Years later, when he was old enough to know better, he would look back on that period of youthful hero worship and cringe, but that was how things stood for him in 1960, and how could he possibly have known any better when he had been living on this earth for only thirteen years? So Ferguson rooted for Kennedy to win, in the same way he had once pulled for the Giants to win the World Series, for a political campaign was no different from a sporting event, he realized, words instead of blows, perhaps, but no less rough than the bloodiest boxing match, and when it came to the office of president, the struggle was fought on a scale so grand and so spectacular that there was no better show anywhere in America. Glamorous Kennedy versus dour Nixon, King Arthur versus Gloomy Gus, charm versus resentment, hope versus bitterness, day versus night. Four times the two men squared off on television, four times Ferguson and his parents watched the debates in the little living room, and four times they were convinced that Kennedy had gotten the better of Nixon, even though people said Nixon had trumped him on the radio broadcasts, but television was all that mattered now, television was everywhere and would soon be everything, just as Ferguson’s father had predicted during the war, and the first television president had clearly won the battle on the home screen.
The victory of November eighth, the narrow victory by a hundred thousand popular votes, one of the smallest margins in history, and the more substantial victory in the electoral college by eighty-four votes, and when Ferguson went to school the next morning and celebrated with his pro-Kennedy friends, some of those figures were still not known, and talk was already circulating about why nothing had been heard from Illinois, there were rumors that Mayor Daley of Chicago had stolen voting machines from Republican districts and dumped them in Lake Michigan, and when that accusation reached Ferguson’s ears, he had trouble accepting it, the idea was too reprehensible, too nauseating, for a trick like that would have turned the election into a bad joke, a travesty of devious manipulations and lies, but then, just as Ferguson was about to give full vent to his outrage, he abruptly reversed the direction of his thoughts, realizing that he had to stop with the Boy Scout stuff and admit that anything was possible. Corrupt men were everywhere, and the more powerful the man, the greater the potential for corruption, but even if the story was true, there was nothing to suggest that Kennedy had anything to do with it. Daley and his band of crooks from Cook County — perhaps. But not Kennedy, never Kennedy.
Still, in spite of his unbroken confidence in the man of the future, Ferguson spent the rest of the day walking around with an image in his head of those submerged voting machines lying at the bottom of Lake Michigan, and even after the final numbers proved that Kennedy would have won the election with or without Illinois, Ferguson continued to think about the machines, continued to think about them for years.
On the morning of January 20, 1961, he told his parents he wasn’t feeling well and asked if he could stay home from school. Since Ferguson was a conscientious boy and not known for inventing imaginary ailments, his wish was granted. That was how he came to watch Kennedy’s inauguration speech, sitting in front of the television set while his mother and father worked at their jobs downtown, alone in the little living room just off the kitchen, watching the ceremony take place in the cold and blustery Washington weather, so frigid and windswept that when the ancient, rheumy-eyed Robert Frost stood up to read the poem he had been asked to write for the occasion, the same Robert Frost who was responsible for the one line of poetry Ferguson knew by heart, Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, the wind gave a fierce, sudden kick just after he arrived at the lectern, wrenching the one-page manuscript from his hands and gusting it high into the air, which left the frail, white-haired bard with nothing to read, but he pulled himself together with admirable poise and alacrity, Ferguson felt, and with his new poem flying out over the crowd, he recited an old poem from memory, turning what could have been a disaster into an odd sort of triumph, impressive but somehow comical as well, or, as Ferguson put it to his parents that evening, both funny and not funny at the same time.
Then came the newly sworn-in president, and the moment he began to deliver his speech, the notes emanating from that tightly strung rhetorical instrument felt so natural to Ferguson, so comfortably joined to his inner expectations, that he found himself listening to it in the same way he listened to a piece of music. Man holds in his mortal hands. Let the word go forth. Pay any price, bear any burden. The power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. Let every nation know. The torch has been passed. Meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe. A new generation of Americans. That uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war. Now the trumpet summons us again. A call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle. But let us begin. Born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace. Let us explore the stars. Ask. Ask not. A struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself. A new generation. Ask. Ask not. But let us begin.
For the next twenty months, Ferguson watched closely as the man of the future stumbled forward, launching his administration with the birth of the Peace Corps and then nearly destroying it with the Bay of Pigs debacle on April seventeenth. Three weeks after that, a human-sized football named Alan Shepard was punted into space by NASA and Kennedy declared that an American would walk on the moon before the end of the sixties, which Ferguson found difficult to believe but hoped would happen, for he wanted his man to be proven right, and then Jack and Jackie were off to Paris to meet de Gaulle, followed by two days of talks with Khrushchev in Vienna, and one blink of the eyes later, as Ferguson read his first book about contemporary American politics, The Making of the President, 1960, the Berlin Wall had gone up and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem had begun, that dolorous spectacle of the half-bald, twitching murderer sitting alone in the glass box, which Ferguson watched on television every day after school, engulfed by the horror of it and yet keeping his eyes fixed on the screen, unable to stop looking, and by the time the trial was over, he had worked his way through all 1,245 pages of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the immense tome by blacklisted former journalist William Shirer, which won the National Book Award in 1961 and was the longest book Ferguson had ever read. The next year began with another extraterrestrial exploit: John Glenn catapulted beyond the edge of the troposphere and circling the earth three times in February, which Scott Carpenter repeated in the spring, and then, just two days after James Meredith became the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi (another spectacle Ferguson watched on television, praying the poor man wouldn’t be stoned to death), Wally Schirra outdid Glenn and Carpenter by looping around the globe six times in early October. Ferguson was in the tenth grade by then, his first year at Montclair High School, and because his mother had refused to sign the form in September, the football season had started without him. He was largely over that disappointment by the time of Schirra’s journey, however, having found a new interest in the person of Anne-Marie Dumartin, a fellow sophomore who had come to America from Belgium two years earlier and was in his geometry and history classes, and so absorbed was he by this object of his rapidly growing affections that there was little time to think about the man of the future just then, and so, on the night of October twenty-second, when Kennedy addressed the American people and told them about Russian missile bases in Cuba and the naval blockade he was about to put in force, Ferguson was not at home with his parents watching the broadcast. Instead, he was sitting on a bench in a public park with Anne-Marie Dumartin, wrapping his arms around her body and kissing her for the first time. For once, the normally attentive Ferguson was not paying attention, and the greatest international crisis since the end of the Second World War, the threat of nuclear conflict and the possible end of the human race, did not register with him until the following morning, after which he began paying attention again, but within a week his man Kennedy had outmaneuvered the Russians, and the crisis was over. It had looked as if the world was about to end — and then it didn’t.