Camelot Lost

Two weekends ago, as the latest Capitol Hill scandal broke—this time involving sexually explicit emails and instant messages sent by former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.)—Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP) celebrated its 40th anniversary with uplifting speeches, panels, and dinners. I can’t help but find it perfectly fitting that the two events transpired simultaneously; the juxtaposition of the celebration and the scandal made brutally clear what has become an increasingly obvious disconnect between the institute’s tone and imagery and the reality of contemporary politics.

The IOP was founded as a “living memorial” to President John F. Kennedy ’40. The likeness and the aura of JFK pervade the building: His visage graces everything from walls to brochures to computer screens. When I attended the IOP’s freshman welcome event back in September 2003, we were shown a video of Kennedy’s famous 1963 commencement address at Vanderbilt, in which he eloquently urged students to enter politics.

Although it is a carefully nonpartisan organization, the IOP’s existence rests on certain premises commonly associated with JFK and the youthful, optimistic attitude of his era: that public service is a noble calling; that government can and should be a force for positive social change; that young people, if properly inspired, will help lead the nation to ever loftier heights.

But when the time arrived to commemorate the IOP’s 40 years of inspiring students to service, we were treated to Foleygate, the most bizarre, humiliating, and nauseating scandal yet to emerge from a decade of disgraces in Washington. It is the perfect Kennedian nightmare: eager teenagers make the pilgrimage to Washington to learn about government, but instead get hit on by the chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus.

The whole affair poignantly highlights how far removed the IOP’s founding gospel is from political life in the 21st century. It’s not as though the IOP fails to recognize this: Its director, former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, often remarks upon how difficult it is for the IOP to carry out its mission in today’s political climate. Nevertheless, there was something surreal about a weekend of paeans to public service that coincided with reporters in Washington digging through Foley’s perverted instant messages.

Surreal, but not especially novel. Except perhaps for a few months following 9/11, politically interested people born in the 1980s have never known honorable politics. We were weaned on Monica Lewinsky; next came Florida, Iraq, Katrina, Abramoff, William Jefferson stuffing cash into his freezer, and partisanship so vicious it turns off even the proudly Machiavellian students at the IOP. JFK’s speech at Vanderbilt feels like it was from another universe—an historical curiosity, but not a compelling reason to pursue a career in politics.

Current political figures, of both parties, often attribute their involvement in politics to the inspirational example set by JFK. We have no comparable figure today, and no number of videos or Kennedy posters can remove the spirit of Camelot from the historical freezer, microwave it, and feed to students. We know we’re living in an age of Foley, not Kennedy.

This, it should be made clear, is by no means a criticism of the IOP, which offers students an amazing array of resources and opportunities—so much so that I feel a bit uncomfortable saying anything even implicitly unfavorable about it. The tragedy is that many of those resources are political veterans who reminisce about how when they were in politics, it didn’t seem quite so miserable.

In a strange way, though, some optimism is warranted. What will motivate our generation of students to public service is, I suspect, not inspiration but embarrassment. We look around and see a society in which most things work fairly well. Scientific and technological innovations improve the length and quality of our lives. Women, as well as ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities have more opportunities than ever. Crime and teen pregnancy are at or near historic lows. The military fights valiantly and enjoys the backing of the entire nation. It is just the government that is not holding up its end of the bargain, and those of us interested in politics are sick of the rest of society having to drag the public sector along as dead weight.

This, in part, explains the oft-noted lack of radicalism among most of the IOP’s students. Our times are not Kennedy’s times—for the most part, we don’t need a government that fosters a civil rights revolution, creates Medicare, or goes toe-to-toe with Khrushchev. We would settle for one that doesn’t abandon poor people to die in hurricanes and that prevents members of Congress from having cybersex with 15-year-olds.

Some will mourn the decline of idealism among the students at the IOP. It’s true that the Earned Income Tax Credit is less romantic than the Peace Corps—which almost no IOP students will join—and quietly hunting down terrorists doesn’t have the emotional appeal of bearing any burden or fighting any foe. But idealism and Kennedy nostalgia will not rescue politics from the likes of Mark Foley. If we cannot make politics virtuous, we can at least make it effective, and to that end, a generation of hard-headed realists may be just what the doctor ordered.



Joshua Patashnik ’07 is a government concentrator in Adams House. He is the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Political Review.