Ask Not
A bitter snowstorm dropped six inches of snow on America’s capital city the day before Inauguration Day. “Many of the pre-inaugural social affairs had to be canceled,” The New York Times wrote on Friday, January 20, 1961, adding that the snowfall had “snarled traffic, disrupted air and highway travel and chilled thousands of visiting Democrats.”
Even before the city was covered with snow and chill, there was a sense of excitement that clogged Washington, D.C. just as well as any icy flake or gust of wind. “It appeared,” the Times wrote, “to be one of the largest gatherings of enthusiastic Democrats since Andrew Jackson’s mountain boys came here 128 years ago.”
Locals considered it the coldest inauguration week since William Howard Taft’s bone-chilling Inauguration Day in 1909, when an unrelenting blizzard brought almost ten inches of snow and mighty sheets of ice after a day of heavy rain in such ferocity that Taft, to the chagrin of inaugural tourists, took the oath of office and delivered his inaugural address from the comfort of the Senate chamber rather than on the platform at the Capitol Building.
The second Inauguration Day of the outgoing president four years earlier had been cold but much warmer than usual. Dwight D. Eisenhower, speaking at noon when temperatures settled around 44°, had summoned the American people to “pursue right—without self-righteousness,” to “know unity—without conformity,” to “grow in strength—without pride in self,” and to “ever speak truth and serve justice” when dealing with foreign nations.
Eisenhower had ended his address with the hope of a vision unfulfilled but ever worthy of our striving toward. “May the light of freedom, coming to all darkened lands, flame brightly—until at last the darkness is no more,” he had said, concluding, “may the turbulence of our age yield to a true time of peace, when men and nations shall share a life that honors the dignity of each, the brotherhood of all.”
On Saturday, January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy sought to pursue that same goal, even if the means toward that end differed from those of Eisenhower. Newspapers had already predicted that the solutions to the problems of the day would be “more radical than anything in American politics since the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
The future, as ever, was uncertain, but that did not mean that all was uncertainty. What most if not all knew that Kennedy was young, charismatic, and determined to govern as a man who represented the next generation and not the last, the future and not the past, the new and not the old.
When Kennedy took the oath of office at noon, eight inches of snow lay on the ground. The air was frigid at 22°, the coldest Inauguration Day on record since Franklin Roosevelt’s third swearing-in in 1941. At age forty-three, Kennedy was the youngest person to ascend to the presidency since Theodore Roosevelt in 1909, who, at forty-two, became president following the assassination of William McKinley.
Determined to project the youthful vigor that had defined his campaign, Kennedy removed his topcoat and gave his 1,300-word inaugural address in the icy winter air. “We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom—symbolizing an end as well as a beginning—signifying renewal as well as change,” Kennedy began. “We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution.”
At a time when concerns about nuclear war were ever-prevalent, Kennedy sought to reassure the nation—and the world—that America would not abandon its unique character. “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike,” he said, “that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
Kennedy added, in words now as famous as the Declaration of Independence, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
It was a theme that followed Robert Frost’s reading of “The Gift Outright” just before Chief Justice Earl Warren administered the oath of office. “The land was ours before we were the land’s,” Frost had said. “She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people.” The poem continued: “Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves.” Independence had brought a fuller realization of the American, who “found salvation in surrender” to a land “still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become.”
Concluding an address that Eisenhower praised as “fine, very fine,” Kennedy gave Americans a task: “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
Listening to those words, one man, like countless others, was moved to action. “I was very enthusiastic,” David McCullough recalled. “So I quit my job and I went down to Washington,” going “door-to-door hoping to find a job where I could use my education and experience up to that point to serve my country.” Browsing the Library of Congress one day, McCullough decided to write a book about the Johnstown Flood of 1889.
McCullough found his calling in the past. He wrote first-rate, award-winning, unparalleled books of history, earning him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006 for “his lifelong efforts to document the people, places, and events that have shaped America.”
In the final sentence of his final book, The Pioneers, published in 2019, three years before his death at age eighty-nine, McCullough wrote of the settlers of the Northwest Territory: “They accomplished what they had set out to do not for money, nor for possessions or fame, but to advance the quality and opportunities of life—to propel as best they could the American ideals.”
In ways, McCullough’s last published words described himself and all those who listened on January 20, 1961, resolving to ask not what America could do for them but what they could do for their country.