EDITOR’S NOTE: Analysis by Leah M. Wright, a NCS political historian and an affiliate professor of historical past on the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. “American Prince: JFK Jr.” is airing now on NCS.
It’s been 65 years since John F. Kennedy first spoke of America’s “New Frontier.” This was his rallying cry for the nation, urging residents to be daring and brave of their imaginative and prescient for options for not simply the US but additionally the world’s most urgent issues. “It would be easier to shrink from that New Frontier, to look to the safe mediocrity of the past, to be lulled by good intentions and high rhetoric,” Kennedy declared in July of 1960.
The New Frontier, what would develop into the centerpiece of John F. Kennedy’s all-too-brief presidential administration, was a name to the next function: an idealistic demand that the nation and its residents use their creativity, braveness and creativeness to foster widespread home and world progress and uplift. Kennedy’s administrative imaginative and prescient promised a authorities that may aggressively work to handle financial inequality, develop alternative, discover new questions of “science and space,” provide peace whereas stopping conflict and deal with “unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice.”
Though Kennedy’s lofty agenda imagined America on the world forefront of progress within the Nineteen Sixties, these concepts so modified the nationwide panorama and creativeness that in addition they continued to form American social and political attitudes for generations. In December 1963, when an inconsolable Jackie Kennedy Onassis described her late husband’s presidential period as an “American Camelot,” she succinctly characterised a temper and a mythos that may come to outline John F. Kennedy’s legacy.
Here’s what’s been achieved since JFK’s ‘moonshot’ speech
Kennedy’s imaginative and prescient and agenda weren’t with out flaws. The period was removed from the utopian Camelot urged by uncritical romanticized mythology. But that mythology has each resonated and persevered for thus lengthy as a result of of the precise enduring accomplishments of President Kennedy’s administration. Kennedy made good on his audacious govt promise of collective effort and progress. He proposed and typically efficiently instituted a flurry of transformative govt orders, packages and payments. In 1961, he established each the Peace Corps, a tangible embodiment of American service overseas, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as an institutionalized kind of advancing diplomatic “soft power” in growing nations.
As president, Kennedy championed the “moonshot,” a daring scientific feat that captured the creativeness of a nation and demonstrated the boundless potential of cooperative American innovation.
He argued that authorities ought to spend cash on individuals, and advocated for the growth of the federal social security web, together with a rise within the federal minimal wage, new federal subsidies in impoverished rural and concrete areas, federal help in training, healthcare protections for the aged and expanded federal funding for psychological well being initiatives.
Never-before-seen video of JFK (2015)
The ambition and idealism of the New Frontier even compelled Kennedy to evolve in some of his extra troubling views. His early reluctance to handle issues of racial equality and civil rights finally gave approach to a sequence of equality-based govt orders, together with one which laid the groundwork for modern-day affirmative motion. In June 1963, throughout a televised speech, President Kennedy argued that racial equality was an ethical crucial for the nation and promised to implement essentially the most complete civil rights invoice that the nation had ever seen. After his demise, Congress finally made good on that promise, passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The legacy of the “American Camelot” wasn’t merely in these insurance policies handed but additionally within the idealism that it inspired. Those ethical imperatives of progress and perception within the potential of authorities to do good and pressing work resonated deeply in some ways, together with sending Kennedy’s son John Jr. to a life of function and repair earlier than his life was lower quick.
The ethos of Camelot persevered for greater than six many years. Now, as we strategy the top of President Trump’s first 12 months of his second time period in workplace, this lens that outlined American public priorities has been dismantled.
The promise of sacrifice, service and the facility of authorities to do that sort of good work has come undone, changed by a self-serving transactionalism. Instead of “ask what you can do for your country,” Trump, who recently reported $600 million in revenue for 2024, appears to be asking how greatest he can revenue.
Trump revamps White House Rose Garden
He has explicitly described Kennedy’s guarantees of American Camelot as corrupt, inefficient and un-American. Much of Kennedy’s work and legacy have been rolled again and erased. Even the symbols of the Kennedy period are altering, with the literal paving over of the White House Rose Garden and Trump’s takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
President Trump’s cultural overhaul
The distinction between that world and this one is stark. The present administration’s “America First” agenda is an inversion of Kennedy’s makes an attempt at worldwide cooperation, most notably with the defunding and dismantling of USAID. The present administration described these packages as “wasteful spending that does not align with the America First agenda,” an agenda that included halting the resettling of refugees in America. Kennedy’s ultimate guide, in the meantime, was titled “A Nation of Immigrants.”
Where President Kennedy argued vigorously for the federal government to develop packages to help residents, the present president has advocated for a dismantling of the executive state and the social security web, together with planning to add rigid work requirements to Medicaid and food assistance programs and stripping health insurance from millions. Where Kennedy noticed a dynamic future in science and exploration, the present presidential administration is laser-focused on deregulation, anti-intellectualism, privatization and a retreat from world cooperative financial and overseas coverage agreements.
Where John F. Kennedy essentially developed on civil rights and racial equality and implored Americans to have the ethical fortitude to do the identical, Donald Trump believes the wrestle for equality can go too far, overturning decades-old civil rights law, banning, censoring and defunding range, fairness and inclusion efforts, and even calling for the sweeping erasure of actual American history.
What’s most totally different on this second, although, is how this alteration appears and sounds. The rhetoric of this period is radically totally different from the period of Camelot. Kennedy’s speeches, for all their youthful hopefulness and vigor, had been appeals to our ethical core, our shared dedication to group and nation, and to America’s “better angels.”
The rhetoric of 2025 is confrontational, transactional, divisive and grim. It prioritizes private acquire and the person over collective betterment. President Trump, seated in a closely gilded Oval Office, surrounded by gold-plated Trump-branded merchandise and trinkets, brings a blunt readability to the present second. His promise is that “American Camelot” is lifeless.