To celebrate Presidents Day I selected several old Reader’s Digests to browse for articles on Presidents. With President Obama just completing his first year as Commander in Chief I found an article I thought appropriate. The following is not the complete article.
Reader’s Digest, 1962. pp 53-54
Condensed from Time (January 5, ’62)
The Testing of a President
Fourteen tough months in office have proved a sobering and maturing experience for the youngest elected chief executive in America’s history
The taste of victory was fresh and sweet to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He sat in the drawing room of his Georgetown home and spoke breezily about the office he would assume. “Sure, it’s a big job,” he said. “But, I don’t know anybody who can do it any better than I can. It isn’t going to be so bad. You’ve got time to think – and besides, the pay is pretty good.”
One year later, on a cool, gray day, the 35th President of the United States sat at his desk in the oval office of the White House and discussed the same subject. “This job is interesting,” he said in the combination of Irish slur and broad Bostonese that has become immediately identifiable on all the world’s radios, “but the possibilities for trouble are unlimited. It takes a lot of thought and effort. It’s been a tough first year, but then they’re all going to be tough.”
Kennedy has come to realize that national and international issues look much different from the President’s chair than from a candidate’s rostrum. There are fewer certainties, and far more complexities. “We must face problems which do not lend themselves to easy, quick or permanent solutions,” he said recently. “And we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent not omniscient, and that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution for every world problem.”
That sober view of the limitations of power and authority is far removed from Kennedy’s campaign oratory. He promised a “New Frontier” to “get America moving again.” He soon found that it was tough enough just to keep the old problems from getting out of hand.
In the 1960 campaign he effectively used the charge that U.S. prestige had plummeted during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. In fact, the United States had under Ike, and retains under Kennedy, a high reservoir of good will in the free world – as Kennedy saw for himself in his triumphal trips to London, Paris and, more recently, Latin America.
When Kennedy first came to the White House, he resented his inheritance, constantly referred to problems “not of his own making.” But now those old problems tend to become “our problems” and the fact that the world is in trouble seems to Kennedy less Dwight Eisenhower’s fault than he once suspected.
Behind such changes of attitude lies the central story of a U.S. President’s coming of age. Personality is a key to the use of Presidential power, and John Kennedy in 1961 passed through three distinct phases of Presidential personality. First there was the cocksure new man in office. Then, after the disastrous, U.S. invasion of Cuba, which might have ruined some Presidents, came disillusionment. Finally, in the year’s last months, came a return of confidence, but of a wiser, more mature kind that had been tempered by the bitter lessons of experience.
