact, cold calculus, and dispassionate data. His familial tradition of competitive ruthlessness buttressed by chronic ill health and life and death decisions made during wartime experience had schooled him with a tough resiliency that made politics look tame in comparison.
Trump occupies a very different space. At times, he has evidenced a tendency to prefer a parallel universe that he retreats to whenever he can, one of achievements, applause and adoration, a mental safe room where he is master of all he surveys and his punchlines land. In his version of Washington, he is the Henry V-style man of action to predecessor Barack Obama’s indecisive, cripplingly intellectual Hamlet.
Trump’s self-belief appears to get a shot in the arm from every victory, real or imagined. This may go some way to explaining why, even as his approval ratings fall off a cliff and some call for his impeachment, he sees no reason to alter course, as he and a sycophantic court around him seem to become ever more self-righteous.
‘I’m president, they’re not’: Donald Trump at rally in Washington.
There are Trump supporters who glean parallels with the much-revered JFK: Kennedy’s first year was a disaster, as he himself acknowledged. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Communist Cuba was only the first in a series of failed efforts to undo Fidel Castro’s regime. His 1961 summit meeting in Vienna with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was a personal and national humiliating experience. Most of his early legislative proposals died on Capitol Hill. Yet JFK eventually stabilized his administration and clawed his way back.
Likewise, the past few weeks illustrate how, when just about written off for the umpteenth time, Trump can still pull off the art of the comeback. And Trump being Trump, he makes sure his 33 million Twitter followers know about it. When Republican Congresswoman Karen Handel beat Democrat Jon Ossoff in a Georgia race much-hyped as a referendum on his presidency, Trump tweeted: “Thank you @FoxNews ‘Huge win for President Trump and GOP in Georgia Congressional Special Election.’”
Then the president jetted off to Iowa to bask in the adulation of his supporters in the forum he likes best, a campaign-style rally in which he was free to rant about “dishonest media” and floated the idea of solar panels on his border wall. Then came the veterans event at the White House where, under the gaze of portraits of George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, Trump projected himself as a man who Gets Things Done. Meanwhile, Trump finally caught a break on the worst crisis facing his presidency, the multiple investigations into his election campaign’s links to Russia. First, David Brooks, a Trump critic and New York Times columnist, suggested that the scandal may be overblown. Then, the Washington Post published a major investigation that raised questions over whether Obama could have done more to stop Moscow’s interference in last year’s poll. Trump was handed another gift when CNN was forced to retract a report, citing a single anonymous source, that Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials”. It changed nothing about the Russia-related cloud over Trump but it did feed into his ongoing narrative that untrustworthy media organisations are conspiring to bring him down.
Many White House staffers were undoubtedly cheered by the CNN blunder, reckoning it will prove to skeptical voters that the mainstream media has a “vendetta” against the administration. The president’s supporters seized on the incident to plant seeds of confusion and questionable equivalency: if that Russia story was wrong, perhaps all of them are wrong?
Yet another lifeline was thrown to Trump from a not entirely unexpected quarter. The Republican controlled supreme court partially restored his executive order imposing a travel ban on six Muslim-majority countries and said it would hear arguments in the fall. After several setbacks in lower courts, the president was quick to trumpet nothing less than a “clear victory”.
Trump’s parallel universe also consists of speeches, bill signings, Oval Office photo ops and meetings with foreign leaders with whom he has, essentially stopped taking questions from the media, preferring to be lavished with praise that often jars with reality. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, for example, thanked Trump for “having spent so much time with me, for having spoken such kind words about me and my country … In this journey of India-America relations, I think I would like to thank you for providing great leadership.” Trump detected no irony whatsoever in that statement.
None of these examples comes without caveats. Handel’s victory in Georgia was in a seat that Republicans have held since 1979; Democrats say Trump’s proposed budget will make it harder for veterans to receive health care; the Russian investigations are likely to slog on for years and could still find that Trump obstructed justice when he fired FBI director James Comey; the Supreme cCurt did not fully reinstate his travel ban, granting exemption to people with a “bona fide relationship” with someone in the US. And his campaign promise to repeal and replace Obamacare remains in perilous limbo on Capitol Hill, while the president has been condemned by both parties for a crude Twitter (what else?) attack on TV host Mika Brzezinski.
But, as British Prime Minister Theresa May discovered, politics is often a battle of perceptions. One of the things the American progressive elites don’t want to seriously consider is the distinct possibility that despite his obvious challenges, Trump might actually be seen as successful.
That’s because in this era of short news cycles and shorter attention spans it doesn’t take a lot for a president to start looking good. If the expectations for Trump are really low, as they are, it may just take one ‘success in spite of himself’ scenario to completely change the equation. A string of these “victories”, judiciously timed, would then virtually guarantee that a left-of- Hillary Clinton Democrat in 2020 would be defeated. In fact, recent polls show Senator Elizabeth Warren losing by solid margins to Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up. The important consideration (and the fun) about history is that predicting an election so many days off is a fool’s errand. On one hand his administration could unfold as Richard Nixon’s and Jimmy Carter’s did and Trump could be relegated to lame duck status making way for Mike Pence’s nomination. Conversely, he could pull off a Ronald Reagan, even a Barack Obama, and come from behind to win a second term. It should be remembered that JFK recovered from his first year to the point where re-election in 1964 was almost preordained.
And so, as America and the world moves past this particular Fourth of July, the challenge is to widen the scope of US patriotism beyond the president. We are living through an actual stress test being applied to the American system and we can’t afford to simply tune out or bask in the cynicism of moral relativism. Liberal democracy is not a guarantee and the alternatives have proven themselves worse in every way for believers of individual liberty.
In the Trump era, it’s ironic that progressives are beholding the wisdom of federalism while civil libertarians are more broadly appreciated as defending core values. These are civic evolutionary steps Americans should not forget when the next president takes office.
The broader patchwork of checks and balances is also why this president’s obsessive attacks on the credibility of journalism should be debated by every citizen. It’s worth remembering that the Constitution makes no mention of political parties, but it does a free press. That’s because the Founders recognized that journalism is an essential guarantor of liberty.
Whether one is a supporter of Trump's or not, In the coming years, Americans (and the global audience) are going to rely on a truly free press despite the attempts of the administration to distract, divide and browbeat any opposition into silence. A vibrant independent judiciary should restrain executive overreach. And principled members of Congress will need to assert their independence rather than acting as partisan apologists while abandoning their constitutional responsibility.
Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States, is a loquacious man (that much everyone can agree on), and counts JFK among his heroes. In his 2012 Democratic Convention speech he touched on certain truths that best sum up the resiliency of both the American system and its people in tones redolent of his predecessor:
"Look, I love our country so much. And I know we're coming back. For more than 200 years, through every crisis, we've always come back. People have predicted our demise ever since George Washington was criticized for being a mediocre surveyor with a bad set of wooden false teeth. And so far, every single person that's bet against America has lost money because we always come back. We come through every fire a little stronger and a little better.
And we do it because in the end we decide to champion the cause for which our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor — the cause of forming a more perfect union."
The American system appears strained but is still strong. Their greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, was wedged by two of their worst, James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. They will get through this by remembering that their democracy is a common responsibility, not something to be delegated to divisive factions or an overbearing president.
That’s the way to truly make America great again.
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