When President-elect John F. Kennedy was inaugurated in January 1961, he requested American poet Robert Frost read one of his poems at the ceremony.Frost was so touched by the personal invitation that he composed a new forty-two-line preface to the one that Kennedy wanted him to recite. With the bright sun glaring off the snow and the wind mussing his papers on the podium, Frost had only been able to read the first three lines: “Summoning artists to participate / In the august occasions of the state / Seems something for us all to celebrate,” before he had to stop.He set the pages aside and recited his poem “The Gift Outright” from memory.
After the inauguration, the Poet and the President were connected in the public mind.Over the course of the next two years, the more Kennedy worked to support the National Cultural Center project the more his connection grew with the art world in general.
Shortly after that “American Pageant for the Arts” gala designed to raise money for the Cultural Center that we talked about last week, Kennedy and his speechwriter, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., penned a piece for Look magazine that was published under the President’s name.It touched on the role of the arts in a free society and Kennedy pushed back against the notion apparently popular with some that American artists had to follow some official government line.Art “means more than the resuscitation of the past,” he said.It “means the free and unconfined search for new ways of expressing the experience of the present and the vision of the future.”Unlike totalitarian governments, the United States had—or at least it ought to have—a unique relationship with the arts.A democratic society has a special responsibility to the arts, he explained “for art is the great democrat calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color.”
Efforts like this, words like these, associations with people like Leonard Bernstein and Pablo Casals from that gala are what contributed to Kennedy being thought of a friend to the arts.
In October 1963, President John F. Kennedy travelled to Amherst College in Massachusetts and spoke at the groundbreaking of the school’s new Robert Frost Library.The arts were on his mind that day as well, particularly how the country at large had been treating many its artists over the previous decade.“If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society,” he said,” it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential.”
Just a few weeks later, Kennedy was dead, killed by an assassin in Dallas.
