The 17th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Monday, March 29, 2004
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
Agenda
Welcoming Remarks
Robert L. Lynch
President and CEO
Americans for the Arts
Performance by Martha Graham Dance Company
Introduction of Guest Speaker
Senator Edward Kennedy
The 2001 Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Steven D. Spiess
Chairman, Board of Directors
Americans for the Arts
Proceedings
MR. LYNCH: Good evening. On behalf of the Board of Directors of the Americans for the Arts, I want to welcome all of you to the 17th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy, the largest ever with almost 2,000 of you in attendance, including many of our nation's most influential cultural leaders. My name is Bob Lynch, and I am the President and CEO of Americans for the Arts, your host. We have a very exciting evening planned for you tonight, including an artistic surprise, but first I would like to tell you a bit about who we are and what we do.
Americans for the Arts is the national organization for advancing the arts in America. Our three goals are to create a climate in which the arts can thrive in every American community, to generate more money for the arts and arts education, and to build more individual appreciation for the arts.
As many of you know, Americans for the Arts was the recent recipient of an extraordinary gift from philanthropist Ruth Lilly—$120 million over 30 years. Our Board of Directors has spent the last year formulating a strategic plan that will take us through the next five years. With the help of more than 1,000 of our members and friends, many of you in this room, we have identified five key areas of work:
Research and information, where we plan to create more tools like our national economic impact study that showed the nonprofit arts industry generates $134 billion each year, along with 5 million jobs and $24 billion returned in total government revenues.
Professional development, where we hope to offer more training for our nation's professional arts leaders, especially those working with local arts agencies across the nation. We hold a major convention each year, and this July it will be co-hosted with the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and held here in Washington, DC. And many of the State Arts Agencies board members of NASAA are here with us tonight.
Strategic partnerships—we hope to expand our collaborations with more national service organizations, such as the 69 cosponsors here tonight to kick off the Arts Advocacy Day conference tomorrow.
Our greatest focus in the near future is the policy and advocacy and visibility for the value of the arts part of our work. Over the next several years, Americans for the Arts will mobilize efforts to advance federal issues with a team of 50 state arts advocacy captains, as well as coordinate and link 50 statewide advocacy efforts to address state issues. In fact, we're pleased to announce that two national organizations, the State Arts Advocacy League of America and the National Community Arts Network, have just voted to fold their efforts into Americans for the Arts as a newly formed State Arts Action Council and Network. We hope to make some real progress with that kind of collected energy and clout. We have also invested in an extraordinary new one-stop federal, state, and local arts advocacy Web portal that was just launched just this Friday. I believe that many of you received an e-mail from us that will help each of you to go online and easily contact your elected officials, track their voting records, and access a complete guide to every media outlet in your area.
Fortunately, we don't have to work too hard to convince some of our elected officials about the importance of the arts to our country and in communities all across the country because they already get it. And I want to thank all of the members of Congress who are here with us tonight, and specifically Representative Louise Slaughter of New York, who is the co-chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus and Representative Dave Obey of Wisconsin, who tomorrow—a harmonica player as well—will be receiving our 2004 Congressional Arts Leadership Award. Let's take a second to show our appreciation.
For those of you who are new to the Nancy Hanks Lecture, it was originally developed to honor the memory of the late Nancy Hanks, who served as our chairman at Americans for the Arts, the Chairman of our Board of Directors, and then was appointed by President Nixon to become Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1969. During her eight-year tenure as the NEA Chair, the agency's budget grew an astounding 1,400 percent, which ultimately changed the face of public funding for the arts in this country. And tonight, we have in the audience two of our current federal cultural agency leaders, NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, and the Chairman of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Robert Martin.
I would also like to acknowledge two distinguished former NEA Chairs, Frank Hodsoll and Bill Ivey, and I would like to ask the four of them to stand.
Also with us tonight are a number of current and past members of the presidentially appointed National Council on the Arts and the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. We are deeply grateful to all of you for your public service, and we really thank you for being here with us tonight as well. Thank you.
And finally, we would like to recognize the people and the organizations who have made this event possible. Starting with our host, this is the 12th consecutive year that The Kennedy Center has hosted the presentation of this lecture series, and I thank them for their generosity.
I would also like to thank Hinda Rosenthal and her family at the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation for their fourth consecutive year of support of this lecture series, and along with them other funding partners, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, the Lockheed Martin Corporation, Betty R. Sheffer Foundation, Four Seasons Hotels, and US Airways. Thanks to all of you for making this kind of policy even a possibility for all of us in the arts.
Now for the artistic surprise. Many of you have seen one of the ads from our three-year national public awareness campaign with the Ad Council, the ad campaign entitled "Art. Ask for More." It has reached 150 million households and uses humor to promote the benefits of an arts education. In fact, we've inserted our removable window decals in your program with the hope that many cars will be leaving The Kennedy Center tonight with them in their back windows.
Over the last two years, Americans for the Arts has been working with the Martha Graham Dance Company to use an image of Martha Graham as one of the four arts icons used in the campaign. And it should be appearing above me as we speak.
Full-page campaign ads have appeared hundreds of times in newspapers across the country, and dozens of times in the New York Times alone. And this particular ad won first prize as the best PSA from the National Association of Newspapers last year. But perhaps more importantly, the Graham Company tells us that our ad, which includes the tag line "There's not enough art in our schools, no wonder people think Martha Graham is a snack cracker," that that ad has been a terrific boost to their visibility, and so we are pleased.
This year, President Bush has proposed increasing the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by $18 million for a program entitled "American Masterpieces: 300 Years of American Genius.” Tonight, you will see an example of an American masterpiece that is scheduled to be featured in this national initiative next year. And here is another interesting side note about the Graham Company that is particularly appropriate for a Washington appearance. Among its alumni is one Betty Bloomer who, after dancing with the company in 1938, would become better known as First Lady Betty Ford. And also in today's New York Times some of you may have seen that the company was awarded a $1.25 million grant from the Andrew J. Mellon Foundation, so congratulations to the company on that.
Now, a lot of people have to wait until April 14th to April 25th and go to City Center in Manhattan to see them, but not us. In their season's repertory is this excerpt from Martha Graham's Sketches from Chronicle, from 1936 when her company was composed entirely of women—this last segment of the ballet evokes Graham's hope for the future in the aftermath of war, a timely message for today.
Please join me in welcoming the Martha Graham Dance Company to help us welcome our speaker tonight and an excerpt from Sketches from Chronicle entitled "Prelude to Action."
(Whereupon, an excerpt from "Prelude to Action" was performed by the Martha Graham Dance Company.)
You know, from ideas to policy to action to advocacy to money to art, I think that is the whole panorama that we try to exhibit with this event, and our thanks to this exceptional company for honoring the legacy of the genius of American dance. Thank you, to all of you.
As a native of Massachusetts, I am particularly pleased to introduce our next speaker.
Since the day that this incredible building opened as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy in 1971, the name Kennedy has become synonymous with leadership in the arts. For more than 40 years, Senator Edward M. Kennedy has carried forth the arts and humanities legacy that his brother began. A legendary figure in his own right, Senator Kennedy has passionately advocated the need to nurture creativity and to broaden access to artistic excellence in the United States Senate. He is the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which has jurisdiction over arts and humanities issues.
Throughout his work, he carries strong messages of freedom of expression, tolerance, and creative rights. He has spoken staunchly of the central role of the federal government in supporting American cultural life, inspiring bipartisan cooperation among his colleagues in the Senate. Senator Kennedy has also been one of the trustees and stalwart supporters of The Kennedy Center for more than 25 years. He is the recipient of our own 1999 Congressional Arts Leadership Award, and he is here tonight to formally introduce one of his friends, and most importantly, his constituent, Doris Kearns Goodwin.
It is with great pleasure that I introduce and ask for a warm welcome to the great Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Introduction by Senator Edward M. Kennedy
Thank you. Thank you so much for—Bob Lynch, for your extremely kind and generous introduction, and I commend your effective leadership on the cultural issues and all you are doing at Americans for the Arts.
The Arts Endowment has had an impressive leadership over the years and they have guided the agency well, and it has been a privilege to work with each of them and it's an honor to have Bill Ivey, Frank Hodsoll, Dana Gioia here with us this evening. And it is a real pleasure and a privilege to be here this evening. I've had the honor of working with many of you to support the Arts Endowment and to help make programs and music and dance and drama and the visual arts more available in communities across the country. And it is gratifying to see our cause prosper in spite of the slings and arrows of outrageous politics.
Because of the good work of so many of you, more and more people understand that the arts make a difference in our lives and are worth fighting for. Many thanks to all of you for working so skillfully and tirelessly, especially in what we all know were some very challenging years.
President Kennedy said it this way in words that are now inscribed on the wall of this building—"I look forward to an America which will reward achievements in the arts, as we award achievement in business or state craft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens."
Tonight, we reaffirm our commitments to the endowment and to the cultural programming, and I know that President would be very proud of all of you and all that you are doing so well.
It is a special privilege to be here this evening with Doris Kearns Goodwin. I've known Doris and her husband Dick for many years, and I've been very grateful throughout that time for her advice, her scholarship and, most of all, her friendship. Many of you know her for her thoughtful and articulate commentary on television. She has an inspiring sense of history, an amazing wisdom about both the small details and the broad strokes of policy and politics, and the way they shape our past and future.
Everyone has a favorite Doris book. Unquestionably, her biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt have enhanced the way the world understands these two famous leaders and their extraordinary legacy for our nation. And her unique genius enables us to see not just what happened, but also how it happened and why it happened.
Doris is a constituent and lives in Concord where American history began, the perfect hometown for someone who has had such a remarkable impact on the way we understand our nation's history. Doris applied her talents in many ways. She loves baseball, and her book Wait 'Til Next Year is a classic of the genre.
I'm glad to be able to say that Doris, after a misspent youth cheering for the Brooklyn Dodgers, is now a solid fan of the Red Sox.
She says, “Wait 'Til Next Year,” and the Irish say, "Misery loves company.”
I have to admit that my favorite among her books is The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. It is a perennial best seller because each new generation of the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds buy so many copies of it.
Doris has written the stories that expand our understanding of the world around us, and has truly enriched our lives in so many ways. She's a brilliant historian with a beautiful mind and a wonderful writer and friend. It is a great, great honor to introduce her now, my friend, Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Thank you. Well, for me, it is a great honor to be introduced by Senator Kennedy, an old friend for whom I have the greatest admiration, respect, and affection. And I must say it's a great honor in this video age that so many of you have come here tonight to hear an old-fashioned public lecture—no visual accompaniment, no dazzling pyrotechnic displays, simply a short person behind a tall podium speaking for 45 minutes or so.
So, let me take you on a journey with me to examine the role of the arts and the lives and the presidencies of the four men that I have lived with over the last 40 years of my professional life—Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, and now Abraham Lincoln.
It is an especial pleasure for me to bring all my guys together in one lecture, for one of the difficult aspects of moving from one subject to the next is the sense of betrayal you feel when you leave one behind and take up the next. For example, after spending six years in the company of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt by writing my book about World War II—embarrassingly, that book took me longer to write than it took World War II to be fought—when the time came that I had to start working on Lincoln five years ago, I had to move all my Roosevelt books from my study to make room for the accumulating Lincoln library. And I felt a little sad and a little guilty about that. In fact, I have a recurring nightmare that in the afterlife I will be confronted by a panel of all my subjects who, one by one, will tell me everything I got wrong, and Lyndon Johnson will be the first to speak up, shouting, "How come that damn book on the Kennedys was twice as long as the book you wrote about me?"
But let me begin with Franklin Roosevelt, for it was during his administration that the national government first became concerned with the arts and the livelihood of artists. During the early years of the Great Depression, when families were forced to spend the little money they had on food and rent, concerts and plays became unaffordable luxuries. Half the theaters in New York City closed down. Half the actors and three-quarters of the musicians and dancers were unemployed. At the same time, with the collapse of numerous newspapers and publishing houses, thousands of journalists and writers were broke.
Roosevelt's New Deal came to the rescue with the creation of a range of WPA, Work Projects Administration Program, that provided meaningful employment for tens of thousands of artists, musicians, dancers, writers, sculptors, painters, actors, and directors. When the critics complained that the government should not throw away its money on dancers and actors and painters—after all, what they did was not really considered work, in the minds of many people—the WPA director, Harry Hopkins, famously replied, "Hell, they've got to eat just like other people." But the WPA programs did far more than feed hungry artists. By underwriting artistic performances in far-flung regions around the country, in places where many Americans had never before seen a live performance of any sort, they brought orchestras and string quartets to millions of Americans, revealing an audience for classical music far larger than anyone had ever imagined before. Art and music teachers were dispatched to rural areas and city slums. Touring repertory groups performed both works of Shakespeare and new works by the masses, producing plays that are still considered among the finest in the history of American theater, with the money from the large audiences they drew plowed right back into the local communities. By making artistic endeavors accessible to the many, they were no longer regarded as luxuries for the rich, but as something everyone needed to enrich their daily lives, to uplift their spirits, to stimulate their creative energies.
Unemployed painters and sculptors were hired by the WPA to produce murals and objects of art for public buildings, hospitals, libraries, and schools. Ten thousand writers were brought together with teams of researchers and editors in an immense effort to gather information on the history, culture, legends, and traditions of individual states and cities, producing the magnificent American Guide series, which Louis Mumford called "The finest contribution to American patriotism that has been made in our generation."
WPA journalists interviewed 2,000 former slaves, producing the Slave Narrative collection, which remains to this day one of the most vivid reconstructions of life in the antebellum South, and a fundamental starting point for any historian who studies slavery.
And then for the artists themselves, the experience of working together on joint projects, created an esprit de corps and a sense of community that many had never felt before by working alone in isolated studios. "To this day," one WPA artist many years later, "we meet and reminisce about the good old days when we flourished as artists together. Then, as now, there were greater and lesser artists, but everyone had respect for the other fellow artist and his need to work at his art." Moreover, as the touring companies of dancers and actors and orchestras came to regions that had never before experienced live productions, the spirit of community was awakened in hundreds of cities and towns across the nation.
It was Roosevelt's genius to grasp the importance of sustaining the spirit of community in difficult times. When the trauma of the Great Depression was replaced by the even greater challenge of Adolf Hitler, the Nazis in the Second World War, he repeatedly argued that, "So long as the energies and the passions of the American people as a whole could be aroused, the American home front would win the war." To this end, he set out to involve as many people as possible in every aspect of the war. War bonds were sold in small denominations so that the mass public could participate. Twelve million volunteers were recruited as air raid wardens, block captains, and auxiliary fire and police. Seven million volunteered for the Red Cross duty. Aluminum and rubber scrap drives advertised by posters drawn by WPA artists were instituted in cities and towns not simply to expand scarce supplies of aluminum and rubber, but to give people a chance to participate in their villages as a collective endeavor. And the response was overwhelming, as citizens lugged tons of old coffee pots, frying pans, cocktail shakers, cigar tubes, old rubber toys, and rubber galoshes to their village greens, while school children rolled old rubber bands into huge rubber balls.
Whenever I read about those days when rubber was so scarce that no rubber tires for private use could be manufactured, including automobile tires, my mind boggles at the one exception that was made—during the entire war, women's rubber girdles were still allowed to be manufactured, for when it was first announced that girdles were going to be proscribed, the outcry was so passionate, not only from women who argued that their postures would be destroyed, but from men who argued that if women's stomachs stuck out, then men's morale would go down.
So, the administration carved out an exception for women's rubber girdles.
On a more serious note, while I fully understand how much more difficult it would be to create a similar sense of community today, given the difference between our amorphous War on Terror and the Second World War, I keep wishing that there were ways to involve more of us in the ongoing struggle. I imagine, for example, a vast expansion in our public health service, our fire departments, and our police departments, all of which would be good in themselves, not simply as protection against emergencies.
I can imagine vast new public works projects to strengthen our infrastructure of bridges, railways, and electrical grids—again, good for our emergencies, but also for the job outsourcing problems that we are facing. I can imagine federal support for language training, for the study of Arabic cultures, much as Sputnik led to an increased support for science and math, and I dream of a Marshall program to develop alternative energy sources. I know all of these things may sound very idealistic, but as Lincoln said in the midst of the Civil War, "The dogmas of the quiet path are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
Obviously, the most significant difference between our War on Terror and the Second World War in terms of creating a shared experience of community is the absence of a draft, which brought 15 million Americans into the armed forces during World War II. While I understand the arguments arrayed against a resumption of the draft, I must say that in our own family we have seen the positive impact that military service can play through the experience of our youngest son, Joe, who graduated from Harvard College in June of 2001 in history and literature, and then volunteered for a stint in the Army in the wake of September 11th. After a year in basic training and Officers Candidate School, he was shipped to Baghdad last May, where he has been a platoon leader with the First Armored Division ever since, never once second-guessing his decision.
He has found the experience of leading 24 men the most rewarding of his life. None of these young men have gone to college, much less ivy league schools. All of them want to do well, knowing full well that by doing so they will have opportunities for advancement they might never have had. He has, I believe, created an intensely loyal unit, able to withstand what has been a most difficult assignment. He never lets us know the full measure of the dangers. Only through letters to his brother Michael, who is a year older, and who has written to him every single day that he has been there—that brotherly affection means more to me than anything else—only then did we learn that a soldier next to him was killed a few weeks ago, or that a rocket-propelled grenade flew two feet over his head one night. The year of combat duty is now winding to a close, however, and in a few weeks the First Armored Division will leave Baghdad for Germany, where he has 20 more months to serve. We cannot wait. And Joe surely feels the same, though on the phone the other day he said he feared that his next assignment would be a letdown after the intense camaraderie of leading a platoon in combat, which simply shows how deep within all of us is the yearning for community.
And on a lighter note, I must say that one of my favorite discoveries in working on the Roosevelt books was the unique little community that he created for himself in the White House during the war. Every night, he would gather his aides and his friends for a cocktail hour, where the rule was you couldn't talk about the war. You could talk about books you had read, plays you had seen, gossip about who was involved with whom as long as the war didn't get mentioned, so that they could all relax and replenish their energies to face the struggles of the following day.
He went even further in the sense of community by turning the second floor of the White House into the most exclusive residential hotel I have ever read about. Winston Churchill came and spent weeks at a time living in a room diagonally across from Roosevelt's on that second floor. Harry Hopkins, his then foreign policy advisor, having moved from domestic to foreign policy, came for dinner one night early in the war, stayed over, and never left until the war came to an end. Eleanor's great friend, Lorena Hickock, had a bedroom next to Eleanor, and Princess Martha, a beautiful princess from Norway in exile in America during the war, came and lived at the White House on weekends, in that second-floor suite.
I discovered that when Churchill was there, he and Roosevelt would stay up until 2:00 a.m., drinking and smoking, until finally Eleanor would come into the room and say, "Isn't it time for you two little boys to go to bed?" But then Churchill famously said once to Roosevelt, "It's fun to be in the same decade with you."
At times, I would imagine all of them gathered in the corridor that connects the eight bedroom suites on the second floor of the White House, in their bathrobes, discussing great events of the war, and I kept wishing that when I had been up there with Lyndon Johnson when I was 24 years old, I had thought of asking, "Where did Roosevelt sleep? Where was Churchill? Where was Harry Hopkins?" But, of course, I wasn't thinking in those terms when I was a young girl. So I happened to mention this on a radio program here in Washington, The Diane Rehm Show, that I wished I could see it once more to picture which bedroom each person was in, and it happened that Hillary Clinton was listening. So, she promptly called me up and invited me to sleep overnight in the White House. She said, "We could then wander the corridor together and figure out where everyone had slept 50 years earlier." So, two weeks later she followed up with an invitation to a state dinner, after which, between midnight and 2:00 a.m., the President, Mrs. Clinton, my husband, and I, with my map in hand, went through every room up there and figured out, yes, Chelsea is sleeping where Harry Hopkins was, Bill Clinton is where Franklin Roosevelt was, but most excitingly for us, we were sleeping in Winston Churchill's bedroom. There was no way I could sleep. I was certain that he was sitting in the corner, drinking his brandy and smoking his ever-present cigar.
In fact, that bedroom is the scene of my favorite story in World War II, which is that when Churchill came to visit Roosevelt in January of '42, after Pearl Harbor, they were all set that afternoon to sign a document that put the allied nations against the Axis power, but the allied nations were calling themselves then the Associated Nations, and no one liked the word. So, early that morning, Roosevelt had awakened with the whole new idea of calling themselves the United Nations. It's where the word was presumably born. He was so excited, he had himself wheeled into Churchill's bedroom to tell him the news, but it so happened that Churchill was just coming out of the bathtub and had absolutely nothing on. So, Roosevelt said, "Oh, I'm so sorry, I'll come back in a few moments," but Churchill, ever able to speak spontaneously, in a very formal voice said, "Oh, no, please stay. The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the President of the United States."
Can you imagine that you are dripping from the tub, your stomach is sticking out, and you can say something like that?
So then Roosevelt tells him the idea of the United Nations, which Churchill immediately embraces and has the further presence of mind to quote an entire poem written decades earlier in England, where the words "United Nations" had once been used.
So, that night, as soon as the President and First Lady left, I couldn't wait to go in the bathtub, and then I truly felt I was in the presence of the greatness of the past.
But, sadly, for all the immense contributions to the world of art that the WPA artistic programs under Roosevelt made, Roosevelt himself was not ready to make them a permanent part of the national landscape. With the immense upsurge in employment brought about by the Second World War, the funding for the WPA came to an end. He said, "With the satisfaction of a good job well done and with a high sense of integrity, the WPA has asked for and earned an honorable discharge." Thus, the larger objective of making access to the arts a public right was not reached.
So matters stood until President Kennedy came into office, bringing with him a desire to effect a positive change in the relationship between the arts and the federal government, and the inspirational leadership to create a new climate that would eventually allow this change to be effected. "I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization," he said, "than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nurture the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. I look forward to an America,” as Senator Kennedy said, “which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or state craft.” He appointed Roger Stevens as chairman of the board of National Cultural Center. He made August Pecture his special consultant on the arts, and he commissioned a study on the role of the government in the arts and created an advisory council on the arts, thus, building the foundation for a major shift, but Congress was not quite willing to move any further and take the next steps.
President Kennedy did, however, have one notable success with the Congress relating to the arts, an episode in which my husband, Richard Goodwin, then a special assistant in the White House, was involved. He tells the story in his memoirs, early in the administration, Jackie Kennedy sent a memorandum to her husband asking if something could be done to help save the monuments of ancient Egypt, including the mammoth Temple of Abu Simbel threatened by the floodwaters from the construction of the Aswan Dam. The United Nations set out to raise the funds, but the Eisenhower administration had refused to contribute. Without the United States' help, it was believed that the monuments would perish. In return for contributions, Egypt had offered to give some of the monuments to the donating countries, including, if the donation were large enough, a small temple. Kennedy sent the memo on to my husband, Dick, for possible action, and here is what Dick writes:
I had no doubts about the merits of the project. I was less certain that Kennedy could be persuaded to ask Congress for an appropriation of $30 or $40 million to save Egyptian antiquities. When I entered the Oval Office to make my pitch, I explained that the treasures were priceless. “That's all fine,” Kennedy said, “but what do you think Brooklyn Congressman Rooney is going to say when I ask him for $40 million to save a bunch of rocks in the middle of the Egyptian desert? I know what he'll say,” Kennedy continued, “he'll say, Jack, you must be out of your mind, there's not one Egyptian voter in the whole country.” Well, I wasn't going to argue politics with the President. Instead, I told Kennedy of the Egyptian promise to give some of the antiquities to contributing countries. “Imagine, Mr. President,” I concluded, “Napoleon only brought back an obelisk from Paris, you can bring an entire temple to Washington.” He looked at me for a moment, those steel blue eyes unwavering and enigmatic. I've gone too far, I thought. Then, Kennedy leaned back in his chair as if pondering a difficult decision, and smiled broadly. “Let's give it a try.” So, Kennedy talked to Rooney, and just as he predicted, Rooney said, “Jack, you must be out of your mind.” But Rooney was a loyalist to the administration, so he added, “If that's what you want, I'll try it.” The money was appropriated. The preservation was successful, and the Temple of Dendurra now sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a gift from the Egyptian government.
Well, after President Kennedy died, my husband remained in the White House as a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson. He recalls a conversation early in the Johnson administration about the arts, in which he told Johnson that though forward steps had been taken in the Kennedy administration, Congress had not yet been willing to pass legislation to subsidize the arts. Johnson's eyes lit up, and in characteristic fashion he slapped his knee and he said, "Well, hell, maybe Kennedy couldn't do it, but I surely can." So, in his State of the Union message in 1965, Johnson spoke movingly of the need to enrich the spirit of the American people, "We do not intend to live in the midst of abundance," he said, "isolated from neighbors and nature, stunted by a poverty of learning and an emptiness of leisure." He proposed legislation to create a National Foundation on the Arts, and then the master set to work. No one understood better than Lyndon Johnson how to deal with Congress.
His mastery had really begun when he first came to Washington as a congressional aide. Living in a boardinghouse with other aides, he took four separate showers every night so he could talk with as many people as possible. The next morning, he went into the bathroom five different times at 10-minute intervals to brush his teeth. Within a week, he had evaluated which aides were the smartest, the shrewdest, the most reliable ones from which he could learn the ropes.
Many years later, as President, he still understood that he had to talk personally with as many Congressmen as possible, to learn what they needed to make they feel important. So, he would invite individual Congressmen and Senators to breakfast, to lunch, to dinner. He would call them at 6:00 in the morning. If they weren't up, he would talk to their wives. If the wives weren't up, he would talk to their kids—"Now, you tell your daddy to go along with me on this bill." One Senator told of receiving a call from Lyndon Johnson at 2:00 a.m. Johnson said, "I hope I didn't awaken you." The Senator said, "Oh, no, I was just lying here, looking at the ceiling, hoping my President would call."
Now, people assumed, with only partial accuracy, that the key to Johnson's success came in his ability to trade dams, public works projects, all manner of goodies, for votes. Indeed, he was called "The Wampum Man." But the real key to his success was the strength of his convictions and his ability to convince wavering Congressmen and Senators that if they came with him on pieces of legislation that he proposed—Medicare, civil rights, poverty, aid to education, aid to the arts—they would be creating a legacy of their own that would be remembered for years to come.
The story is told of his conversation with Everett Dirksen, the Republican Minority Leader, that successfully persuaded him to join and bring Republicans to join the northern Democrats in 1964, to break the southern filibuster against the historic civil rights bill that would end apartheid in the south. After promising Dirksen enough projects to fill the entire state of Illinois, he reportedly said, "Just think, Everett, if you come with me on this bill, the NAACP will fly your banner for 99 years. You'll be the hero of the hour." And then going one step further, "Everett, you know I saw your state's exhibit at the World's Fair. It said 'Illinois, Land of Lincoln,' big statue to old Abe Lincoln. Hell, Ev, you come with me, I'll build you a much bigger statue of your own." And then the final push, "Just think, Everett, if you come with me on this bill, 200 years from now school children will know only two names, Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen."
How could Dirksen resist? When the vote came, he carried 27 Republicans to join the 44 northern Democrats to break the filibuster, to bring that historic bill to the Floor, where it soon became the law of the land, forever changing the face of our country.
Lyndon Johnson's bill to establish the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities encountered opposition from both conservatives opposed in general to government funding of the arts, and from liberals fearing that government intervention in the substance of artistic programs would undermine the artists' creativity. Senator Gross of Iowa attempted to destroy the bill by adding bellydancing and poker to the list of fine arts that would be funded. When asked how he could define poker as an art he replied, "For sure, there are artists at poker. In fact, I have run into a few of them myself." But, fortunately, the nuisance amendment was defeated and President Johnson signed the historic legislation in September 1965. And here we are nearly 40 years later, knowing that despite having to fight a good number of tough battles, the twin agencies remain strong and proud and remarkably resilient, having made enduring contributions to the cultural life of our country.
My own experience with Lyndon Johnson began when I was, and now admit with some trepidation, a 24-year-old White House intern, but our relationship had a less promising start than that of Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton. While I was a graduate student at Harvard, I was selected as a White House Fellow, a fabulous program. Colin Powell was a White House Fellow. Wesley Clark was a White House Fellow. There was a big dance at the White House after we were selected. President Johnson did say he wanted me to work directly for him in the White House, but it was not to be that simple, for in the months leading up to my selection, like many young people, I had been involved in the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, and had previously co-authored an anti-Johnson article with a friend, which came out a few days after the dance in the White House and the New Republic, and the theme of the article was how to dump Lyndon Johnson in 1968.
Well, I was certain that he would kick me out of the program, but instead he said, "Oh, bring her down here for a year, and if I can't win her over, no one can." So, I did end up working for him in the White House and accompanying him to his ranch to help him on his memoirs the last four years of his life. To be honest, I never fully understood why he had chosen me to spend so many hours with in those last years. I'd like to believe it was because I was a good listener, and he was a great storyteller, one of the best I've ever encountered in public life. Fabulous, anecdotal, funny, interesting stories.
There was a problem with these stories, I later discovered, which is that half of them weren't true, but they were great nonetheless.
So, it was that I liked to listen to the stories, I hope, but I also worried that part of the attraction might have been that I was then a young woman, so I consistently chattered to him about boyfriends even when I didn't have them, to make sure to keep him on a friendship level. And everything was working perfectly until one day he said he wanted to take me to have a conversation by the lake—conveniently called Lake Lyndon Johnson—and there was wine and cheese and a red-checked tablecloth, all the romantic trappings. And he started out, "Doris, more than any other woman I have ever known"—and my heart sank—and then he said, "you remind me of my mother."
It was pretty embarrassing, given what was going on in my mind. But I must say, the older I have gotten, the more I realize what an extraordinary privilege it was to have spent so much time with President Johnson and Lady Bird, a great woman for whom I have the deepest respect and affection, and how important she has been to the world of art, and how lucky I was to have spent so many hours with her aging lion of a husband, a victor in a thousand conquests, and yet so sadly defeated in the end by the war in Vietnam, for I realize now that in the vulnerable state that he found himself in in those last years, he opened up to me in ways he never would have had I known him at the height of his power, sharing his fears, his sorrows, his worries about how history would remember him. I must say, that larger-than-life quality never ceases to amaze me.
Not long ago, I was at a conference with the former CEO of Pepsi Cola, Don Kendall. He came right over to me and he said, "Now, I know you knew Lyndon Johnson when you were a young girl, but I have a Johnson story I bet you don't know." He told me that he was good friends with President Nixon, and when Nixon first got into the White House, he asked Kendall to go to Johnson's ranch to talk to him about some sensitive matter. So, I get to the ranch, Johnson is working on his memoirs, he looks up grumpily and says, "How am I supposed to remember what happened 30 years ago, 40 years ago? These chapters are just not coming alive at all. The only chapters that are any good at all are where I had this little tape machine in my Oval Office, and I used to press a button and I had verbatim conversations. Now, those chapters are great. So you go back and tell your good friend, Nixon, as he starts his presidency, there's nothing more important than a taping system."
And thereby Lyndon Johnson contributes to the downfall of his good friend, Richard Nixon.
But I would like to believe that the experience of getting close to this one larger-than-life figure has helped me to penetrate the characters of all the other presidents I have studied, none more complex, none more extraordinary than Abraham Lincoln, the last of the four presidents I will talk about tonight.
When I think about his relationship to the world of art, what strikes me is that he is precisely the kind of person that the various art programs hope to reach, a person who had little or no opportunity throughout his childhood and early adulthood to attend any kind of live performance, but whose soul thirsted after drama, poetry, and literature.
As a child, he was allowed to attend school, as he said, only by little, in between cycles of farmwork. The aggregate of his schooling did not amount to more than one full year. He had never set foot inside a college or an academy building until he acquired his license to practice law by studying all on his own. What he had in the way of education, he lamented, he had to pick up step by step. Relative, the neighbors recall that he scoured the countryside for books and read everything he could lay his hands on. He read and reread the Bible and Aesop's Fables so many times that years later he could recite whole passages from memory. Through Scott's Lessons in Elocution, a kind of textbook that was around at the time, he was introduced to selections from Shakespeare's plays, creating a love for the great dramatist's writing long before he had ever seen a performance. Though he could get his hands on only a small number of books, they were some of the best books in the English language. Reading the Bible and Shakespeare over and over implanted the poetic rhythms that would later be manifest in his unparalleled presidential speeches. When he came across a passage that struck him, his stepmother recalled, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper, and when the board would get too black, he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again. Then once he got some paper, he would write the passage down and rewrite it and keep it in a scrapbook so he could memorize it. Words thus became precious to him. Yet, though he had read, studied, and memorized large portions of Shakespeare, it was only when he became president that he had regular access to live theater. We all know, of course, of his assassination at Ford's Theater, but we know little less and we should know more of the number of plays that he actually went to see during his presidency. Indeed, as often as he could during the worst days of the Civil War, he went to the theater, relishing performances of Henry the IV, Hamlet, and MacBeth. After a superb performance of Henry the IV, he wrote James Hackett, the actor who had played Falstaff, a touching letter. "Perhaps the best compliment I can pay you," he said, "is to say I am very anxious to see it again." And then he talked about his feelings about various Shakespeare plays. "Of all the plays, however, I think none equals MacBeth. It is wonderful. Unlike you gentlemen of the profession, I think the soliloquy in Hamlet commencing 'Oh, my offense is rank' surpasses that commencing 'To be or not to be.'"
It was not easy for young Lincoln, as a child, to possess a poet's sensibility, and yet live in a frontier environment that considered reading a form of laziness. It was painful to think that his gifts might never be realized. One of his favorite poems, "Gray's Elegy," has as its major theme the assertion that "For many a rose is born to blush unseen and waste its fragrance on the desert air," little wonder that he grew depressed at times at the thought that his passionate desires might remain unfulfilled, and how wonderful it must be for all these people involved in community arts programs today, to know that every now and then they can reach a passionate child such as Lincoln and change that child forever, by providing contact with drama, music, dance, or art.
Lincoln's one outlet as a child was his skill at telling stories. As a small boy, he would sit transfixed as his parents swapped tales crafted from the experience of everyday life with visitors and neighbors by the fire. Then, after hearing the adults talk, he would stay up half the night translating their stories into words and ideas that his young friends could comprehend, so the next day he could climb on a make-believe stage in the form of a tree stump or a log and entertain his own circle of mesmerized listeners. Much later, as a lawyer on the circuit, traveling with his colleagues around the state for two months every spring and fall, he became known as the best storyteller in Illinois. Villagers would travel for miles around to the taverns to hear him hold forth with his seemingly endless supply of stories drawn from everyday life, filled with maxims or proverbs that people could put to use in their own lives.
One of his favorite stories circled back to the early days after the Revolution. Shortly after the peace was signed, the Revolutionary War hero, Ethan Allen, was visiting England, and while there the British thought to make fun of him and of Americans by hanging a picture of George Washington in the outhouse where Mr. Allen would have to see it. When he made no mention of it after coming back, they finally asked him, "Have you seen that Washington picture?" "Why, yes," he said. Indeed, he thought it a very appropriate place for an Englishman to keep it, for there was nothing that would make an Englishman shit so quickly as the sight of George Washington.
It's scary to think what would happen to Lincoln today, if he told such a story on radio or television. And, yet, the four-letter word he used was not meant as blasphemy, but simply as a description of a basic bodily function.
Another story centered on a man who had a great veneration for Revolutionary relics. Learning that an old woman still possessed a dress she had worn as a young girl in the Revolutionary War, he traveled to her house and asked if he could see it. She took the dress from a bureau and handed it to him. He was so excited that he brought the dress to his lips and kissed it. The practical old lady rather resented such foolishness over an old piece of wearing apparel, so she said, "Stranger, if you want to kiss something old, you had better kiss my ass, it is 16 years older than that dress."
His stories, Lincoln once said, were intended to whistle off sadness. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep. While his more single-minded cabinet members bristled when he opened cabinet meetings by reading selections from the humorist Thomas Hood, Lincoln found sustenance in his life-affirming sense of humor. And Mary Lincoln, understanding the importance of finding means for him to relax and replenish his energy, encouraged him to attend matchable performances, circuses, concerts, and the theater. Thus, while his colleagues suffered from repeated bouts of exhaustion and nervous irritability from working without any breaks, Lincoln, with the hardest task of all, maintained the most generous and even-tempered discipline and disposition. His love of literature and the performing arts took him outside of himself, fed his creative mind, and filled his soul.
In the midst of the Civil War when the Capitol Dome remained unfinished, Lincoln insisted that it must be completed. "Though critics decry the expenditure of money and time when everything should be directed toward the war," Lincoln argued, "if people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign that we intend the Union shall go on." So, as one White House aide at the time said, "Even during the days when Washingtonians feared the Rebels might overrun the city, the sound of the workman's hammer never ceased until finally in December 1863, the magnificent Dome was created and the Statute of Freedom was hauled into its place. One hundred guns were fired in salute, and a flag was raised above the statute to signal the execution of this great artistic work."
I must say, one of the joys of being an historian is the luxury of living with such giants as Lincoln and Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, day after day, year after year, a reward I could not have imagined when the love of history first took root in my heart. It really began when I was only six years old and my father taught me that mysterious art of keeping score while listening to baseball games, all those miniaturized symbols that allow one to record the history of a game that has just taken place that day. So when he came from work at night, he would sit with me for two hours, as I now realize that I, in excruciating detail, with all my symbols on the page, recounted every single play of every inning of the game that had just taken place. But he made me feel I was telling him a fabulous story, which made history magical in my mind. Indeed, I'm convinced that I learned the narrative art from those nightly sessions with my father because at first I would be so excited I would blurt out "The Dodgers won," or "The Dodgers lost," which took much of the drama of this two-hour telling away. So, I finally learned that you had to tell a story from beginning to middle to end. Much later, read an essay by my heroine, Barbara Tufman, who said, "Even if you are writing about a war, you have to imagine to yourself, as a narrative historian, you do not know how that war ended, so you can carry your reader with you every step along the way from beginning to middle to end." So, in some ways, I just learned that as a kid, trying to keep my father's attention. He made it even more special for me because he never told me when I was six or seven years old that all of this was actually described in great detail in the sports pages of the newspapers the next day. So, I thought without me he wouldn't even happen to the Brooklyn Dodgers.
But I believe the second route of my love of history can be traced to my mother's chronic illness. She had had Rheumatic Fever as a child, which left her with a damaged heart, so damaged that she had the arteries of a 70-year-old when she was only 30 years old. It bound her to our house as an invalid, but it meant that she read books in every spare moment she could find, though having only an eighth-grade education, and every night she would read to me as long as I could stay awake—that childhood dream of never having to go to sleep. The only thing I loved more than listening to a book was listening to stories about her childhood. I somehow became obsessed with the idea that if I could keep her talking about the days when she was young and healthy, that her mind would control her body and this premature aging process we were all witnessing would somehow be stopped in its tracks. So I would constantly say to her, "Mom, tell me a story about you when you were my age," not realizing how peculiar that was until I had my own three sons, who never once have said to me, "Mom, tell me a story about you when you were our age."
But I must say, over the years, as I've sat down to interview all the various people for my books, ranging from Rose Kennedy— who I saw when she was relatively young, in her 80s and 90s—to the children of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, to Lyndon Johnson himself, and I've asked them to tell me stories of the days when they were younger, it sometimes seems to me that I'm still seated with my mother as a child and begging her to tell me a story. Indeed, so powerful are the stories and memories of the past, that even though both my parents died—my mother when I was only 15, my father when I was in my 20s—I can still sit at Fenway Park with my sons and imagine myself back at Ebbetts Field with my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below—Jackie Robinson, Duke Snyder, Peewee Reese, Roy Campanella. And when I open my eyes and I see the sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an almost invisible sense of loyalty and love, linking my sons to the grandfather who's face they never had a chance to see, but whose heart and soul they have come to know through all the stories I have told.
But of all the stories, I think, and as a presidential historian that I've been involved with, none has moved me more than that of Abraham Lincoln. From an early age, Lincoln was fueled by a powerful desire to be remembered after he died, to accomplish something so worthy that people would tell his story after he was gone. He was haunted from early childhood by the thought that he didn't want to just go from dust to dust, so he came eventually to accept the Greek concept of Claoff—the idea that our names live on if our accomplishments are large, if, as a result of our lives, our countrymen are better off. He worried, however, as a young man, that his generation didn't have the same challenges that the Founding Fathers had faced, those giant oaks, he called them—Washington, Jefferson, and Adams—who had created a republic and had their names emblazoned on rivers, mountains, and cities. He feared that only modest ambitions were left for his generation. Yet, as it turned out, of course, the wheel of history turned, the rising intensity of the antislavery movement led to the creation of the Republican Party, to cessation in Civil War, creating an almost impossible challenge for Abraham Lincoln, which he met with such brilliance that he is remembered today in ways he never could have dreamed.
I believe in the wake of September 11th that we have seen a similar turn of history's wheel. After the decade of the '90s, marked by obsessions of O.J. Simpson, President Clinton's sexual behavior, and private affluence, great public issues are now once more in the forefront. While our anxieties are great, there are also great opportunities for political leaders, opinion leaders, soldiers, journalists, historians, teachers, and the like. In times of crisis the nation is no longer an abstraction. People want to feel connected. They need to feel connected and engaged. We can only hope that our presidential campaign and the leadership that emerges will be worthy of our age, that we will focus on the tremendous issues at stake, and not be distracted by petty attacks nor let ourselves expend energy and strength delivering blows from one side to the other.
Lincoln's words written so many years ago still have relevance for us today, as we undertake a War on Terror that could well be the defining event of our generation. "We will be remembered in spite of ourselves," Lincoln said. "The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation." We, even we, hold the power and bear the responsibility. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. We can only pray that 50 or 100 years from now when poets, dramatists, artists, and musicians are engaged in recapturing our generation, it will be said that we, too, held the power and bore the responsibility, and that we nobly saved our beloved country, the last best hope of earth.
Let me end on a more personal note by saying that I shall always be grateful for these curiously intertwined loves of history and baseball that have led me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to believe that the private people we have loved in our families and the public figures we have respected in our history, as Abraham Lincoln so wanted to believe, really can live on, so long as we pledge to tell and to retell the stories of their lives. I thank you for letting me do that with you this night. Thank you.
Concluding Remarks
Steven D. Spiess, Chair, Board of Directors
Good evening. I'm Steve Spiess, I'm the Chairman of the Board of the Americans for the Arts, and my closing remarks are very brief. But as a first order of business, can we thank Doris Kearns Goodwin once again for a truly wonderful speech.
And also I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Martha Graham Dance Company for their truly beautiful performance.
And, of course, Senator Kennedy for honoring us with his presence tonight.
And my final thank you goes to all of you for coming here and being here tonight and for supporting the Nancy Hanks Lecture and Arts Advocacy Day and for the work that you do every day out in the field.
I've been asked to tell you that the date has already been set for next year's lecture. It is March 14, 2005, so start scribbling that down in your Palm Pilots on the way out.
And, finally, I'm happy to invite you to join us upstairs at the reception in the Atrium. There are staff and volunteer outside who will show you how to get there, and just bear with us with the elevators because there's a lot of you and only a couple of them. Thank you very much for coming. Goodnight.
