(John F.) Kennedy’s Law
Life is unfair.
Questioned at a White House press conference on March 23rd, 1962 about the apparent unfairness of the first American advisers being killed in Vietnam while the rest of the nation was enjoying the benefits of peace and prosperity, President John F. Kennedy, drawing on his own experience in World War II, replied: “There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some are wounded and some men never leave the country . . . Life is unfair.” This law was echoed on the M.A.S.H. television series:
There are certain rules about war and rule number one is that young men die and rule number two is that doctors can’t change rule number one. (August 6th 1991)
Another much-quoted Kennedy rule for living, “Don’t get mad get even”, may actually have been coined by his father Joseph Patrick or by another member of the older generation. See Dirksen’s Three Laws of Politics.
Sad to report, the provenance of the equally famous “Forgive but never forget” also is somewhat cloudy. The sentiment was attributed to JFK by his speechwriter and special counsel Theodore C. Sorensen in a 1968 television interview. The pragmatic Kennedy was perfectly capable of reaching this conclusion on his own, but it also seems possible that he half-remembered Aesop’s tale ‘The Man and the Serpent’, whose moral is that “Injuries may be forgiven but not forgotten.” The psychiatrist Thomas Szass amplified this in The Second Sin (1973): “The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.”
Finally, wise souls with short memories may take consolation from the plight of the monarch in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1872):
“The horror of that moment” the King went on “I shall never never forget.”
“You will though” the Queen said “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”
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