Volume 1, Number 9 · December 26, 1963
The Fate of the Union: Kennedy and After
By C. Vann Woodward
Eight men have died while serving as President of the United States, but the first seven furnish no very instructive analogy for the eighth. Three of them, Lincoln, McKinley, and Franklin Roosevelt, were war Presidents who had fought and won their wars and served out more than a complete term before they fell. Three others, Harrison, Taylor, and Garfield, were not really in office long enough to establish policies of long-range consequence before death overtook them. Unlike his ill-fated predecessors, President Kennedy was cut down in mid-career toward the end of his third year in office. He had had time to make mistakes and to learn from them, but not enough time to profit much from them. He had had time to make plans and policies, but not time to fulfill them. 'We have made a beginning—but we have only begun,' he told Congress in his message last January. 'Now the time has come to make the most of our gains—to translate the renewal of our national strength into the achievement of our national purpose.' But there was not time enough. And that is the real poignancy of his tragedy—unfulfillment, great potentialities unfulfilled.
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