The unfinished year

LAST WEEK'S Democratic convention was like a time capsule. The thematic commitment to the future required a revisiting of the past - a specific time in which this nation's still unrealized dream was born. From Ted Kennedy's impassioned overture to Barack Obama's closing address, it was 1963 again, America's unfinished year.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s address at the Lincoln Memorial was momentous for moving the project of racial healing from the margins of the country's conscience to its center. King drew the link between racial discrimination and economic injustice, helping whites and blacks alike to recognize a common purpose.

The anniversary of King's speech gave the convention its moral spine, with Obama's nomination an instance of King's permanent relevance. His "I have a dream" speech is a touchstone of education, and now three generations hear it as addressed to them.

But that an event from long ago can have such universal immediacy remains remarkable. After all, 45 years before 1963 was 1918. It is inconceivable that the nation under John F. Kennedy could have understood itself in terms set by the era of Woodrow Wilson.

It is not just baby boomers who take their bearings along a course set in 1963. Obama himself, and the legion of his young supporters, understand themselves in the language of just that time. And the music: Stevie Wonder was Obama's warm-up. 1963 was the year of his first hit (coming in an album entitled "12 year old genius"). It was in 1963 that American rhythms began swinging between the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and they still do. But the songs were only anthems of a deeper stirring in the national imagination, an overturning that would leave nothing untouched.

In 1963, a presidential commission condemned the vast inequities between the sexes, but women took the matter into their own hands with that year's manifesto, "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan. In 1963 "second-wave" feminism was launched, a movement Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama have ridden so deftly, with countless sisters.

When Ted Kennedy ended his convention speech by declaring "the dream lives on" (a poignant adjustment on his 1980 peroration, "the dream will never die"), everyone knew what dream he meant and that it went back to 1963.

But racial healing, economic justice, and gender equality all depend on reinventions of the meaning of power, which King summed up in his firm advocacy of non-violence - a theme to which no explicit attention was paid last week.

Yet violence remains the defining problem of the American condition - in inner city neighborhoods, abusive homes, prisons, and in a US foreign policy over-reliant on military force.

In 1963, the word peace entered the political lexicon, put there by John Kennedy himself. Alone among statesmen, he understood after the Cuban Missile Crisis of the previous October that human approaches to violence had to change. Kennedy's ally in this was Pope John XXIII, whose 1963 encyclical "Pacem in Terris" was taken as the cry of all humanity. ("Nuclear weapons must be banned!") Pope John, not incidentally, changed what it meant to be Catholic, as one sees clearly in the career of Joe Biden, beginning then.

Only weeks after the encyclical, in June, Kennedy drastically recast his administration's Cold War stance with an unprecedented speech at American University, addressed directly to the people of the Soviet Union. ("I speak of peace because of the new face of war.") A month later, Kennedy's initiative paid off with the Partial Test Ban Treaty, the beginning of arms control. The year 1963, in fact, was the beginning of the peace movement.

All of this was cut short. The promise of 1963 remained unfulfilled - until now. The nomination by the Democrats of an African-American man, whose most powerful rival has been a woman, is properly taken as a milestone.

Yet the dream to which steady reference is made goes even deeper into the nation's condition than race and gender, as was clear in that unfinished year. Nonviolence was no mere tactic for King, nor was peace simply one item among others on John Kennedy's agenda.

In the end, both men held up a new vision not only of what is necessary for America, but of what is possible. So let's finish what they began.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.