JFK - 50 Years Later

The grief and anguish that followed the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was tremendous, as it should have been, and it led to a short-term commemoration in the form of renamed streets, a renamed airport, and the thirty-fifth President's profile replacing Benjamin Franklin's on the half-dollar coin.  The grief and anguish, though, never really went away.  For the past fifty years, Americans have continued to hold Kennedy's memory in high regard.  He remains a symbol of dedication to public service and devotion to country.  After all, he served the United States honorably in the Navy in World War II, he pursued a life of public service in the postwar years to promote active American engagement with the rest of the world in the cause of freedom, and he devoted his 1,037-day administration to improving conditions at home.

Kennedy presents the ideal more than the real, though,. and not because of who he was versus whom everyone thought he was.  His methodical pursuit of civil rights, the leading domestic issue of his time in office, did not produce a huge civil rights law in his term - that happened under his successor, Lyndon Johnson - and his miscalculations in the Cold War led to the Bay of Pigs and may have helped ignite the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Kennedy represented the promise of what America could be, as he inspired many Americans to serve as he did in the interests of their country and the world.  It was this call to service that led to the Peace Corps and the exploration of space. Some of Kennedy's objectives succeeded, both on his watch on on the watch of his successors - a nuclear test ban treaty, civil rights legislation, the first moon landing - while others, such as universal health care, did not.  It's those things that did not happen that haunt Americans.  Ironically, his most memorable legacy - giving  the country a sense of youth and vigor - belied his own health problems, but his infusion of public vitality was a needed antidote to a nation worn down by Communist hysteria and bland complacency.  The United States seemed poised for greater things in November 1963.  What, we ask, would America had been like if Kennedy had lived?

Th assassination forever shattered the notion that modern America was immune to tragedy.  Three U.S. Presidents had been assassinated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when the country was making the transformation from a confederation of rural provinces on a wild, open continent to a major colossus on the global stage.  America was becoming a more responsible and more civilized nation by 1960.  President Kennedy seemed to be the man to complete the mission of creating a perfect union.  Shooting Presidents was something that just didn't happen anymore.  That was something that happened in a less civilized and less enlightened age.  (The assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, the most recent presidential assassination in American history before November 1963, was thought to have closed the book on the nineteenth century for America the same way Queen Victoria's death earlier that year signaled the end of the nineteenth century for Britain.)  Since 1963, of course, America has unraveled in a spiral of indifference, cynicism,  uncivil behavior, and violence.  Gun murders are something we've horribly grown accustomed to, as Al Sharpton has pointed out.

Born in 1965, I have lived virtually my entire life in the Great Unraveling.  I can't recall a time in my own life when Americans were inspired to serve the country and work for a brighter and more just future.  Oh, there have been times when I thought we found the leader to inspire us to do better by America - Bill Clinton in 1992, Barack Obama in 2008 - but I turned out to be sadly mistaken.

Norman Mailer said it best after we lost John F. Kennedy: "For a time, we felt the country was ours.  Now it's theirs again."