When all the votes were counted, Kennedy’s man Lynch had prevailed by a vote of 47–31. The senator, who, according to both Jackie Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, cared as much about this political fight as any in his career, had gained undisputed control of the state party and could now deliver a majority of the state’s forty votes to Stevenson at the convention.44 The victorious Kennedy hopped a plane to New York, where his sister’s wedding reception at the Plaza Hotel was still going strong. Before departing Boston, he placed a call to Stevenson’s campaign manager, James Finnegan, who expressed his delight at the outcome.45

Yet Kennedy seemingly took little joy in his win—the mudslinging by both sides, he told aides, had been unseemly and depressing. In a magazine article in late May and in a commencement address at Harvard two weeks later, he tried to reclaim loftier ground.46 Drawing on arguments and examples developed in Profiles in Courage and echoing his remarks at the National Book Awards dinner, the Harvard address focused on what he described as the lamentable and seemingly deepening schism in the country between politicians and intellectuals.^* “Instead of synthesis,” he told the crowd of three thousand in Harvard Yard, a few feet from the dorm in which he lived freshman year, “clash and discord now characterize the relations between the two groups much of the time.”

The politician, whose authority rests upon the mandate of the popular will, is resentful of the scholar who can, with dexterity, slip from position to position without dragging the anchor of public opinion….The intellectual, on the other hand, finds it difficult to accept the differences between the laboratory and the legislature. In the former, the goal is truth, pure and simple, without regard to changing currents of public opinion; in the latter, compromises and majorities and procedural customs and rights affect the ultimate decision as to what is right or just or good. And even when they realize this difference, most intellectuals consider their chief functions that of the critic—and politicians are sensitive to critics—(possibly because we have so many of them). “Many intellectuals,” Sidney Hook has said, “would rather die than agree with the majority, even on the rare occasions when the majority is right.”

It would be imperative, Kennedy continued, for both sides to remember that American politicians and scholars claimed the same proud heritage. “Our Nation’s first great politicians were also among the Nation’s first great writers and scholars. The founders of the American Constitution were also the founders of American scholarship. The works of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Paine, and John Adams—to name but a few—influenced the literature of the world as well as its geography. Books were their tools, not their enemies.” Nor was this a temporary phenomenon, Kennedy added, for the link between the intellectual and the politician in the United States lasted for more than a century. Thus, in the presidential campaign a century before, in 1856, “the Republicans sent three brilliant orators around the campaign circuit: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Those were the carefree days when the eggheads were all Republicans.”

He closed by reminding his audience that politicians and intellectuals ultimately must commit to operating within a “common framework—a framework we call liberty. Freedom of expression is not divisible into political expression and intellectual expression.” And the payoff for such a common commitment could be great, he promised:

“ ‘Don’t teach my boy poetry,’ an English mother recently wrote the provost of Harrow. ‘Don’t teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament.’ Well, perhaps she was right—but if more politicians knew poetry and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live on this commencement day of 1956.”47