JFK and the Paradox of Leadership: The president's 'wilderness tour' showed that even the greatest politicians can only bring the country forward when the public is willing to be led.

• Author: Townsend, Kathleen Kennedy
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

In the spring of 1963, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin--then only a few months into his freshman term--reached out to President John F. Kennedy's aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and to my father, then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, with an idea: the president should do a speaking tour of western states on the theme of conservation.

Nelson knew that my uncle, an avid sailor, had a special relationship with nature, an almost mystic appreciation for the winds and tides. And my father, who loved the outdoors, was a good choice to be intermediary. Some of my first memories are of walking in Rock Creek Park, near our house in Georgetown, where once he even built a raft to float down. When I was growing up, we went on rafting trips--down the Yampa and Green rivers in Utah, the Middle Fork of the Salmon in Idaho, the Colorado. Once we even went on a camping trip with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

The president quickly agreed to do the speaking tour, at least in part because it would be a way to test the waters ahead of his 1964 reelection campaign. Though the trip was billed as "nonpolitical"--a reminder of how different times were back then, when campaigning a year before an election was considered unseemly--everyone understood that it was a campaign tour in all but name, a measure of Kennedy's appeal in deep Goldwater country, states he had lost in 1960. "Kennedy Tour Is Test for '64," read a headline in the New York Times. The article, like many reports about the trip, put "nonpolitical" in quotes.

But that's not how Senator Nelson saw it. In letters to the president, he described the tour as a way to finally draw attention to what he saw as a crisis of declining natural resources--"water pollution, soil erosion, wildlife, habitat destruction, vanishing open spaces, shortage of parks etc." Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had been published the previous year, and Nelson was convinced that the American people were passionately interested in the issue of conservation. What was missing, he told the president, was leadership. "This is a political issue to be settled at the political level but strangely politicians seldom talk about it," he wrote. JFK's leadership would be the spark that could ignite a movement.

Or so Nelson thought. JFK set out for the trip in September, and it didn't take long for Nelson to notice that the crowds that greeted him exhibited little enthusiasm for talk of wilderness protection. They...