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"The link between the American scholar and American politician" lasted over a century. In the 1856 campaign, Republicans had "three brilliant orators - William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Those were the carefree days when the eggheads were all Republicans." One of their own became president on March 4, 1861, denied a second term by his April 1865 assassination, challenging the establishment and existing order also his undoing.
Kennedy quoted John Milton, Bismark, Goethe and others, his erudition on display for those attending, a man with an intellect who used it. He reminded the audience that politicians and intellectuals "operate within a common framework - a framework we call liberty. The lock on the door of the legislature, the Parliament, or the assembly hall - by order of the King, the Commissar, or the Fuehrer - has historically been followed or preceded by a lock on the door of the university, the library, or the print shop."
Where freedom is endangered, he said, politicians and intellectuals "should be natural allies, working more closely together for the common cause against the common enemy." They both must decide whether to be "an anvil or a hammer....whether (they are) to give to the world in which (they were) reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of (their) learning" for society's benefit, or do it solely for their own. "As one who is familiar with the political world, I can testify" to the challenge we face.
He opted against handing over political and public life to experts "who ignore public opinion. Nor would I adopt from the Belgian constitution of 1893 the provision giving 3 votes instead of 1 to college graduates; or give Harvard a seat in the Congress as William and Mary was once represented in the Virginia House of Burgesses."
But he urged politicians and intellectuals to work together, warning that we don't "need scholars or politicians like Lord John Russell, of whom Queen Victoria remarked, he would be a better man if he knew a third subject - but he was interested in nothing but the constitution of 1688 and himself. What we need are men who can ride easily over broad fields of knowledge and recognize the mutual dependence of our two worlds."
He ended quoting what an English mother once wrote the Provost of Harrow, saying "Don't teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament."
"Well, perhaps she was right - but if more politicians knew poetry and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live on this commencement day of 1956."
Aged 39, he scarcely had more than seven years left before America's dark forces killed him, a lesson his successors never forgot. Neither should we knowing the rogues that followed and their agendas, worst of all post-9/11, putting the nation on a fast track toward despotism unless cooler heads can stop them.
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