TODAY’S FROZEN MOMENT - 70th Anniversary Here was this curious letter from then-Senator John F. Kennedy to author Ernest Hemingway….July 26th, 1955 Kennedy was writing to Hemingway to ask him about his quote addressing courage as grace under pressure…. Kennedy explained that he wanted to use the quote to open the book he was writing which would eventually be titled “Profiles In Courage” …. Kennedy had heard about Hemingway making the statement “Courage is grace under pressure”, but he wasn’t completely sure and didn’t know where Hemingway had said it or exactly how… Some have said that it was a line out of Hemingway’s novel “The Old Man And The Sea”…and others say it was used in an essay... Hemingway and Kennedy never met… but after Hemingway’s death, his wife Mary was invited to a now-famous dinner at the White House in 1962, where she was seated beside Kennedy. They argued about his policy regarding Cuba, where she and Hemingway had lived for two decades… Though they had a heated argument that evening, Mary nonetheless admired the young president, and she ended up donating more than 90 percent of Hemingway’s manuscripts to the Kennedy Library in Boston… Seems an odd place for them to be housed, and there are some who say you could call that library the Kennedy-Hemingway Library…. But I just kinda love this earnest little letter… from a time before the internet or Siri or any of that… when, if you had a question about a famous writer having said a certain quote, to be sure about it, your only recourse was to type out a short letter of inquiry… kinda great….
[Mary Elaine LeBey]
