“Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him,” former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic.

President Kennedy said the same thing – almost.

“When power intoxicates, poetry restores sobriety,” read the draft of his speech for the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College in October 1963.

The President edited that sentence to read, “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

How do I know?

The full text of the speech, with Kennedy’s hand-written changes to Arthur Schlesinger’s draft, was on display at the Kennedy Library in Boston. I asked Kathleen Kennedy Townsend for a copy. It now hangs on my office wall.

As a student at Amherst, I studied in the Robert Frost Library.