One Small Kind Word for JFK
By Charles Wellborn
[Dr. Charles Wellborn is Professor of Religion Emeritus, Florida State University, Tallahassee and for 20 years was Dean of the FSU Overseas Campus in London.]
In the past few months America–and the world–have been deluged with articles, books, and television documentaries revealing the alleged sordid details of the private, and especially, sexual life of former president John F. Kennedy. Indulging in its currently most popular blood-sport, the media has pulled no punches in its pursuit of scandal–some of it, quite possibly, true but some of it undoubtedly based on malicious hearsay and self-serving assumption.
I have read and watched this material with mixed emotions. I have no defense to offer for Kennedy`s moral failures, but I must admit to being depressed by the whole sorry spectacle. I find it sad to watch the image of a former American hero being gleefully destroyed. After his tragic assassination in Dallas, Kennedy was elevated by the American public–and by the world at large–almost to the position of a martyred saint. It was perhaps inevitable that his feet of clay should be painfully laid bare.
As a perhaps irrelevant interjection here, I would predict that much the same fate awaits someone like Princess Diana, whose unexpected death so recently produced quite unnatural paroxysms of grief in Britain and indeed almost everywhere. Once the sensation-seeking journalists and revisionist historians do their work, the Princess will not fare well. She too had feet of clay.
In this connection several observers of the modern scene have pointed out the disturbing fact that today we have few, if any, heroes. I am convinced that all of us, young and old, need heroes–role-models, objects of genuine veneration and admiration. I confess that once John Kennedy was one of my heroes, based on what I understood of his political stances and compassion for the little man. I have now lost my hero and find that substantially more painful than losing something like a mere appendix. The world is a bleaker place without heroes.
As I write here in England, a continuing television series called "Heroes" is in progress on the BBC. A distinguished journalist, writer, and former Member of Parliament, Brian Walden, is, each week, giving a thirty-minute lecture on heroic figures of the past. Thus far, he has dealt with Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. His intention is, he says, to consider such figures in total, "warts and all." Unfortunately, he spends almost all of his time dealing with the "warts." Neither Churchill nor Lincoln emerges from his scathing scrutiny with much honor. I find his muckraking a thoroughly depressing spectacle.
As a Christian, I have been constrained by all of this to go back to my New Testament and to the teachings of my Master. Years ago a dear friend of mine, now dead, took up his first pastorate in a Baptist church in an East Texas town. As he began his sermon on his first Sunday morning he placed a rough piece of rock on the front of the pulpit, reminding his congregation of the words of Jesus as he knelt beside the prostrate form of a wretched woman taken in adultery. "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." I list that statement among a number of the teachings of Jesus that most of us find difficult and do exegetical cartwheels trying to explain away.
Perhaps my friend`s gesture is a bit too dramatic for many of us, but there is hard truth behind the gesture. Jesus certainly condemned moral sin wherever he found it, but he never rejoiced in it. In the Kennedy affair I have been repelled by the eager interest of much of the public in every prurient detail of the story and, especially, by the unholy joy of some, openly exulting in the downfall of an American idol. The moral weakness and sexual turpitude of another human being, however exalted his position, is not a valid source of amusement or delight.
Every moral condemnation that issued from the lips of Jesus was interlaced with profound compassion. He knew and taught that all people are sinners, each in his/her own way. No one human being`s transgressions and weaknesses are carbon copies of someone else`s moral failings. We each sin in our own way, and all sins are abhorrent in the sight of God. Few, if any, of us would relish the prospect of the public revelation of every detail of our private lives, especially those incidents and episodes we have diligently sought to forget. It ill behooves us to gloat over the public moral nudity of someone else.
Just as important, I think, is that we remember that no human being is totally bad. We are all intricate mixtures of faith and doubt, selfishness and altruism, love and lust. Which is precisely why all of us–the John Kennedys and the John Does–must finally rely on the immeasurable grace of a loving God.
All of this reflection has led me to remember one small incident in my personal life, an incident which involved President Kennedy. Totally unimportant in the larger scheme of things, it is for me, nevertheless, a poignant memory.
The 1960 presidential campaign between Kennedy and Richard Nixon was bitterly fought, nowhere more so than in Texas, where I was a pastor at the time. In our area the campaign steadily degenerated in tone and spirit. Ignoring the many real and important differences of policy and qualification between the two candidates, the major debate came to center on whether Kennedy, by upbringing and practice a Roman Catholic Christian, should be elected president. Platforms and pulpits reverberated to the claims of the prophets of doom. A dread picture was painted: if Kennedy were elected, the White House would be the servant of the papacy and national policy would be directed from some secret room in the Roman Vatican.
Political feeling was intense in the city where I served as a pastor. I did not believe then, and do not believe now, that it is part of the job of a minister to tell his congregation how to vote in a partisan political contest. And as a practical matter, when I stepped into my pulpit on Sunday morning I faced in the pews one faithful deacon who was chairman of the county Democratic organization and another equally faithful deacon who was chairman of the county Republican party. I certainly had no desire to be involved in any sort of political controversy.
Then something significant happened. The pastor of the most influential Baptist church in the city decided to use his pulpit on a Sunday morning in early October to mount an openly partisan attack on Senator Kennedy. His tirade was based entirely on the fact that Kennedy was a Roman Catholic, and he used as his primary piece of evidence the so-called "Knights of Columbus Oath," which supposedly bound the members of that Catholic men`s organization to a bloody persecution of all Protestants.
I knew–and I could not believe that my seminary-educated colleague did not know–that the "Oath," over and over again, had been discredited and proved fraudulent by reputable scholars of all faiths and none. I also knew that there was no evidence whatever to show that Kennedy subscribed to any of the beliefs set forth in that forgery. I was appalled and dismayed. There seemed to me no ethical or Christian justification for my fellow pastor`s action.
The attack on Kennedy was picked up by the local press and then by statewide and national newspapers. It received headline attention. Though I felt strongly about the whole matter, my response as a careful man (which I believed myself to be) was strictly limited. I regularly wrote a column called "From the Pastor`s Study" for our church newspaper, distributed only to the members of our congregation. I used that column the following week to set out what I entitled "A Call for Fair Play." I detailed the indisputable evidence for the fraudulent nature of the so-called "Oath," and I urged my people to make their own decisions as to how to vote, based on the important and certainly debatable genuine political issues.
I did not foresee the results. In the same way that the press had seized upon the original attack, they now exploited my strictly church-related remarks. Headlines appeared in the local paper, and national press organizations gave the story wide coverage.
It was, as I remember, a Tuesday afternoon in late October of that year. I was beavering away in the church office when my secretary burst in, obviously in a state of high excitement. "Pastor," she almost shouted, "Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, is on the telephone. Senator Kennedy wants to speak to you."
I thought my usually clam and efficient secretary had suddenly had an attack of unexplained intellectual vertigo. But I must admit that I, too, was excited. It is not every day that a minor Baptist preacher gets a telephone call from a man who might well become President of the United States. When I picked up the phone, an anonymous voice insured that I was the proper person to take the call. And then there came the unmistakable clipped, New England accent of John Kennedy.
"Mr. Wellborn," he said, "Forgive me for interrupting your busy schedule." (My busy schedule!) "I wondered if I could take a moment of your time ("Yes, Senator, I think I could spare a moment!") "I want to tell you that we have gotten the press releases on your recent statement calling for fair play in the campaign. After what we`ve been getting recently in Texas, your remarks were like an oasis in the desert. Let me assure you that we will make no use of your statement in our campaign. I have just called to express in all sincerity my respect and gratitude."
That was it–two minutes at the most. He did not ask me for any further statement or action. He did not even ask me to vote for him. He simply said, in a gracious and, it seemed to me, sincere way, "Thank you."
So what, you well might say. It was an insignificant incident. And you are probably right, but forgive me if I wonder just a bit. I do not claim in any way to understand John F. Kennedy, but when I view all the dark and sordid stories about him, I feel compelled to mix in one little moment almost forty years ago–one simple, undemanding, "Thank you."
No one of us understands completely the totality of another human being, even those we love most or who love us. There is something unfathomable to human intelligence about the human soul. Every little human entity is one of the enigmas of the universe, which is one reason why the scientists will never completely analyze us under the microscope or in the laboratory. And that is why one of the "blessed assurances" of the Christian is the faith that the God who stands both behind and in the universe and who called us each one into being does know and understand.
The New Testament tells the story of Zaccheus, a miserable little man who one day climbed a sycamore tree in his curiosity to catch a glimpse of Jesus. Beneath the tree Jesus stopped, looked up at that nondescript human specimen, and called him by name. And not only did he name him, but he insisted that he must go home with him. Jesus knew Zaccheus and understood him in all his misery and littleness, just as God knows us all.
I remember one brief moment when John Kennedy and I made personal contact, but I share more than that moment with him. We share our human-ness. My path has been different from his and my weaknesses are peculiar to me, but we have both, I am certain, walked through the same valleys of moral ambiguity and ethical weakness. We professional ethicists, among whom I list myself, work diligently to set our standards, rules, regulations, and guidelines for individual and social behavior. But, in the final analysis, we are all human, and we fight a common battle.
That, I suppose, is why I feel constrained by my Christian conscience to say this one small kind word for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
