Last remaining symbol of the New Frontier laid to rest

Last Thursday morning they trooped to a Virginia hillside, speckled with white monuments standing out against the gray April skies, to reflect on, to salute, and then, with a bugler’s sad tattoo, to bury the New Frontier.

For placed into the freshly shoveled earth was America’s last aviator avatar, a man remembered as the first of his countrymen to orbit the Earth, but also a combat fighter pilot, senator — and symbol of a nation’s highest hopes and its highest achievements.

Also buried, along with John Herschel Glenn Jr., who died early last December but wasn’t given Arlington Cemetery burial honors until this week, were the idealism and highminded values of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier.

To be sure, the New Frontier was more than a half-century old. Its mixture of national optimism, national purpose and — lest we forget — national security survived the assassination of its midwife. It was the soundtrack of the 1960s.

Its spirit sent Americans into space through NASA, to foreign lands through the Peace Corps, to remote Appalachian hollows through VISTA. It sent scores of Americans into politics, some of whom mimicked the Kennedy style (hands in their suit-coat pocket), some of whom made the 35th president’s causes their own. It battled segregation (“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution”) and cultivated the arts (“The new frontier for which I campaign in public life can also be a new frontier for American art”).

Glenn, who died at age 95, was very likely the last living symbol of the New Frontier.

The 7-year-olds pictured in grainy films gazing with wonder into the skies as Glenn’s Atlas booster climbed into space now are eligible for Social Security. Kennedy died in 1963; all the other of the Original Seven astronauts died before Glenn.

In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Kennedy described the New Frontier not as a set of promises but “a set of challenges,” encapsulating “not what I intend to offer to the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.”

Glenn endured as a symbol of American virtue and of New Frontier values for his vigor, courage, determination and optimism.

On the launch pad as on the stump, his thumbs-up gesture was an irrepressible impulse. Glenn had the attributes the columnist Mary McGrory identified as being most cherished by President Kennedy: the “decorum and dash that were in his special style.”

This is not an age of decorum, nor of dash. It is a time of invective, not idealism; of crudity, not civility.

In this context, elegies to the values of the New Frontier often prompt cynicism, for in the Kennedy years there was failure (the Bay of Pigs and the Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev), deceit (the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem), and deplorable moral lapses (wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr.).

But by June 1963, when in consecutive days Kennedy delivered remarkable speeches on civil rights and international peace, there were glimmers of greatness in the Kennedy presidency.

Even if the actions of that period never matched the values of that period, still the president reached for the stars, as did John H. Glenn, buried, along with the New Frontier he symbolized.

David Shribman Columnist