“Once there was a Fleeting wisp of Glory”

President John F. Kennedy’s administration in its early stages was at one time fondly attributed by the press to a Broadway musical. It was well known how much he and then First Lady Jackie Kennedy loved the Broadway musical, “Camelot”, when it first debuted in 1960, right at about the time of the presidential campaign which he won. How much the story in the musical had affected Pres. Kennedy’s view of his presidency, the country and the world, was subject to wishful speculation by many, including the media that was fascinated by the charisma of a young and vibrant president.  Sadly, the event in November 1963 tragically put an end to all of it.

What was it in the musical that could possibly have attracted the First Couple? Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, lyricist and composer teamed up for “Camelot” but their prior work, “My Fair Lady” was what first catapulted them to fame. They collaborated in “Brigadoon” and “Paint Your Wagon” (this last one, when made into a movie, had Clint Eastwood sing in his one and only musical role, but I digressed).

There was the Cold War just a little over a decade after WWII. The fear of a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union gripped the nation and the rest of the world. The United Nations was a young world organization where the Security Council’s circular table evoked the idea behind and connected to the idealism of King Arthur’s Round Table.  Camelot was the dreamy, idyllic place from which King Arthur ruled, surrounded by knights in shining armor from all around the kingdom and even from across the ocean. All of these symbolisms were not lost on many citizens of the world, fearful of another war but hoping for peace. Kennedy perhaps reflected upon those fears and what better way to launch his administration by countering fear with the ideals represented by chivalrous knights? I am merely speculating.

Let’s examine the story of “Camelot”. King Arthur was going to marry Guinevere. When they first met he explained to her what Camelot was all about with the song, partly:

A law was made a distant moon ago here:

July and August cannot be too hot.

And there's a legal limit to the snow here

In Camelot.

The winter is forbidden till December

And exits March the second on the dot.

By order, summer lingers through September

In Camelot.

Last stanza went:

Those are the legal laws.

The snow may never slush upon the hillside.

By nine p.m. the moonlight must appear.

In short, there's simply not

A more congenial spot

For happily-ever-aftering than here

In Camelot.

Jackie Kennedy was known to have played the vinyl record (no CD or streaming then) over and over in the White House. John Kennedy had a genuine fondness for it, for sure, but he also loved Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. I often wondered what it would have been like if Kennedy went on to finish his first term and re-elected for a second one.

As tragic as his story was, “Camelot” was not, in its full story, the pure and idyllic place as portrayed earlier in the musical either. {Note: the musical and the Legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are two entirely different stories; the latter, far from what the musical represented, was truly about chivalry, righteousness and faith against aggression by foreign invaders}.

The musical was a contradiction in its content.  There was the fairy tale land of perfection, only to be soiled by an adulterous affair between Sir Lancelot and Guinevere, then an intrigue fomented by King Arthur’s illegitimate son, Mordred, followed by the inevitable destruction of the Round Table. King Arthur, if Kennedy idealized him, was an ineffective, oblivious king who through to the end stuck to his ideals even as his kingdom was falling apart. The fall of Sir Lancelot from being the perfect model of knighthood, proved the depth of human frailty.  King Arthur considered him his best knight even though he was from the other side of the English Channel. Lancelot described himself the perfect knight without a shred of humility when at the beginning of the musical on his way to Camelot he declared:

I've never strayed

From all I believe;

I'm blessed with an iron will.

Had I been made

The partner of Eve,

We'd be in Eden still.

C'est moi! C'est moi!

Lancelot not only did he make it to knighthood in the first ballot, so to speak, he became King Arthur’s favorite. But it did not take long for character to succumb to human weakness. Guinevere and Sir Lancelot fell for each other and King Arthur’s world was ripped asunder. Well, Kennedy turned out to be more like Lancelot. He was a war hero, good looking, magnetic and everything a knight was portrayed.  But he was a flawed man. That we knew later. He was the fallen Lancelot and he had several Guinevere(s) as it turned out, long before he stepped into the White House that was his Camelot and even during his brief sojourn there.

“Camelot” is still one of my favorite musicals, so it might seem I am contradicting that sentiment after the above dissertation.  There was hope at the end of that musical, as he was preparing for battle after the kingdom’s fall. King Arthur saw a young boy emerged from behind the lines to join the king’s army. King Arthur saw hope and a shining example that chivalry was still alive in the boy’s face.  He knighted him Sir Tom but he was going to send him away from the battlefield to “go home and grow old”. But before the boy left he told him to listen first:

Each evening, from December to December,

Before you drift to sleep upon your cot,

Think back on all the tales that you remember

Of Camelot.

Ask ev'ry person if he's heard the story,

And tell it strong and clear if he has not,

That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory

Called Camelot.

That is about all we can hope for today as governments here and from many corners around the world face all kinds of challenges. It seems that crises after crises are all we hear. Our fears increase by the day while the world appears helpless. People from all corners can only harken to a place, more imagined than real, more wishful, supported only by a universal hope. But perhaps by miracle the world will get to it. Yes that we will indeed get to where “once there was a fleeting wisp of glory” which once found, we can hold onto and we get to keep it for at least ten thousand years.