Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service

The purplest passage of a new dawn

I've been looking at how to start a story. What about a non-fiction text?

Well, here's the most contrived opener of which I immediately think.

10. Theodore H White: The Making of the President, 1960

JFK was not, by any measurement, the most successful US president. In retrospect he had too many strikes against him, starting with ramping up the war in Vietnam. He didn't deliver on Civil Rights — that too was left, along with southern loathing, to LBJ.

We can excuse Kennedy in retrospect because his presidency was abbreviated. The more we learn, the harder it gets to see him as the Bright Shining Star that his coterie of admirers and publicists perpetrated.

When White was writing (the book published in 1961), all that was in a shrouded future. The gilt hadn't rubbed off the Bostonian gingerbread.

So, here we go. Enjoy the ride:

It was invisible, as always.
They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, as they always do, seven and a half hours before the candidate rose. His men had canvassed Hart’s Location in New Hampshire days before, sending his autographed picture to each of the twelve registered voters in the village. They knew that they had five votes certain there, that Nixon had five votes certain—and that two were still undecided. Yet it was worth the effort, for Hart’s Location’s results would be the first flash of news on the wires to greet millions of voters as they opened their morning papers over coffee. But from there on it was unpredictable—invisible.
By the time the candidate left his Boston hotel at 8:30, several million had already voted across the country—in schools, libraries, churches, stores, post offices. These, too, were invisible, but it was certain that at this hour the vote was overwhelmingly Republican. On election day America is Republican until five or six in the evening. It is in the last few hours of the day that working people and their families vote, on their way home from work or after supper; it is then, at evening, that America goes Democratic if it goes Democratic at all. All of this is invisible, for it is the essence of the act that as it happens it is a mystery in which millions of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together, none of them knowing the shape of the whole.
What results from the fitting together of these secrets is, of course, the most awesome transfer of power in the world—the power to marshal and mobilize, the power to send men to kill or be killed, the power to tax and destroy, the power to create and the responsibility to do so, the power to guide and the responsibility to heal—all committed into the hands of one man. Heroes and philosophers, brave men and vile, have since Rome and Athens tried to make this particular manner of transfer of power work effectively; no people has succeeded at it better, or over a longer period of time, than the Americans. Yet as the transfer of this power takes place, there is nothing to be seen except an occasional line outside a church or school, or a file of people fidgeting in the rain, waiting to enter the booths. No bands play on election day, no troops march, no guns are readied, no conspirators gather in secret headquarters. The noise and the blare, the bands and the screaming, the pageantry and oratory of the long fall campaign, fade on election day. All the planning is over, all effort spent. Now the candidates must wait.

As I said, purple prose. Is it 'over the top'? The excessive flag-waving certainly grates on this non-American; but there are many truths implicit there.

Shall we continue with White, a bit further?

The candidate drove from his hotel at the head of his cavalcade to the old abandoned West End branch of the Boston Public Library. Here in these reading rooms, the countless immigrants and their children of Boston’s West End for two generations had, until a year ago, first set their feet on the ladder that was to take them up and out of the slums. Now, deserted and desolate, the empty library was the balloting place of the Third Precinct, Sixth Ward, and here at 8:43 he voted, signing the register as John F. Kennedy of 122 Bowdoin Street, Boston.
He was tense, it seemed, as he voted, thronged and jostled by the same adhesive train of reporters who had followed him, thronging and jostling, for three months across the country; only now his wife was with him in the press, and he was uncomfortable at how the pushing might affect her, she being eight months pregnant. He let himself be photographed as he came from the booth, and then the last cavalcade began, in familiar campaign order—photographers’ car first, candidate’s car second (the top of the convertible shut, for he did not want his wife to catch cold), security car next, three press buses following. It moved swiftly out of the West End, down through the grimy blight of Scollay Square, under the tunnel to East Boston and the airport. This had been his first political conquest—the Eleventh Congressional District of Massachusetts, immigrants’ land, full of Irish, Italians, Jews, some Negroes, few Yankees.
For a full year of journeys he had bounded up the steps of this same airplane in a grace act that had become familiar to all his trailing entourage—a last handshake to dignitaries, an abrupt turning away and quickstep run up the stairs, a last easy fling of the hand in farewell to the crowd cheering his departure, and then into the cozy homelike Mother Ship and security.
This morning he walked up the stairs slowly, a dark-blue mohair overcoat over his gray suit, bareheaded, slightly stooped. He was very tired. He paused at the top of the stairs and, still stooped, turned away. Then he slowly turned back to the door but made no gesture. Then he disappeared. He was off to Hyannisport: a quick flight of twenty-five minutes; no disturbance; the plane full of messages of congratulation; the welcoming group at the Cape shrunk to a few score—and no more speeches to make.

That works, for me, in capturing the journey of the Kennedy tribe. All four of JFK's grandparents emigrated from Ireland in the Famine years: Fitzgerald from rural County Limerick, to marry a Cox from Cavan; the Kennedy and his Murphy wife from County Wexford. They entered the Massachustts workforce at the bottom, as labourers, coopers and street-traders. 'Honey Fitz' cut it as a Boston politician, and entered Congress. Onwards and upwards, mainly through the ruthlessness of 'Honey Fitz'.