Just over 60 years ago, on a late autumn evening, I sat, having eaten my tea at a small card table in the little front room of my parents’ tiny terraced housed in Preston Lancashire. It was a Friday, the weekend beckoned - no more College work for a day or two - but as I sat knife and fork in my hand little did I know that it was to be a Friday I would never forget, one I would still remember in my 80th year. I was 18 years old. The ancient black and white TV in the corner of the room was on and I had before me an empty plate having just eaten the egg and chips that my mother had cooked for my tea. I was half watching the local North West News on the TV whilst at the same time copying up notes from an A level Economics class that I had attended that day at Blackpool Technical College & School of Art, having just started the A level course at the College with the hope that I would get the required qualifications to gain admission to a teacher training college.Now, 62 years later I remember that night with absolute clarity and I know that I am not alone. It is often said – correctly – that those who were alive when President John F Kennedy was assassinated will always remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of Kennedy’s death. I can and do. As I sat, my lecture notes in front of me and my pen in my hand, the local news was interrupted and a newsflash began to give the early details of JFKs assassination and I, like millions of others across the world, suddenly found our world turned upside down; in the words of Don McLean’s iconic “American Pie” ‘…There we were all in one place, A generation lost in space, With no time left to start again….” That night we sat glued to the TV and radio waiting for more news, hoping against hope that it would be good news. It wasn’t – and the whole world, I think, both cried and held its breath at the same time. The following morning I walked into an eerily silent Preston town centre and can well remember joining the crowded groups of people – many in tears - standing outside TV retailers, TV rental shops and the Owen & Owen department store looking at the screens of the TVs on display in the shop windows and following the black and white pictures of the scenes in Dallas, Washington, New York and the rest of the world's great capitals.
I have thought much about that night and those events in the past 48 hours because of recent national and international events and especially because of a book that I have just finished reading – but will read again, and again, and again. The book is called “Letters that Changed the World” by the internationally renowned British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. The book is a compilation of letters written by prominent people – Kings & Queens, politicians, cultural leaders, soldiers, religious leaders etc – and these letters not only give an insight into the writer, but give a context to the times and events in which the writer lived and in doing so give us an understanding of our world and its and our own history. There are letters written by Henry VIII, Ghandi, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, Mozart, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Queen Elizabeth I, Michelangelo, Stalin, Alan Turing, Catherine the Great, the Egyptian Pharoah Rameses the Great, Vita Sackville West, George Bush, Churchill, the Roman Emperor Hadrian, Ada Lovelace, Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln ……….and many, many more. Each one illuminating, humbling, and marvellously uplifting – and the common thread being that the words of the letter perhaps changed the world. In short, they reflect and explain our shared history.
The world events of the past four months have seen a dangerous and uncouth, mad, and almost functionally illiterate demagogue, Donald Trump, elected to the most powerful office in the world by half an American electorate drunk on its own Republican stupidity, crass naivety, triviality, and anomie. But not to be out done, we in England are throwing ourselves down the same horrific abyss as millions of egregious, ill-informed, intellectually challenged and delusional electors hang on to the venal utterances of the snake oil salesmen that comprise the Reform Party and of their insouciant, solipsistic, perfidious and pernicious spokesman Nigel Farage.
Neither of these situations mirroring each other across the Atlantic will end well; we have two once great nations increasingly in thrall to the stupid, the misinformed, the ignorant and, if the events at the Washington Capitol in January 2021 promoted and sanctioned by Trump are anything to go by, the violent and criminal. Sadly, however, it is the innocent, our children and grandchildren that will ultimately suffer in the fall out from the rise of these demagogues and in the repercussions that will follow these tragic travesties of democracy. I am now 80 years old and a member of the generation that has allowed this to happen on our watch - our children and grandchildren will not view us kindly for the world we are leaving them. They will not be wrong.
And as I have pondered this I have thought of a letter included in the book I mentioned above. It is a letter which, I believe, both in content and style, shows how far we have declined both as a society and as a politically conscious and responsible democracy. Today, we live in an age when Donald Trump, his acolytes and his electors fill social media with poorly structured, grammatically suspect and often foul mouthed text tirades and in the UK Nigel Farage and his followers think that the high spot of the human condition and ambition is a pint of cheap beer in a tacky Weatherspoon’s pub while they curse, rant, and pour scorn and hate upon other human beings and their beliefs and aspirations. This letter shows a different world – but sadly, in my view, a world long gone, although still within my memory.
The letter was written under the most trying of circumstances and times. It is a letter written by Jacqueline Kennedy the wife of the assassinated President John Kennedy just a week after her husband’s death in Dallas. It was written on one of the last nights that she spent in the White House and ending her role as America’s First Lady after the new President, Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in aboard Air Force 1 on the flight back to Washington from Dallas whilst the newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy stood looking on in her blood spattered pink Chanel suit. For my generation those events were not simply iconic they were (and still are) deeply moving and influential upon our lives and beliefs. JFK’s charisma and ability to communicate with everyone – no matter age, sex, creed, nation, politics – was the age of a new dawn. His White House became known as Camelot – reminding us of the mythical and court of King Arthur, a place of honour and virtue; Kennedy's White House, like the mythical Camelot, was a place, by repute, of culture, good taste, kindness and above all wisdom. Kennedy, with his movie-star looks, his culture – he was said to read André Malraux while putting on his tie in the morning – his eloquence, his intelligence and wit epitomised this and swept us along. Of course, in reality it may not have been any of those things but such was Kennedy’s charisma and ability to communicate with everyman that we believed; it gave us hope and allowed us to imagine better things and a better world. And in those long gone days we needed hope. In 1961 the Berlin Wall had been built, the Cold War was at its height. On the other side of the world the Vietnam War was exploding and dragging humanity towards the nuclear abyss, and in October 1962 we had all stood on the very edge of nuclear Armageddon as the Cuban Missile Crisis brought terror to us all. I can remember going to bed each night of the two weeks when that Crisis filled our TV’s, radios and newspapers and like millions of others wondering if I would wake in the morning or if my home would just be a nuclear wasteland. Throughout these crises JFK seemed to be the person to whom we clung as the USA and the Soviet Union faced each other, each with its finger on the nuclear button. 
The letter is written by Mrs Kennedy to Nikita Khrushchev, President of the Soviet Union – the man who had faced her husband John Kennedy from the opposite side of the world throughout these existential events and terrifying times. It is supremely elegant and touching both in its literary simplicity and political/presidential grandeur. It is a letter full of grace to both uplift and humble and, if you are of my generation and lived through the nightmare of November 22nd 1963, and the years leading up to it, to bring tears to one’s eyes. It is a deeply personal letter but one which the First Lady knew might have international repercussions. Sadly, however, it is a letter that the current incumbents of the White House or Nigel Farage and his acolytes could not begin to write or even understand for what is implicit in the letter are the very qualities that they refute and despise – empathy, kindness, humanity, responsibility. Nor could the malfeasant, feeble minded and feckless Republican voters who voted for Trump or the ragbag tribe of easily deceived, wilfully ignorant malcontents who supported Farage’s Reform Party in England comprehend or relate to the sentiments in the letter. One only needs to read their foul mouthed, illogical, comments on social media or in the press or hear them on TV to know that their only interest is a selfish concern for themselves; wisdom is an unknown trait and wider humanity is dead to them. So, what did the letter say? I copy below:
Washington, December 1, 1963.
Dear Mr. Chairman President,
I would like to thank you for sending Mr.Mikoyan as your representative to my husband’s funeral.
He looked so upset when he came through the line, and I was very moved.
I tried to give him a message for you that day—but as it was such a terrible day for me, I do not know if my words came out as I meant them to.
So now, in one of the last nights I will spend in the White House, in one of the last letters I will write on this paper at the White House, I would like to write you my message.
I send it only because I know how much my husband cared about peace, and how the relation between you and him was central to this care in his mind. He used to quote your words in some of his speeches-”In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.”
You and he were adversaries, but you were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up. You respected each other and could deal with each other. I know that President Johnson will make every effort to establish the same relationship with you.
The danger which troubled my husband was that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones.
While big men know the needs for self-control and restraint—little men are sometimes moved more by fear and pride. If only in the future the big men can continue to make the little ones sit down and talk, before they start to fight.
I know that President Johnson will continue the policy in which my husband so deeply believed—a policy of control and restraint—and he will need your help.
I send this letter because I know so deeply of the importance of the relationship which existed between you and my husband, and also because of your kindness, and that of Mrs. Khrushcheva in Vienna.
I read that she had tears in her eyes when she left the American Embassy in Moscow, after signing the book of mourning. Please thank her for that.
Sincerely,
Jacqueline Kennedy
Mmmmm! Big men and little men. The First Lady hit the nail on the head. But today, the High Offices of the USA and the UK are increasingly filled by Little Men – men high on pride, deluded and delusional, fuelled with anger and lacking in wisdom and restraint; ready to confront and fight rather than talk and agree, unable or undesiring of seeing the other person’s point of view or imagining a better world, unable and unwilling to empathise, sympathise or understand. In short, unaware or wilfully ignorant of the advice of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” JFK and Nikita Khrushchev understood this - and I believe so did Jacqueline Kennedy. But as for Trump, Farage and the rest there is little or no hope.
But within this there is an inherent problem which would be extremist rulers such as Trump and Farage explore and use to their advantage - it is the paradox of tolerance. Karl Popper, an Austrian, fled his native country when the Nazis took over and settled in England. He became one of the world's foremost philosophers and his book 'The Open Society and Its Enemies' first published on 1945 is considered one of the three most influential books of the 20th century. It is a book that I constantly refer to such is its wisdom and power. Popper had witnessed in his own country and wider Europe how easily legitimate, elected democratic parties and politicians caved in and failed to prevent the rise of fascism and totalitarianism. He was also troubled by the influence that powerful people - like Hitler and Mussolini - had over millions, moulding opinion to their own evil ends with little apparent push back. Popper was clear: “If we are to survive then we must break with the habit of deference to powerful men.” But he identified a more important issue – what he termed the "paradox of tolerance". Democracies, he argued, are by their very nature tolerant; they see and respect everyone’s point of view, they understand, and value everyone and their opinions equally. But, he argued, within that there is a potential problem; a paradox. Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. “We must therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate intolerance" he stated. If a society is tolerant without limits, then the intolerant – the Trumps and the Farages, their acolytes, and their misguided, evil beliefs - will eventually destroy the society's ability to be tolerant - just as Popper had seen Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini do in their countries.
If intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they exploit a society’s values and erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices. We have seen this in the USA in recent months, at the Washington Capitol in January 2021, and now with the election of Reform Party in the UK we are seeing it here too. Extreme, intolerant views are gaining an ever-increasing foothold because we “tolerate” those who hold them. We have been warned, but have not taken heed and that has allowed Trump, Farage and the rest to ignore the wisdom and advice of Atticus Finch and so thrive.
I fear for the world that my children and grandchildren are growing up into, but hopeful that they might create something better - at the moment, however, things look bleak indeed.
