The Kennedy Center Could Have Transformed American Culture
An ode to what might have been.
This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is proudly part of the Persuasion family.
With the fate of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—for the moment, no longer the Trump Kennedy Center—unknowable, it’s tantalizing to inquire what it might become. A related question is whether it became all it could have been in the first place.
When Jackie Kennedy urged Leonard Bernstein to become the first artistic director of the Kennedy Center, what was on her mind? Did she phone him because he was a famous and dynamic American musician with whom she happened to be well acquainted? Or because he was a famous and dynamic American musician dedicated to curating the American musical past and charting its musical future? All we know (from Jamie Bernstein’s memoir) is that he answered the call, said yes—and then changed his mind because he could not see himself dedicating time to the job.
What became the Kennedy Center was envisioned as a showcase for both American and “global” performing arts when President Eisenhower signed the National Cultural Center Act in 1958. The specific form this might take was secondary to a prolonged fundraising effort that surged after the Kennedy assassination. The eventual result both is and is not a “national cultural center.” Its National Symphony has never aspired to be a national symphony—it is the Washington, D.C. Symphony, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to be. That said: We really do need a national symphony, because our native musical inheritance, in the concert hall, remains largely unattended. For that matter, American cultural memory is notoriously short, and never more so than today. Imagine a national cultural center with national music, theater, and dance companies. It’s a pipedream, but it’s an informative one.
Bernstein is a wild card in this narrative. He enjoyed a dynamic rapport with JFK and the First Lady. The day of the assassination, the first edition of the New York Times announced the impending appointment of Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy insider, as the president’s advisor on the arts. The impending Bernstein/Kennedy partnership might have taken many forms. Very possibly it could have included a bona fide national symphony at the planned “national cultural center” that was being planned and promoted with Bernstein’s help.
Something like a national symphony was in fact created four years after the Kennedy Center opened in 1971. This was the American Composers Orchestra, which during its initial decades commanded the resources to regularly perform at Carnegie Hall. But it was crippled by a programming formula (often attributed to the composer Francis Thorne) that created eclectic concerts, sampling American works from different periods.
When I was invited by the Pacific Symphony to help create a West Coast equivalent to the ACO, we instead programmed thematically—and surveyed a lot of important American music that remains neglected. But in Orange County, California, we had no national impact. D.C.’s PostClassical Ensemble, during the years I helped to run it, was dedicated to curating an American repertoire. Our concerts, CDs, DVDs, and broadcasts championed Louis Moreau Gottschalk, William Levi Dawson, Harry Burleigh, Arthur Farwell, Lou Harrison, Silvestre Revueltas, Virgil Thomson (his film scores), Aaron Copland (the music not heard: The City with film; the Piano Fantasy), Zhou Long, Charles Ives, and more.
But the closest thing to a national symphony was Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic, especially in its earliest phase. Correction: It was a national symphony. His first subscription program, on October 2, 1958, proclaimed a template—William Schuman: American Festival Overture/Charles Ives: Symphony No. 2/Beethoven: Symphony No. 7. Bernstein’s repertoire explorations were systematic. They included Gustav Mahler and subsequent twentieth-century symphonists little played or otherwise marginalized. They included programs dedicated to specific periods and styles of American composition.
In the realm of symphonic music, Charles Ives is our supreme creative genius. Bernstein’s Ives advocacy, with the Philharmonic, figured crucially in the belated discovery that Ives was a composer who singularly enriched American cultural memory. As a matter of course, Bernstein prominently participated in the Ives Centenary in 1974. But the recent Ives Sesquicentenary was wholly unmarked by our most prominent orchestras. It also passed unnoticed at the Kennedy Center. What form of arts leadership might Bernstein have furnished in D.C.? His tenaciously American odyssey, embracing both Broadway and the concert hall, testifies that he would have pursued a mandate passionately weighted toward New World achievement.
An informative footnote to this tale is the candidacy of Nicolas Nabokov. He lobbied hard for the Kennedy Center job and was supported by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once Kennedy’s intellectual aide de camp. As secretary general of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (covertly funded by the CIA), Nabokov was a crucial figure in the cultural Cold War. His output included high-profile arts festivals abroad. The biggest and most ambitious, in Paris in 1952, showcased orchestras and opera companies from London and Vienna, and orchestras from Boston, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, and Rome. Nabokov was not especially knowledgeable about the American arts. He was a Russo-European intellectual based in France. His Rolodex was famous—he could have conceivably turned the Kennedy Center into something like an American Edinburgh Festival.
Nabokov visited the Kennedy White House in 1962 for a dinner (which he helped to plan) honoring Igor Stravinsky. His impressions of the First Lady were not especially flattering. Perhaps this disaffection was returned. In any event, it was the American baritone George London who served as the Kennedy Center’s first executive director, overseeing artistic planning. The center never attained the international prestige Nabokov would have craved—and never attained the New World focus Bernstein would have pursued.
What might the Kennedy Center have hypothetically become? We could also use a national theater with a gifted dramaturg. Right now, it might pertinently curate the important political theater works of the thirties. A play like Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935) might be a poor bet in a commercial theater today. But it once electrified America, and we should have an opportunity to remember why and how. In the world of ballet, we actually possess a national company once linked to the Kennedy Center. Thanks to George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, the New York City Ballet Americanized classical ballet and more bravely explored the American repertoire than any present-day orchestra. The Suzanne Farrell Ballet, an offshoot of City Ballet, was once the Kennedy Center’s resident ballet company.
In New York City, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts hosts an orchestra, an opera company, a ballet company, and a theater company. The artistic synergies once vaguely envisioned, binding the constituents, never materialized, but they could do so at a bona fide national cultural center stocked with scholars, dedicated to preserving and applying American cultural memory. Imagine an alternative world, in which Bernstein and the Kennedys—John and Jackie both—bequeathed a proactive White House arts component prioritizing American achievement, past and present. It almost happened.
Joseph Horowitz is most recently the author of a novel, The Disciple—A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age. His book on the cultural cold war is The Propaganda of Freedom.
A version of this piece was originally published on Arts Fuse.
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On June 22, it was exactly 50 years since my best friend and I saw Bernstein conduct at the Garden State Arts Center. I had bought a blue Honda CB 360T motorcycle with the $1,000 savings bond that my grandmother left me and we managed to scrape together enough change to buy lawn seats.
So, off we went on the Garden State Parkway where motorcycles might not as yet have been legal. We were the only people to arrive on motorcycle and the only long-haired and tee-shirt clad attendees that day. Although we were conspicuous among those who spread out blankets set with food and drinks and candelabras, when the concert began everyone danced and laughed together.
I asked my friend if my memory was correct and he wrote back “Sounds right. On your motorcycle. All American composers. He levitated during the performance. Quite striking.”
Thanks for the memory.