Today is the 40th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's murder. I was two years old when it happened, so I have no personal memories of the event, though I distinctly remember TV coverage of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King's deaths in 1968.
Two thoughts occur to me today:
1) I know he wasn't perfect and that some people didn't care for Kennedy. But it seems to me most Americans respected him, and that the country felt some sort of shared purpose under him -- a sense Kennedy himself was able to stir. That's a feeling we lack now. For a few weeks, maybe months, after 9/11, it seemed like we'd gotten back a bit of that sense of community, but Bush's ill-founded war on Iraq and the neo-cons' lust for gutting government have made us just as divided as we were the day the Supreme Court gave the election to Bush.
I've lived most of my adult life (eight years of Reagan, eight years of Clinton, and nearly three years of "W") under highly divisive presidents. I know there's no way JFK's Camelot could be reclaimed today, but it would be great to have a few years under a president whom most of us could rally around.
2) Some Americans still find it hard to believe Kennedy was killed by one man acting alone. Some Americans feel the circumstances behind 9/11 remain highly suspect, and just this past week I read a calmly compelling op-ed by a credible writer who believes Paul Wellstone's October 2002 plane crash was not an accident.
Conspiracy theories are, by turns, intriguing, frustrating, and even entertaining. But I have little time for conjecture. I want to look to the future, and I think we lose energy and momentum by dwelling on past injustices, however horrible they may have been. What do you think?
Kennedy's funeral is the first memory I have to which I can place a date -- I was not quite four (and I was *pissed* that my normal cartoons weren't on).
I wonder how well Kennedy would have survived in this political climate, though, with his medical problems and his womanizing and so on -- plus the accusation of dirty tricks involved his election.
But yes -- my understanding is that his Presidency was a time of hope, and there hasn't been a lot of that since then.
Posted by: Sharon in Idaho | November 23, 2003 at 06:51 AM
Sharon,
Re: Your comment about being pissed about JFK's death preempting cartoons ... I hadn't thought about it since, but I had the same reaction one night when Spiro Agnew as VP was giving some sort of important speech and I went ballistic because it was preempting "Batman" or something!
(I cannot imagine what Agnew was doing, giving a speech. It seems VPs didn't do much of anything in those days ... unlike the puppetmaster we have in that role now.)
Anyway, I vaguely remember my Mom and/or Dad explaining to me that whatever he was saying was very important. It made an impression on me, and shortly after that was when I started getting interested in government and politics. (I volunteered for my first campaign at about 13, about the same time I was *totally* into the Watergate hearings. Yeah, I was a pretty weird kid.)
I agree with you that JFK's personal life would have been a far greater liability these days than in 1960-1963.
Posted by: Julie Fanselow | November 23, 2003 at 07:32 AM