The children of Kennedy

By:JOHN VAN DOORN - North County Times | Saturday, November 22, 2003 10:01 PM PST ∞

Say good night, hope. Show's over. There's the exit, dreams. Be sure innocence goes with you. Get the lights. Eclipse the sun, please.

We have a lousy calendar box, the one for November 22, 1963, to answer for this litany.

We live now in a society filled with the bleached certainty of flawed leadership and stupid behavior; nobody anywhere near the top to believe in. Patriotism is defined as loving war, the flag leads to death in Baghdad.

The outlook was not always so bleak. There was a time, in the thousand days of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, that Americans, on the whole, were filled by that President with the great good glow of what might be. Not all Americans, to be sure ---- haters are always among us ---- but most.

Those Americans could walk for blocks on crowded city sidewalks and not once trip over a cynic. Jade was a jewel, not an attitude. Very few people in those days thought in the foolish confines of "positive" and "negative" because there was no negative, no down, no gray, no lost.

There was up. There was innocence, belief. Americans did not revile, or fear, their government in Washington. They revered it. They couldn't wait to hear the next development, the next idea, the next dream, the next vision, the next joke. Just to catch a glimpse of the President or Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy could set you up for a month.

On half the desks in the land, in offices and homes, were stacks of governmental papers that Americans welcomed, and pored over. They were application forms. How do I sign up? Telephone calls to Washington hummed like a happy symphony, an exultation of larks. Everybody wanted to go to help out. They had heard the call and were convinced that if they could just get to the Capital now, that instant, they could make something happen.

The call, of course, was the clarion come-hither of Camelot, which sang out: Do something for the nation. Don't lay back and wait for the handouts: "Ask not..." the President had intoned on Inauguration Day, and everybody heard, got choked up, tried to recognize the aimlessness of the lives they were leading and answer the call.

Kennedy was a shining President/King with a Mrs. President/Queen, all beauty and soaring intellect and self-deprecating humor, telling us what a fine country we had, and what our duties were, how we were responsible for keeping it at the top of the heap.

Americans took it in and were inspired. They applied for every government job they could think of. They took their families and went to Washington be part of it, close up. Anything. Peace Corps? What is that? I'll take it, they said, and went all over the world, at Kennedy's behest, as hard-working, buoyant representatives of their nation. Dig us a trench, build us a school, give us some medicine. God bless wherever you come from.

You find yourself a 65- or 75-year-old today, somebody with spark and wisdom and fire barely concealed, someone who is gentle and generous and wrinkled, and scratch him. Or her. Underneath whatever they have become are old Peace Corps people. They worked anywhere in the world they were needed, small-time ambassadors, big-time hearts. The children of Kennedy, "do-gooders" before the meaning of the expression got scrambled.

He and she now go to the reunions, because the Peace Corps was the seminal moment of their lives. First principles at last. They speak the language of everywhere ---- one old friend still rattles on in Swahili; in fact, he could not forget the best duty his soul ever knew, and he went back to Africa to live. He is there this day.

There were hundreds of other jobs that they all wanted and signed up for, too. Thousands, probably. Anything that had the mark of service on it.

What they all added up to, what the Kennedy presidency was, was joy. It was the spirit that Americans of the time remember. All things worthy, all things do-able. Laughing all the way. Giving shape to public life that was quite glorious. That's how it was, that's how it felt.

This remarkable vision of life was brought to an end 40 years ago in Dallas ---- with shots from a mistake of a man out of a mundane building ---- when the President was killed.

Our center had not held, and we were not young anymore. Dark curtains fell, and so many Americans have not been able to raise them since, and they squint to see the sunlight.

John Van Doorn, a North County Times editor, has been a writer and editor for over 50 years. He worked in New York and overseas for 40 of those years.