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Kennedy might have used this imagery even more had he lived longer. As it was,
when Lyndon Johnson returns to Boston to campaign for the Presidency shortly after
Kennedy’s assassination, he hearkens back to Kennedy ’s famous farewell address and its
Wintrhoprian images
In that speech President Kennedy told us that John Winthrop, setting out for
America, said to his shipmates, “We must always consider that we shall be as a
city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.” (Johnson 1964, 3)
No other major Democratic figure prominently picks up this imagery again until
Michael Dukakis uses it in a speech before the 1988 Democratic National Convention in
Atlanta, where he lauds
the idea of community. An idea that was planted in the New World by the first
Governor of Massachussetts.
“We must,” said John Winthrop, “love one another with a pure heart
fervently. We must delight in each other, make each other’s condition our own,
rejoice together, mourn together, and suffer together. We must, he said, be knit
together as one, be knit together as one.”
Now John Winthrop wasn’t talking about material success. He was
talking about a country where each of us asks not only what’s in it for some of us,
but what’s good and what’s right for all of us. (New York Times, 22 July 1988)
One of the reasons no other Democrat uses this imagery between
Kennedy/Johnson and Dukakis is because during this time Ronald Reagan was coming to
own such. Yet, by the end of his second term as President he had used it so much, and so
effectively, as to make it “standard peroration” in American political rhetoric (Safire
1988).
5
Quite expectedly, then, this imagery serves as the central focus of the
penultimate paragraph of Reagan’s Farewell Address to the Nation.
The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of
the “shinning city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who
5
Between Johnson and Dukakis, Mario Cuomo does make reference to the “city on the hill” at the
Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, 1984, but he does so precisely to counter Reagan’s use
of the image. Cuomo says, “Mr. President, you ought to know, that this nation is more a tale of two cities
than it is just a shining city on a hill.”
Convention