God, human folly and laughter

“There are three things which are real: God, human folly and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third.”—John F. Kennedy

I don’t recall precisely when I read these lines for the first time, but since that day, long ago, the words have never left me. From time to time I’ve wondered about the context in which Jack Kennedy spoke them, and was surprised to learn recently of their origin. They were written, not spoken, and were inscribed on a silver mug presented as a birthday present to a friend, Dave Powers, Special Assistant to President during the Kennedy administration, on his birthday in 1962.

As a Massachusetts boy raised in the Catholic tradition, with an Irish mother, I was keenly aware of Kennedy and the challenges he faced in winning the presidency. Family members provided us children with campaign buttons; one of them read “If I Were 21, I’d Vote for Kennedy.” I don’t recall actually wearing them, particular not to school in our overwhelmingly Protestant town on the South Shore of Massachusetts. At school our young classmates echoed the prejudiced words they no doubt had heard at home about “the Pope running the country.” They even asserted that a tunnel would be built between Washington D.C. and the Vatican to facilitate the Pope’s takeover of the U.S. At a time when named telephone exchanges still existed, a frequently voiced joke was that the White House phone number would be changed to “Et cum Spirit - 220.”

In retrospect, Kennedy’s election and the reality of his incomplete term in office did not eradicate such prejudices. I was at home, sick, the day of Kennedy’s assassination, but when my siblings returned home they reported that the reaction to the announcement at school of the President’s death included cheers from some of their classmates. Still, the issue of Catholicism as a barrier to national elected office does appear to have been eliminated in the aftermath of Kennedy’s demise, the remnant of these days being the moral/political question of abortion.

Kennedy was from a wealthy family, and it was common knowledge in Massachusetts that not all that wealth had been earned simply through hard and honest work. However Jack Kennedy and his family claimed the high ground culturally, and his time in office came to be characterised as “Camelot”—a time of glamour, of progressive thinking and bold new endeavours, and a celebration of the arts.

I think of the words Kennedy had inscribed on the