Parenting & Family Quote by Pierre Salinger

Nostalgia is doing the heavy lifting here, and Salinger knows it. By invoking "the Kennedy era", he isn’t just offering a neutral point of comparison about ages; he’s smuggling in an entire mood board: glamour, vigor, televised intimacy, and the sense that politics might look like a young family on the national stage. The line is bureaucratic on the surface, almost archival, but its real job is to launder a present-tense political image through a revered past.

Salinger’s own biography matters. As JFK’s press secretary, he helped midwife the modern White House as a media product, where family life became soft power and children became a kind of proof-of-humanity for an administration. So when he notes the return of very young children, he’s also pointing to the return of a governing style that understands spectacle as governance-adjacent. Youth becomes shorthand for renewal, and renewal becomes a claim to legitimacy.

The subtext is slightly sharper than it appears: this isn’t only about charm; it’s about vulnerability. The Kennedy children were photographed, mythologized, and ultimately folded into a national narrative of promise shadowed by tragedy. To say "since the Kennedy era" is to attach the present to that myth while flirting with its stakes. It’s a reminder that the White House is not just a workplace; it’s a stage where family can be deployed as reassurance - and where that reassurance can be fragile.