JFK’s Words Seem to Mock our Contemporary Political Climate

President John F. Kennedy (left) is shown here with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1961. (Walter Kelleher/NY Daily News via Getty Images)

Sixty years ago this week, in an inaugural address that electrified a generation, John F. Kennedy declared, “We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom.”

As president of the United States, those were the first words out of his mouth. But as we approach this week’s inauguration of Joe Biden, the lofty sentiment seems a mockery of our current time.

This seems like no celebration of freedom.

In Washington, D.C., there are 25,000 troops patrolling the ghostly streets. In 50 state capitals, they’re braced for armed attacks. We’re living in the shadow of monstrous rioting at our U.S. Capitol that might have taken the lives of political leaders instead of merely – “merely” is said ironically – five people and the pummeling of courageous but desperately overmatched police.

And we have a disgraced Donald Trump, still denying he lost the 2020 presidential election even though basic arithmetic computable by any grade school child should inform him otherwise.

He lost, but he won’t admit it.

What’s worse is the sheer cowardice of those Republicans on Capitol Hill who know better but won’t step forward and say, in simple words, “There was no rigging of the election. Joe Biden won fair and square. Donald Trump has not been telling you the truth. No one is stealing America from you.”

It’s not only the honest thing to say, maybe it’s a first step toward a national healing.

Those words need to be said forcefully and in public, in front of television cameras –because the message hasn’t sunk in for millions of Americans who don’t seem to believe roughly 50 judges around the country, many of them Republicans, many of them Trump appointees, who have already declared Trump’s declarations utterly delusional and self-serving.

Some of us still remember a case like this around here.

Remember Ellen Sauerbrey?

In 1994, she came from out of nowhere to defeat former Rep. Helen Delich Bentley in the Republican primary election for governor of Maryland. Then, in her campaign against Gov. Parris Glendening, Sauerbrey surprised everyone by finishing within 6,000 votes of victory.

She could have been a hero to everyone, a symbol to underdogs everywhere of personal strength and the power of ideas that had found their moment.

But she couldn’t accept defeat.

In retrospect, she seems almost a role model for Trump. He cries “rigged.” She cried “fraud.”

She said 50,000 illegal votes had been cast against her. Then, as the weeks dragged toward her court date, she said maybe it wasn’t 50,000, maybe it was only 14,000, including prison inmates and hundreds of dead people. Then, she amended the “hundreds” to “a handful.” 

She contended that some people were “double voters” — until the names of those alleged “double voters” were dug up, and they included Stephen H. Sachs, the former attorney general and candidate for governor of Maryland, and Robert C. Murphy, the chief judge of Maryland’s highest court, and Richard D. Bennett, who ran for attorney general — as a Republican.

When those names were revealed in court one morning in January of 1995, weeks after the election, general ridicule occurred. Sauerbrey had nothing left of her case.

Asked for raw numbers, she had no claim of fraud at all.

The case was an embarrassment to everyone, but it was part of a tone in this country, which has only worsened in the willfully divisive years of Donald Trump. We’ve been encouraged to suspect each other, and to demonize those who don’t share our views.

When Al Gore lost his presidential bid in 2000, he had a great election fraud case to make but chose not to, for the good of the country.

When Richard Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960, he might have challenged the votes of the dearly departed in Cook County, Ill., but instead bowed out gracefully.

Imagine the irony. The mood of the country’s gotten so coarse, and so politically distrustful, that we now reach for the disgraced Nixon as an example of diplomacy and good will.

That’s how far America has fallen.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

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