On January 20th, 1961 a poet read for the first time during a presidential inauguration. The idea to invite Robert Frost to “say” a poem during the ceremony originated not with John F. Kennedy himself but with Stewart L. Udall, an environmentalist, activist, former Arizona congressman and Secretary of the Interior designate, who had got to know Frost during his residency at the Library of Congress. It was a great notion and, though Kennedy joked that it could turn out to be a mistake because “you know that Robert Frost always steals any show he is part of,” he immediately saw the advantages in having the US’s most distinguished poet by his side as he was sworn in.
He must have seen, as the poet William Meredith later remarked, that Frost’s presence would focus attention on the incoming president as “a man of culture” and, on a purely analytical level, this was a sufficient PR coup in itself. Yet there were other reasons for including Frost in the celebrations, not least the fact that the notoriously oppositional old “Puritan” had backed the Kennedy campaign from the beginning. In fact, he had shown his support even before Kennedy announced his candidacy.
“The next President of the United States will be from Boston,” Frost declared during a gala dinner for his 85th birthday on March 26th, 1959. “He’s a Puritan named Kennedy. The only Puritans left these days are the Roman Catholics. There. I guess I wear my politics on my sleeve.”
Frost would reiterate his admiration for the junior senator from Massachusetts on numerous occasions, and just as Eleanor Roosevelt’s eventual endorsement appeared to align Kennedy’s political vision with the spirit and values of the New Deal, so Frost’s backing linked the youthful candidate to the latter-day Puritan ethic that Frost had come to embody, both in his writing and in his person. What Frost brought, in short, was resonance.
Having made his decision, Kennedy telegraphed Frost early in December 1960. The old poet replied by telegram the next day, his acceptance of the honor tinged with a sly dig at Kennedy’s supposed inexperience (to which Richard Nixon had made repeated reference during the presidential campaign):
If you can bear at your age the honor of being made President of the United States, I ought to be able at my age to bear the honor of taking some part in your inauguration. I may not be equal to it but i can accept it for my cause—the arts, poetry, now for the first time taken into the affairs of statesmen.