“Not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom…”

This morning in my bookshop, when I picked up a softcover copy of The First 100 Days of the Kennedy Administration, for some reason I opened the back cover first and found printed there the entire inaugural address. John Kennedy was not a man without flaws, and his administration was not perfect, either, but it does seem that we were then a country of ideals and that we could recognize ideals in one another, even across our differences. 

I was in eighth grade in 1961, a high school sophomore two years later, and it would be a while before my political consciousness was fully raised and engaged. All I would have recognized immediately from John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s inaugural address was the oft-quoted line near the end: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” The line I used for today’s heading is not one I would have remembered at all. And, back near the end of the speech again, does anyone ever quote the imperatives that followed the first “Ask not”? 

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.  

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.

Ponder that last one for a moment.

My parents had not voted for Kennedy, but we wept as a family when he was assassinated and watched the funeral together on television. And now as I read his inaugural address, I keep thinking how different our country is today. When JFK addressed “those nations who would make themselves our adversary,” he ws still, also, speaking to Americans, asking that all of us —

…begin anew—remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate. 

He recognized the “common enemies of man” as “tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.” 

You can read Kennedy’s entire inaugural address here. It’s worth reading, either for the first time or as a reminder of where we've been.