By Edwin Cooney
You didn't have to be a Democrat to like President John F. Kennedy during the 1960s any more than you would have had to have been a Republican to like Ike in the 1950s. Jack Kennedy was the second youngest man to take the presidential oath of office. (Note that Theodore Roosevelt was 42 years and 322 days when he took the oath. JFK was 43 years and 236 days upon becoming president.) Young and handsome with thick reddish brown hair, sharp blue eyes, and thin even facial features, well-educated, experienced in military heroism and governmental affairs, a husband to a beautiful wife, a father to two very young and attractive children, somewhat athletic (despite his World War II back injury), a lover of reading, history and sports, the first Roman Catholic president, his often self-deprecating humor drew millions to him believing they knew him sufficiently well enough to refer to him as “Jack” almost as often as they called him "Mr. President.” Just as amazing, the very idea that a president would be the victim of an assassination came out of the blue on a late fall Friday afternoon. This sudden daytime nightmare stunned our national psyche and seared our national consciousness despite the fact that Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley had been so victimized within the previous 98 years.
Even more astounding to millions was the fact that we, the nation that aided others when they were overwhelmed by war, that handed out charity through our Red Cross to other nations when they were hit by natural disasters and strove for international peace and human justice through the United Nations, could possibly deserve to have been stunned by the assassination of such an attractive leader. Above all, he didn't deserve it and we most certainly didn't deserve to lose him. It was mind-boggling to the rest of the world! Sure, we had our faults, but it was the experience of most Americans that we were valiantly striving to correct racial bigotry and even our addiction to materialism. After all, Communists were godless, but we were believers, weren't we? Really, we were good and decent people trying our best to cure the world's ills and insure peace and prosperity everywhere.
Suddenly it seemed to dawn on us that issues rather than personalities were what presidential elections were about. Much of Jack Kennedy's appeal in 1960 was similar to the appeal of singers like Frankie Avalon and Elvis Presley as well as the earlier “bobby socks” appeal of Frank Sinatra.
As America got back to business following the Kennedy funeral and the lighting of the eternal flame at his Arlington grave, Americans soon became sharply aware of the magnitude of the issues faced by its president. Even if the days of Camelot had existed, the days of Vietnam and civil rights were about to take over the melodies and glamour of presidential star power.
The crises of the 1960s and 1970s had much to do with whether American soldiers lived, died, or became long-term wards of the federal government due to their service injuries. Within the next three years following the Kennedy Assassination, Americans began to doubt the validity of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the subsequent resolution which gave LBJ the power to bring peace and stability to Southeast Asia. Had LBJ actually been victimized by North Vietnam thus making it necessary to send so many young men to die in the rice paddies of South Vietnam? Had President Kennedy himself been involved in the assassination of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dihn Nhu which took place about three weeks before our president's assassination in Dallas, Texas? Slowly, but inevitably, the Kennedy family name began to be associated with a planned assassination of Fidel Castro, as well as with organized crime figures such as Chicago's Sam Giancana and others. Were the Kennedy brothers themselves a Catholic family that was rich, smart, and ambitious or were they something more than that? Was "Camelot" merely the self-sustaining dream of Jacqueline Kennedy’s as she spoke to author Ted White on that miserably rainy and cold Saturday night only eight days removed from the minutes she cradled her husband's destroyed head in her lap as they sped toward Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas that terrible Friday afternoon? Were we paying for our enjoyment of glamour rather than substance in our national politics? The answer is that it came to seem so!
We were a generation removed from a life-altering depression and a desperately fought war which we neither wanted nor deserved. Via the Cuban Missile crisis, we had avoided nuclear obliteration largely due to President Kennedy's assertion that the Soviets were looking for a face-saving way out of the crisis they'd created. That judgment alone surely justified Kennedy's 1960 election even if it was based on stardom rather than on intellect, ability, and patriotic reality.
Nations invariably learn even as they make errors. Since Saturday, November 23rd, 1963, Americans have learned more about themselves and the nature of their leaders and society than they learned from the previous 187 years.
Success and power invariably come from lessons whether sought or unsought. The power or capacity to grow develop from those lessons. It would be neither good nor profitable to entirely lose our capacity for innocence, but innocence must be entirely individual rather than national in nature.!
If the assassination of President Kennedy failed to strip America of its innocence, it certainly caused us to be less sure that our success is an automatic reflection of either our goodness or greatness. We no longer assume that the good will inevitably prevail. Today we expect those who would lead us to demonstrate the validity of both their promises and predictions!
Thus, the new paradigm challenges a potential president to mean what you say rather than merely what you believe. The presidency isn't performed on a Hollywood movie set (although Ronald Reagan nearly pulled it off twenty years after his move career ended!), but rather on the stage where conflict, pain, and mortality play as much a role as our hopes, dreams, and national expectations.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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