By Edwin Cooney
The above words were spoken by actress Naomi Brossart while playing Jacquline Kennedy on comedian Vaughn Meader's hit comedy record, The First Family, recorded and released on Cadence Records in 1962. More about that later!
From the very outset of our history, the function and reputation primarily of prominent families has been an element in American politics especially as moral issues have increasingly come to matter. The Adams, Rockefellers, Roosevelts and Kennedys are obvious examples.
Today we must add the Bidens due to the negative attention Mr. Trump has paid to the family of his political opponent. By so doing, he has imperiled the fate of the Ukraine, a sovereign nation, and subjected himself to impeachment, thereby making American politics even more squalid than it traditionally has been. To what purpose? None, I can comprehend!
What makes it significant as to what the American family is legitimately has to do with our individual sense of social and spiritual morality. Some have been convinced for a lifetime that marriage shouldn't be interracial. Others are convinced that homosexual marriages ought to revert to being illegal. Still more Americans believe deep down in their souls that their own separations and divorces are actually immoral!
The danger in all of this controversy is the effect it has on our judgment of one another. Are we as moral or principled as our forebears? Even more tragic is the effect our moralizing has on the children of nontraditional families!
Every parent assumes responsibility and even to some extent accountability for his or her child’s lifelong activities.
A number of presidents have had siblings and offspring who made headlines to their detriment: Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, Neil Bush, and almost all of FDR's four sons and daughter made news during their administrations. The question is: to what real effect? Does it tell us anything about the president's character? I don't think so!
The most tragic example was George Washington Adams, the son of John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams. He was brilliant: a graduate of Harvard and a lawyer, he was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature the year his father lost to Andrew Jackson. However, young George became unstable running up debts, getting a girl pregnant, being absent from his practice. On a streamer from Boston to New York, he accused other passengers of harassing him and he either jumped or fell into Long Island Sound. What presidential family was more upstanding than the Adamses?
The American family has become the chosen constituent of political and social conservatives as they are linked to the church or to what politicians refer to as “family values.”
I own a recording of a speech given by Barry Goldwater in 1965, the year following his defeat by LBJ. The album is called “Your Family is the Target.” He asserts that there’s nothing Communists would like more than to destroy America’s family values. Barry goes on to condemn Social Security and the proposed Medicare program as examples of Communism’s tool to undermine America through the destruction of its “family values.”
Invariably, however, the American family doesn't march in lockstep with expectations. How many American families were broken apart during frontier days when America was establishing its "manifest destiny” during the 1840’s? Nor did family values prevent a lot of husbands from running off to California’s gold fields to get rich.
Finally, if any family's legal or moral crisis is automatically the public's business, what is the future of the individual's right to privacy?
The ideal of the family is something to cherish, but all families are to a great degree dependent on the values of members of the family who are — ultimately — individuals!
Here's an irony for you: The First Family album was recorded in New York City on the night of Monday, October 22nd, 1962 as President Kennedy was revealing the Cuban Missile Crisis to the public which could have been fatal to families all over the world!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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