The Erection of the Statue of Liberty

THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION of the Declaration of Independence (in 1876) in the U.S. gave Edouard de Laboulaye, a French writer on American history and life, an opportunity to propose the erection of a memorial to commemorate the alliance of the two countries during the war and their friendship in the following century. Auguste Bartholdi, a young French sculptor, was selected to plan and execute the memorial. On his first visit to New York he conceived the plan of having the French people erect a colossal statue of Liberty upon one of the islands in the harbor.

Acting on this suggestion, the French began in 1875 to raise funds for the construction of such a statue. The task proved to be greater than had been expected and the statue was not completed at Paris until July 4, 1884. Meanwhile, an American committee was raising funds for the construction of the pedestal. The money was secured in 1886. After the statue had been dismantled in Paris, it was shipped to New York aboard a French ship to be reassembled in New York Haven, where it was unveiled on October 28, 1886.

Incoming and outgoing vessels pass near it -the figure of a woman who has just reached her freedom. Grasping a burning torch in her right hand and in her left holding a book of law inscribed July 4, 1776, she is represented as breaking the shackles lying at her feet.

From "Glimpses of Historical Areas"

Presidential stumbles and successes

An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek.

According to pollsters, the public rates John Fitzgerald Kennedy among the top three American presidents. Few historians would agree, and debunking biographies regularly appear. The latest biography, Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life, offers a sympathetic, though not uncritical, account of its subject. An excellent historian and a renowned biographer of Lyndon Johnson, Dallek tells a familiar story that lacks grand themes or much in the way of new interpretation. But he knows how to write a compelling narrative, and the fresh detail he has mined from recently available sources more than justifies this project.

Kennedy, it turns out, was very sick most of his life, a fact that he and his family carefully concealed. In 1937, after his junior year at Choate, he spent a month at the Mayo Clinic, suffering medical tortures that eventually revealed life-threatening colitis. Dallek suggests that Kennedy’s doctors may have prescribed steroids to relieve the colitis ‘but at the possible price of stomach, back, and adrenal problems.” In 1944 Kennedy had his first back surgery. In 1947 he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a condition of the adrenal glands. He also suffered from chronic and painful prostatitis, which may have resulted from “a possible sexual encounter in college,” Dallek’s rather oblique reference to the gonorrhea-like venereal disease that plagued Kennedy till his death. By the 1950s he was taking cortisone, antibiotics, procaine to relieve back pain, antispasmotics, testosterone for his weight and Nembutal to help him sleep. When Kennedy’s bag of medicines temporarily got lost in Connecticut during the 1960 presidential campaign, the candidate feared that if it fell into the wrong hands the cover-up of his bad health would unravel, along with his election chances.

On the obligatory subject of Kennedy’s ‘compulsive womanizing” Dallek’s none too successfully to find reasons. He offers the example of Kennedy’s father, his satisfaction in outdoing his brother Joe, his sense of entitlement ‘as a member of possible nuclear doom as rationales for his self-indulgence in the White House. And, of course, there was his health. Forced to withdraw from college because his white blood count was sinking, Jack wrote his friend Lem Billings, “Took a peak (sic) at my chart yesterday and could see they were mentally measuring me for a coffin. Eat, drink & make Olive (his current girlfriend), as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral’. Dallek quotes another historian who claimed that playing tennis took more of Kennedy’s time than sex.

In the chapters on Kennedy’s presidency, Dallek is less Concorde which personality and character than with policy, especially foreign policy. “I mean, who gives a (expletive) if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25…?” Kennedy once asked. Dallek praises the Kennedy who resisted the hawks and reproves the Kennedy who was a hawk himself. There was, for example, the matter of Vietnam. Dallek believes that American involvement in the war was a mistake. Kennedy had his doubts, too. In 1961 the president resisted advice that he commit combat troops to the struggle against the Viet Cong, but believing that the stakes were real, he sent military advisers instead. As a result, he found himself in a war he would not admit and couldn’t win. In early 1963 the CIA reported that “the war remains a slowly escalating stalemate.” By then Kennedy was groping for ways to disengage but dared not risk the domestic political consequences.

In May 1963 South Vietnamese president Ngo Diem initiated a confrontation with Buddhist monks that raised serious questions about the viability of his regime. A bitter debate ensured between those of the president’s advisers who wanted to encourage a coup by dissident generals in Saigon and those who did not. Vacillating, Kennedy signaled the plotters in August to proceed but tried to slow them down in late October. He was too late. When he received word on November 2 that Diem and his brother had been murdered, “he leaped to his feet and rushed from the room,” recalled Gen. Maxwell Taylor, “with a look of shock and dismay on his face”.

On civil rights, the preeminent domestic issue of his presidency, Kennedy, says Dallek, was a “temporizer”. Through 1961 and 1962, he refused to risk his political capital or provide moral leadership to meet rising demands for racial justice, preferring cautious executive action. Fear of violence changed his mind. During the spring of 1963 bombs and a ghetto riot attended Martin Luther King’s campaign in Birmingham, and a survey of other Southern cities suggested imminent race war. On June 13, the day his government forced Alabama Gov. George Wallace to admit two black students to the state university, Kennedy finally made the moral case for civil rights bill. “There comes a time when a man must make a stand,” he privately remarked.

But Kennedy continued to temporize. Fearful of white resistance, congressional reluctance and Southern white defections in the 1964 elections, he was prepared to compromise away much of his own bill. Dallek believes that if Kennedy had proposed a civil rights bill in 1961 and made passage of the whole bill a moral imperative in 1963, he might very well have prevailed. As it happened, Lyndon Johnson was the president who refused to temporize and saved the bill.

Dallek concludes that Kennedy’s performance was “a patchwork of stumbles and significant achievements.” The Kennedy presidency, he says, “spoke to the country’s better angels, inspired visions of a less nation and world, and demonstrated that America was still the last best hope of mankind.”

Though much in his book undermines this cheerful conclusion, scholars and the wider public alike will appreciate Dallek’s vivid portrait.