IN HIS endorsement of Barack Obama this week, Senator Edward M. Kennedy dismissed doubts about the Illinois senator's age and experience with a glancing reference to President Harry S. Truman's misgivings about another brash young senator who challenged party elders for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1960.
The full text of Truman's remarks, made at a press conference on July 2, 1960, in his hometown of Independence, Mo., read like Bill Clinton's South Carolina talking points as Clinton tried to elevate his wife's candidacy by marginalizing Obama's credentials.
"I have always liked him personally and I still do," Truman said of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, then a second-term senator from Massachusetts, "and because of this feeling, I would want to say to him at this time: Senator, are you certain that you are quite ready for the country, or that the country is ready for you in the role of president in January 1961. I have no doubt about the political heights to which you are destined to rise. But I am deeply concerned and troubled about the situation we are up against in the world now and in the immediate future. That is why I would hope that someone with the greatest possible maturity and experience would be available at this time. May I urge you to be patient?"
The preference of a former Democratic president for a more seasoned nominee is only one of many striking similarities between this primary campaign and the one that produced JFK as the Democrats' standard-bearer 48 years ago.
Like Obama, Kennedy was a relative unknown only four years before he boldly sought the presidency. Both men came to wide public attention at their party's previous national conventions. In 2004, Senator John F. Kerry chose Obama to give the keynote address at his nominating convention in Boston. Then a candidate for the US Senate from Illinois, Obama brought the house down with his speech on "The Audacity of Hope." In 1956, Adlai Stevenson asked the convention in Chicago to choose his running mate and Kennedy mounted an impressive push for the vice presidential slot. He suffered a narrow loss to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, but when his scrappy bid was done, Kennedy was no longer an obscure junior senator from Massachusetts.
There is an echo of 1960, too, in the emotional power of an endorsement by the adult child of a venerated former president on the eve of an important primary date.
This week it was Caroline Kennedy, the only surviving child of President Kennedy, who lent the imprimatur of Camelot to Obama's bid for the White House in advance of Tsunami Tuesday, when nearly two dozen states will vote in the closest thing this country has seen to a national primary.
In 1960, it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. who played that role for Kennedy's father in advance of a crucial primary in West Virginia, where a largely Protestant electorate was skeptical of JFK's Catholicism.
In a 30-minute televised exchange broadcast before the West Virginia vote, FDR Jr. walked Kennedy through a series of prearranged questions, challenging him to explain why voters should not suspect that he would clear his public policies with the pope or put his allegiance to his church above his commitment to the Constitution. At the end, FDR Jr. pronounced Kennedy the natural heir to his father's political legacy. He mailed letters saying as much to every voter in West Virginia, postmarked Hyde Park, N.Y.
The political exploitation of ignorance and bigotry that were at the heart of objections to Kennedy's religion in 1960 were mirrored last week in South Carolina in the ugly racial subtext of Bill Clinton's advocacy for his wife's campaign.
In 1960, Kennedy neutralized his religion and triumphed by subtly reframing a vote for him as a vote not just for a man and his political platform but a vote for the tolerance and inclusiveness that are at the core of the Democratic, and American, ideal. Obama was standing close enough to the Kennedy clan on that stage at American University on Monday to have absorbed that lesson from 1960, too.
Eileen McNamara, a former columnist at the Globe, is a journalism professor at Brandeis University.
