Almost two generations have grown up with only second-hand knowledge of the hope and excitement with which the world greeted the presidency of the boyish John F. Kennedy, and the devastation that so many people felt when news of his murder spread around the globe. That was 40 years ago.
Yet the Kennedy presidency has remained a subject of fascination for everyone. It is not simply the books and films that have raked over the circumstances of his assassination in Dealey Plaza. There has remained a nagging feeling that when Kennedy was killed, some great opportunity, some chance to make the world a better place, died with him.
The reality was different. We now know of the full extent of his political brinkmanship during the Cuban missile crisis, which was made clear by the release of taped conversations of Kennedy talking with his aides and generals. It was a close-run thing. Worse, Kennedy bequeathed to his successor Lyndon Johnson the Vietnam War, which was to become a great American trauma and cost the lives of millions of Vietnamese whom the US slaughtered during that vicious and pointless campaign.
But it was not the man but what he seemed to represent that was so important. Aged only 43 when he came to the White House, the youngest-ever US president, Kennedy seemed to promise radical change.
His inaugural speech, delivered in his distinctive nasal whine, was one of the finest by a modern incumbent. He defined the moment by promising that the energy, the faith and devotion his administration would bring would “light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.” Instead it so nearly burned it to a cinder.
But after the grim realities of two devastating world wars and at the height of the nuclear stand-off of the Cold War, people wanted a new beginning, and Kennedy appeared to provide it.
There was a genuine hope in the 1960s, combined with a vitality and energy that expressed itself in the emergence of an irresistible youth culture. But his murder exposed the grim reality that the Kennedy fans had dreamt was going away.
Forty years on, we can see the bright promise of Kennedy’s brief presidency for the sham it was. Kennedy was the first of a new breed of politicians who engaged people’s hearts as well as their minds by being a consummate showman. He seemed different — famously so when he faced off with an unshaven Richard Nixon in a televised debate — and he knew how to make promises it seemed he could keep. He was the first effective TV politician, starting a tradition that was fatally to undermine American-style democracy. Ironically, it was on TV that his death was recorded in all its horrific detail.
