Captain Kirk: good, bad, roasted or recast?

Trekcheck: Of Rumor, Roast and SOST in Seattle

SOST in Seattle

It’s confirmed. I will be moderating a panel called “The Soul of Star Trek: The Prime Directive and Beyond” at the Planet Xpo Star Trek 40th Anniversary Gala Celebration in Seattle. As of now it’s scheduled for Friday, September 8 at 3:30 p in the main auditorium at the Science Fiction Museum. Also on the panel will be screenwriter (and TNG writer) Tracy Torme, and authors Jeff Greenwald (Future Perfect) and Dave Marinaccio (All I Really Need to Know I Learned From Star Trek.) So if you’re going to be in Seattle, come on by where no blog has gone before, and engage.

Rumor

Several sites have repeated this bombshell of a story, all using the same source—a post at the Omega Sector. The post reports on an article in Star Trek Magazine, presumably the Brit magazine, that purportedly quotes a producer of Star Trek XI as denying the rumors that the movie will recast the roles of Kirk and Spock. Since that’s only been the major assumption everyone has made about the movie, it’s pretty significant. But isn’t there somebody else with a copy of the magazine who can confirm it?


Roast

I found to my relief that at least the first several comments on the William Shatner site share my view of the Roast on Comedy Central: For the most part it was sordid, dismaying and not funny. There was little humor and less wit on display; the so-called jokes about age were very old and tired, showing that these younger “comedians” have shriveled imaginations; and the jokes about race were not only hoary, they were the kind of jokes that were exhibit A in cultural racism as widely discussed in the 1960s, when Star Trek broke racial barriers on television. The gay jokes were obscene, one-dimensional and ugly. One or two or even a half-dozen might have approached being funny or at least tolerable, but getting continually hit over the head with an infected sledgehammer is not my idea of hilarity.

The level of so-called humor may be familiar and comfortable to those who watch Comedy Central shows, and who count themselves fans of South Park, or even those who like the milder forms of loud, rude, crude, hostile and self-loathing toilet humor that characterizes many of today’s comic films. But for viewers who have seen only The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on that channel, or who tuned in because of Captain Kirk, it must have been profoundly shocking and disillusioning.

Even many of the higher wattage invited guests (including Star Trek actors like Brent Spiner and Rene Auberjonois; I think I spotted Rodger Corman in the crowd) appeared appalled. There was some poor woman in the front, apparently the date or wife of somebody who appeared with Shatner in his police series, who looked aghast and confused from the outset, as well as deeply humiliated.

It was a depressing and humiliating experience watching it. It was all most unfortunate because Captain Kirk is a hero to children, and I’ll bet many badgered their parents into letting them see this. Teenagers who see Shatner as Denny Crain as well as Captain Kirk can now believe that hate humor is acceptable and funny. Well done all.

I probably wouldn’t even have watched it except for the piece in Trek Today that quoted George Takei being very articulate on political matters that relate to his view of what Star Trek means. It also presented some of his lines from the roast, some of which were pretty daring but also witty, and so I thought it might be worth seeing. But not only did his best lines never make it on the air, most of his presentation was more of the same sordid and moronic fratboy obscenities as vomited up by the stage full of surly no-talents around him. This outspoken opponent of stereotypes felt compelled to stereotype and demean himself. I wonder if the others had made the same sort of cracks about his Japanese ancestry as they made about his homosexuality, if he would have joined in those as well. I may have lost some respect for him, especially because he didn’t show much for himself.

As for his attitude toward Shatner, there was so much obvious hostility and vengefulness that it really wasn’t at all funny—it was embarassing psychodrama. I suppose the built-up pressure of all the years of public pretense about his feelings concerning Shatner just got loose, but it sure didn’t look like it was all in good fun.

If you’ve ever seen Nichelle Nichols in person, you know that she is a true lady: regal in bearing, generous and courteous, but she takes no nonsense. Of course there’s nothing wrong in her showing an earthy side in public, and perhaps it was because she didn’t share sufficiently in the ugliness otherwise on display that her part of the roast was cut to a minute or so for the show that aired, and shoved in just before a commercial. But she was a target of jokes that to me demeaned her and Star Trek’s legacy in maters of race and the Other. I’m guessing that she regrets participating.

As for Shatner, this was hardly the affirmation of his status in popular culture—it was a humiliating mistake. Not that he came off so badly himself, but that he participated in this catastrophe in the first place. The only person who came off well was Leonard Nimoy, by refusing to participate but doing an actually funny little preliminary filmed skit with Shatner. (Note the prominent statue of the Buddha in the background at Nimoy’s, very droll).

I’m not against Star Trek stars making fun of themselves, or coming down to earth with their humor (You Tube has a funny piece with Patrick Stewart pretending to talk with another actor about the screenplay he’s writing, which consists of one scene after another of women suddenly getting their clothes blown off “and you can see everything.” It’s especially witty if you know anything about actor lore.) I don’t even care if they make fools of themselves. But I do object to them undermining everything Star Trek stood for, including notions of quality. That roast is worth forgetting as soon and as completely as possible. Maybe an Emmy or two for Shatner on Sunday will help... Now Boston Legal--that's funny.

Now if all goes well, the next installment of the Countdown to 40…

JFK eternal flame

Countdown to 40: From the New to the Final Fronter

by William S. Kowinski

1960 was the first time the Democratic National Convention would be held in Los Angeles. The party and the city had been preparing for many months (including the Los Angeles Police Department, where Gene Roddenberry used to work, and where his father and other family and friends still did. ) Not only would there be thousands of delegates, politicians and reporters, but by then the television networks had learned how to cover a convention.

This one was shaping up to be especially dramatic, perfect for the TV cameras. Television was an especially effective medium for the young Senator from Massachusetts and front-running candidate for the presidential nomination, John F. Kennedy.

Gene Roddenberry had been raised a Democrat---his father was uncompromising on the matter. But GR had another reason to be watching closely. Some 17 years before, Navy Lieutenant John Kennedy had also served in the South Pacific. In 1943, just a few hundred miles from where GR was stationed, Kennedy’s PT boat had been cut in half by a Japanese destroyer. Planes from Roddenberry's base joined the search and rescue, and if GR hadn’t been involved in an accident that disabled his plane, he might well have been in the air looking for Kennedy and his men that day.

After six days, Kennedy was found. He swam three miles to a small island, leading two of his men, and towing an injured man with a rope held in his teeth. He kept them alive until they were rescued. After recovering from his back injuries, Kennedy ran for Congress and then became a Senator from Massachusetts. After nearly being nominated for vice-president in 1956, Kennedy entered presidential primaries in 1960 and became the first candidate to earn his way to the national convention through votes rather than the approval of party bosses.

Gene Roddenberry

JFK to GR:Challenges for the Future

When the convention gathered at the LA Memorial Sports Arena, the struggle was shaping up to be between Kennedy and the older powers of the party, and his nomination was not certain. But after a dramatic week, he won on the first ballot.

Kennedy's official acceptance speech came a day later, on the evening of July 15. He addressed 80,000 delegates and spectators outdoors at the Los Angeles Coliseum, and millions more in the national TV audience. After the expected political remarks, Kennedy talked about the future. If he had been addressing Gene Roddenberry’s future, he couldn’t have been more direct.

"I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier,” Kennedy said, softening and slowing his delivery, and then gradually building to a pulsing series of dramatic statements. “From the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West….Their motto was not 'Every man for himself,' but 'All for the common cause.'"
"…we stand today on the edge of a new frontier—the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and paths, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats…"

"The new frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges…Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus."

"…I believe the times demand invention, innovation, imagination, decision. I am asking each of you to be new pioneers on that new frontier."
Kennedy’s Republican opponent was Vice-President Richard Nixon, nominated without real opposition several weeks later, Both candidates were World War II veterans and comparatively young, with young children. In addition to the usual rallies and speeches, they engaged in a series of three televised debates, the first in history. Nixon was a serious debater, but Kennedy was calm, incisive, forceful and witty, with a dazzling smile. Both spoke knowledgably on a range of subjects, but Nixon was a know quantity—it was Kennedy’s assured erudition, his command of detail that made an impression, and defused the charges of inexperience.

GR must have viewed the televised debates—and noted their huge audiences and wide discussion of them-- with something close to joy. Earlier in the year he had proposed a series idea to the British media impresario, Lew Grade, called Controversy. It was about public issues, and in a followup letter in August, GR used the example of the televised success of a “debate” between Nixon and Soviet Premier Khrushchev, an informal discussion that had occurred on Khrushchev’s visit to America. (In that same letter, he proposed a series based on H.G. Wells’ Outline of History.)

In October, Kennedy was drawing enthusiastic crowds, inspiring a kind of friendly frenzy among the young that used to be reserved for a few pop stars, like Elvis and the young Sinatra. Then there seemed to be a lull, and Nixon was catching up. Historian and Kennedy partisan Arthur Schlesinger wondered whether it was because the electorate was “having sudden doubts whether it really wanted so intense a leader, so disturbing a challenge to the certitudes of their existence; it was as if the American people commenced to think that the adventure of Kennedy might be too much…”

It was a pattern repeated on election night. At first Kennedy surged ahead, and then very close to victory, his vote count stalled, while Nixon's grew. Eventually it all came down to California, in the final time zone to close the polls and start the counting. The presidency was not decided until the following morning, and Kennedy was the President-Elect.

JFK Inaugural January 20, 1961

From New to Next Generation

Then on a frigid January day in Washington, he delivered his inaugural address. It was instantly impressive, and has grown in fame since. But by the 1990s, all that was ever heard of it was one sentence: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” By the early 21st century, that was reduced to an iconic soundbite of two words: Ask not.

But that was only one sentence among many heard that day, and talked about and quoted for days and months to come. There was the call, early in the speech, to fulfill the postwar hopes of those who had fought World War II. It was a call to action to Kennedy’s generation, and to Roddenberry’s :

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace..”

While Kennedy signaled his determination to remain firm against any aggression (and these words are often quoted to define him as a Cold War president) he also called for cooperation, for both sides to “explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems that divide us,” and to end the arms race and control nuclear weapons. He pledged support for international agreements and institutions such as the United Nations-- “our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace…”As events would finally prove, these were heartfelt and serious statements, and they would become more so as time went on.

He also signaled that his new frontier would include creative and positive uses of science and technology:

“Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.”
He linked progress in science and technology, as well as in economics and international institutions, to a moral purpose grounded in our common humanity. To the world’s poor he pledged help, “not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” He asked his fellow citizens to join him in “a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”

As he had in Los Angeles, he challenged Americans to do the difficult, with energy and realism but with purpose.

All this will not be finished in the first 100 days,” he concluded, and more than prophesized, “ Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”

President Kennedy in the White House

Roots of Starfleet

And so it did begin. Kennedy’s first official act was to increase the amount and upgrade the quality of surplus food for the poor and unemployed. He challenged Congress to pass a higher minimum wage, and a system of medical care for the aged (which became Medicare.) He began the Alliance for Progress, a partnership with Latin America to address the root causes of social unrest, such as poverty and inequality.

He began the Peace Corps, the program that best symbolized his intentions and the Kennedy style—pragmatic compassion, active participation, youth and enthusiasm. The Peace Corps caught the national imagination, and Gene Roddenberry was proposing a “youth corps” TV series, saying in a memo, “Unlike shows which are offered purely as escape entertainment, this one involves certain moral and philosophical issues on which I have strong feelings.”

What Kennedy represented, or even personified, could be defined as what Arthur Schlesinger called the Politics of Hope. Schlesinger noted Emerson’s division of “the party of the past and the party of the future, between the party of memory and the party of hope.” Though this essay predates the Kennedy years, Schlesinger was a White House advisor when he published in his book with that title in 1962. He was redefining American liberalism for the 1960s as the belief “that society can and should be improved, and that the way to improve it is to apply human intelligence to social and economic problems.”

Kennedy advocated a future that included an independent role for the imagination and the arts. The arts also were an outlet for the Kennedy glamour and mystique, especially when the President and his beautiful First Lady, Jacqueline, hosted artists and writers at the White House. “…the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may,” Kennedy proclaimed. “In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”

But Kennedy’s enthusiasm for the future was best symbolized in America’s suddenly vibrant leap into space. The shock of Sputnik led to humiliation in 1957, when the first U.S. space rocket staggered up before crashing back and exploding on the launch pad, in full view of the world’s television sets. The Eisenhower administration finally devoted funds and priority to a program some prominent members had previously and publicly mocked. The forsaken Orbiter program devised by Werner von Braun was suddenly revived, and resulted in the first American satellite launched in early 1958.

Mercury capsule, John Glenn, Annie Glenn, JFK

Launching the Enterprise

Though the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Mercury astronaut program were created in the final Eisenhower years, the efforts to send a man into space didn’t reach fruition until Kennedy was in office. Both the Russians and Americans conducted numerous launchings and tests of vehicles, sending up animals and instruments, trying to return and recover them on earth. Then in April 1961, the first human to orbit the earth was the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin. His vehicle weighed five tons—twice as heavy as the planned Mercury capsules.

But in early May, Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space. It was a short, sub-orbital flight, but every aspect of it was televised, and the adventure galvanized the country. Shepard received Manhattan’s largest ticker-tape parade to date, and met the President and First Lady at the White House.

Then in late May, Kennedy went to Congress with an astounding proposal: he dedicated the U.S. to land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth, by the end of the 1960s. The American space program hadn’t yet placed a human or even a large payload into orbit. Yet though Congress was skeptical, the country was excited. They were even more thrilled when, after Virgil Grissom’s sub-orbital flight in July, the following February John Glenn orbited the earth three times, again with full television coverage. His parade broke Shepard’s record. He was the first American hero of the space age. President Kennedy welcomed him to the White House, referring to space as “the new ocean…and I believe the United States must sail on it…”
While there was no longer an immediate military reason for an expanded space program (the U.S. had missiles that could carry the now compact hydrogen bombs to distant targets), there was national prestige involved. In his remarks to Congress proposing what would become the Apollo program, Kennedy spoke of the space efforts of both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. and “the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere” as a challenge to prove that a free people could achieve great ends. “But this is not merely a race, “ he said. “Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.”

While he praised recent U.S. efforts, he asserted: “Now it is time to take longer strides--time for a great new American enterprise--time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.”

But just spending more money on space technology wasn’t going to be enough. He said this commitment required an unprecedented “degree of dedication, organization and discipline.” of selflessness and working together. It could not be accomplished “unless every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant gives his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space.”

But the real key to the Kennedy years was in the shift of mood and expectation in feeling and attitude, hopes and expectations about the future. Since at least the end of the 19th century, when H.G. Wells was creating both science fiction and futurism, and when people in general were getting used to the idea of large-scale change, the stories about the future gravitated towards one extreme or the other: towards new heavens or new hells, dreams or nightmares, utopia or oblivion.

World of Tomorrow Fair 1939

Visions of the Future: Fear and Hope

America had been industrializing throughout the 20th century, and as waves of new immigrant workers joined those who had come to America for a better life on the land and in the cities in earlier generations, the future became the national faith. When Gene Roddenberry was growing up during the crisis of the Great Depression, that faith was fierce. "Then and now, you have to wonder what really held it all together," said a character in The American Clock, a play by Arthur Miller about the Depression, "and maybe it was simply the Future: the people were still not ready to give it up.”

By 1939, some Americans got to see what that future might look like, at the New York World’s Fair. Its theme was “The World of Tomorrow,” and it purported to portray the coming utopia of 1960. There was the gleaming white Trylon, the shimmering Glass Center, the Perisphere that contained the model city of the future: “Democricity,” with its white houses on pure paved streets, surrounded by trees and grass. At the General Motors "Futurama" chairs moved along a conveyor belt past screens showing what life would be like in this utopia: happy, healthy people driving air conditioned cars (that cost only $200), across vast distances on wide superhighways.

According to the guide’s recorded voice, many people would live in houses made of special materials, so if you didn't like how your house looked you could simply throw it away. They would live in small villages where they could grow their own food, and they would work in clean modern factories, or skyscrapers in the city, 1500 feet high. Fourteen-lane turnpikes would connect everything. Cars would speed along them safely, because the cars drove in separate lanes protected by high curbs, and automatic radio control would keep each car a safe distance from the ones behind and in front of it. Because of technology and efficiency, the voice said, most of America would be forest again. Everyone would be well educated, there would be little disease, and the average lifespan would be seventy-five years.

At the Westinghouse display, a woman called Mrs. Drudge washed dishes in her sink while Mrs. Modern used an electric dishwasher. Mrs. Modern got done first, and was always clean and smiling. At the RCA display, a couple of puppets named Kukla and Ollie demonstrated another new feature for the home, called television.

But if they yearned for such a utopia, Americans also harbored a fear of oblivion, as was illustrated in 1938, on Halloween. Radio was the major entertainment medium for the country as a whole, but also the major news medium. The young director the Mercury Theatre of the Air, Orson Welles, got the idea of combining them, and gave a copy of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds to writer Howard Koch, and told him to write the story in the form of news bulletins.

Those who tuned in the night of October 31 were told in the first minute of the broadcast that it would be a dramatization of the Wells’ story. Orson Welles intoned the introduction, using phrases from the novel, but also described the story as beginning on October 30, 1939—a year into the future—when “business was better. The war scare was over…”

Business wasn’t much better in the ninth year of the Depression, but it was the war scare of 1938 that probably inspired the panic that ensued when at least some listeners (how many is disputed) believed they were hearing an actual invasion in progress. By 1938, the duly elected leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, had declared himself War Minister, and marched his armies into Austria. German planes had committed the first bombing of a European city from the air, destroying the Spanish town of Guernica, an act rendered in black and white horror by Pablo Picasso. Japan had invaded and occupied areas of China.

Koch rewrote Wells’ war to take place in the United States, starting near Princeton, New Jersey, the new home of Albert Einstein. Listeners who tuned in late heard unfamiliar voices who nevertheless sounded like real radio news reporters talking about Martians in their invincible fighting machines as they advanced on major cities across America. There was enough of a reaction that newspapers such as the New York Times reported on the panic the next day.

It was this fear of oblivion that seemed proven first. The hope for utopia was soon dashed as war exploded across Europe during the run of the 1939 World’s Fair. When Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, some Americans refused to believe the radio news reports, having been fooled once already by phony Martians. President Roosevelt blamed Orson Welles.

But five years later, even after the Allies triumphed over the mortal threats of the Nazis and Imperial Japan, the atomic bomb quickly dropped a pall over many utopian hopes. By the time the real 1960 came around many of the utopian dreams of the 1939 Fair had ironically come true (though not always with wholly utopian results), but oblivion seemed closer than ever, and the more likely fate.

Then the Kennedy years changed the balance, tipping it towards the politics of hope, especially for Gene Roddenberry’s generation, apparently taking over the country, beginning with the White House. Kennedy was 43 when he became President; GR was 39 then. It was their time to transform the country and build the future, and like GR, many of the people around Kennedy, or who Kennedy inspired, had lots of ideas on what ought to be done, and how.

But just as importantly, Kennedy redefined the terms of utopia and oblivion, not as two possible fates, but as a choice. He stated it most succinctly at the beginning of his Inaugural Address: “The world is very different now,” he said. “For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”
They could choose utopia or they could choose oblivion. There would be considerable drama concerning these choices in the Kennedy years. In the Berlin crisis of 1961, and most especially in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the world came as close to nuclear oblivion as it ever knowingly had.

For a tense week in October, the United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war, with the world watching. World power politics became human beings confronting fatal choices and imagining consequences of actually employing the technology of mutual self-destruction. Oblivion was an emotion, a mistake, a decision away. When the Soviets agreed to withdraw their missiles from Cuba and the crisis ended, Kennedy committed himself to changing the terms of international politics.

The first step was a nuclear test ban treaty. But when negotiations with the Soviets stalled, Kennedy used his commencement address at American University in June 1963 to not only press for an agreement, but to move the world away from the risk of instant oblivion and towards a transformation. It was the kind of world statesmanship and advocacy for the future that was H.G. Wells’ repeated dream.

JFK American University June 1963

Speaking to the Trek Future

Listen carefully to what JFK said that day, and see in your mind's eye how these words were played out in the Star Trek saga...

In calling for peace, Kennedy quickly set new terms, both realistic and bold. “What kind of peace do I mean?” Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war…I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children…“Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women; not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.”
“Total war makes no sense,” Kennedy said, repeating the phrase several times, emphasizing devastation so extensive it would be visited on “generations yet unborn.” “I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men.”

“I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war. But we have no more urgent task.”
Some opponents regarded negotiating arms agreements as a sign of weakness—to them, the test ban efforts were “defeatist.” Kennedy deftly reversed the charge. He said believing peace is impossible is defeatist, because it means “that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. ” Then he used the phrase that more than any other sums up the Kennedy faith: “Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man.”
Though he acknowledged the value of dreams and hopes, he advocated an attainable peace “based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions…Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts…For peace is a process, a way of solving problems.”
Kennedy called for cooperation based on a certain historical objectivity that has since been borne out more dramatically than he could have dreamed. “However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem,” he said, “the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.”
For many Americans at the time, Soviet Communists were incomprehensible and threatening. But Kennedy suggested that, just as the Soviets misunderstood America, Americans had a distorted view of them. “No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.”

Kennedy acknowledged the evils of Communism, but also complimented the Soviets on their achievements in science and culture. In speaking of the abhorrence of war that the two nations had in common he eulogized Soviet suffering in World War II. No act of honoring could have meant more to the Russian people.

The speech subtly linked this theme of suffering with an assertion of mutual interest in ending the arms race itself. Kennedy pointed out that both nations are “devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease.”

Kennedy added the “ironical but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours.”

Peace, he concludes, is a primary interest for both nations---indeed for all nations. In the most quoted phrases of the speech, Kennedy said: “For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
The American University speech became instantly famous around the world. In England, the Manchester Guardian called it “one of the great state papers of American history.” Most importantly, the full text was printed in the Russian press, and its Russian language broadcast by the Voice of America was the first western program in fifteen years the Soviets did not attempt to jam. Khrushchev told Averell Harriman, in Moscow to negotiate the test ban, that it was the best speech by an American president since Roosevelt. Negotiations moved swiftly forward. Some six weeks after the American University address, the nuclear test ban treaty was signed.

It was, Kennedy told the nation on July 26, “an important first step---a step toward peace, a step toward reason, a step away from war.” But the treaty required Senate confirmation, and conservatives as well as prominent military figures were decrying it as a threat to national security. Kennedy invited public debate, “for the treaty is for all of us. It is particularly for our children and our grandchildren, who have no lobby here in Washington.”
While it became clear by the fall that the test ban treaty and Kennedy’s advocacy were enormously popular with the American people, it was not so easy a victory that summer. The treaty had to be ratified by the U.S. Senate, and there was substantial opposition. Even Kennedy’s speech did not have the same impact within the U.S. as outside it, partly because the nation was gripped by its major internal issue of moral and political consequence, and Kennedy made a groundbreaking speech on that subject the very next day.

Martin Luther King at March on Washington August 1963

Calling Uhura to the Bridge

The issue of civil rights for African Americans had been steadily growing in prominence, punctuated by episodes of conflict and violence, since the mid 1950s. In 1963 police violence against non-violent demonstrators and white rioting and firebombing in black neighborhoods of Birmingham, Alabama, pushed the civil rights struggle to a new level. Then Alabama Governor George Wallace announced he would personally bar the admission of the first two black students to be enrolled at the University of Alabama under federal court order.

The drama, which turned out to be little more than a ceremony of defiance for cameras, played the day after JFK’s American University speech. Kennedy spontaneously decided to speak to the nation that night. With little in the way of prepared text, he delivered a speech on civil rights as perfectly timed and morally clear as he had the day before on world peace. Equality is a moral issue “as old as the scriptures and…as clear as the American Constitution, he said “In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated…” The day before he had urged empathy for the Soviet people; now he asked white Americans to imagine themselves in the place of black Americans. “Who among us then would be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”
He announced the voting rights legislation that would become landmark law under Lyndon Johnson. He had also advocated new help and new recognition for the poor in America (motivated in part by the new book, The Other America, that detailed the shocking poverty most Americans didn’t see, written by Michael Harrington, one of the chief demonstrators outside the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles that nominated him for President.) This became the core of Johnson’s War on Poverty; other Kennedy initiatives inspired elements of LBJ’s Great Society.

On August 28, between a quarter of a million and half a million people created the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was an overwhelmingly peaceful event, the largest demonstration in the nation’s history. U.S. television networks preempted much of their programming to broadcast it, and thanks to the new Telstar communication satellite, it was one of the first events to be televised live around the world.

Instead of “As the World Turns” and “Art Linkletter’s House Party,” U.S. viewers saw this massive crowd gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and they heard Bob Dylan sing “When the Ship Comes In,” as well as songs by Miriam Anderson, Peter, Paul & Mary, Odetta and others. They heard white labor leader Walter Reuther speak; rabbis, preachers and priests pray. And they saw and hear Martin Luther King make his famous “I have a dream” address.

Kennedy met with leaders of the march in the White House. Kennedy knew (as LBJ did later) that such forthright and principled support for civil rights would doom the Democratic party in the previously solid South, perhaps for a long time. But the march signaled the possibility of a new political coalition that meant this step towards the future might be sustained. Kennedy described himself privately as “an idealist without illusions.”

Though he accepted the possibility that his stand on the test ban treaty might lead to his defeat for reelection, Kennedy believed the opposition was not as strong among voters as rising conservatives claimed. By September, it was clear that he was right. Overwhelming public sentiment in favor of the treaty led to Senate confirmation.

As Kennedy traveled across America in late fall, he spoke often about the issue of peace, to increasingly enthusiastic response. This was the last image, and the lasting image of Kennedy, held by many Americans and certainly many people around the world.

Jacqueline Kennedy November 1963

From the New to the Final Frontier...

So much had happened, so much had changed in the thousand days of the Kennedy administration. What Kennedy contributed to the soul of the future went beyond these great issues. He brought imagination and intelligence into the public arena, and suddenly it was stylish to be smart. Kennedy was intensely curious and persistently ironic, with an educated judgment, a respect for complexity and a need for large ideas. Kennedy’s press conferences were a revelation of erudition and wit. The emphasis on intelligence in the Kennedy government provided a new legitimacy to the life of the mind. Suddenly the egghead was in, and the intellectual was sexy.

Kennedy was also the first President since Teddy Roosevelt to promote physical fitness, and though a sudden fad for the “fifty mile hike” died quickly, the general idea of fitness and “vigor” became part of the Kennedy image. The Kennedys were often photographed sailing, and the Kennedy clans’ touch football games became legendary.

“Jack” and the beautiful Jackie Kennedy, their children Caroline and John-John: they were in every sense the First Family. How Jackie dressed changed how women looked, and connected a larger portion of America to European fashion, as well as making European style more acceptable across an increasingly affluent but still provincial America.

Above all there was a sense of youthfulness—of “the young in spirit, regardless of age,” as he said in his call for explorers of the New Frontier.

This was the coming of age for Gene Roddenberry’s generation. I could find nothing on the record about GR’s views on JFK, but it’s not hard to figure out what they might be. Apart from the general attitudes they shared with others in their generation (and the recreation of sailing, which became GR’s replacement for flying), there is ample evidence in GR’s later work of a convergence with Kennedy’s views, particularly the ones from 1963 detailed above. From the New Frontier and the space program, to Civil Rights, efforts to address poverty and disease, and the attitudes towards peace outlined in the American University address, to more subtle thoughts about such matters as exploration without exploitation tucked into other speeches---it all could be considered part of the blueprints for the Star Trek future.

There has never been, and they may never be again, a national trauma as intense and lingering as the sudden taking away by assassination of this young President in November 1963. From the first news reports on Friday to after the state funeral on Monday, America stopped. Stores were shuttered, and storefronts draped in black, all product images replaced by wreathed portraits of the fallen President. By 1963 almost every home in the U.S. had at least one TV set, and there was nothing else broadcast that weekend but related news, including the responses of people around the world, interspersed with Kennedy speeches and interviews. 95% of the American audience watched the funeral.

The sadness, the attempts to cope and accommodate what had happened, went on for months and years. Arguably the effects of Kennedy’s assassination never ended. But at the time, those who admired Kennedy, his words and his public persona, had to find ways to honor and absorb them in their own lives and work.

It was about four months after President Kennedy’s life was erased that Gene Roddenberry had roughed out in some sixteen pages his idea for a television series about the future, called Star Trek.