Gone, but Not Forgotten

As with many of my generation, I can still remember hearing the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated on this day in 1963. I attended a Lithuanian Catholic grade school, run by the IHM Sisters. I can recall the nuns telling us about Kennedy's assassination, leading us in prayer and then dismissing the class. As Will Bunch at Attytood observes, Forget an anniversary? Why the JFK assassination still matters, it's also amazing that we've reached the point where the date is not noted.

This piece from the Washington Post, The Day a Generation's Spirit Died, is an excellent summary of the Kennedy legacy:

It was not the product of party or ideology; rather the reverse. For all his amused affection for his brawling fellow Democrats, Kennedy was a skeptical partisan at best. "Sometimes," he said more than once, "party loyalty demands too much." He was even more skeptical of ideology. Liberals, he said, "tend to underestimate the importance of winning"; conservatives too often "close their eyes to society's needs." Predictably, he was viewed with suspicion by both the left and the right. Liberals eschewed him for Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 Democratic National Convention; conservatives stampeded to Lyndon Johnson at the convention and to Richard Nixon in the general election. But Kennedy did something no politician had done at least since Theodore Roosevelt. He electrified much of a generation, many of whom had previously neither known nor cared about politics and government.

His famous call to "ask not what your country can do for you" is now so well known it's a cliche. Who remembers today how radical a departure that was from the lunch pail political rhetoric of the 1940s and '50s? Who had ever run for office before by asking us to give rather than take?

Politics in the 1950s — at least in image — was the province of greasy, balding fat men with wet cigars and wide ties. They were the ward heelers and aldermen and lodge brothers of a Ralph Kramden America, leavened out with the occasional plutocrat or statesman. They brokered candidates in smoke-filled rooms and wore funny hats in chaotic conventions where they thronged as much to get away from their wives as to choose our leaders. Younger political hopefuls had to butter them up or buy them out and wait their turn to run. Elections were "delivered" by "passing the word." Predictability was political gold. New ideas and faces were suspect, and politics usually catered not to the best in us but to the worst.

Onto that scene sailed John F. Kennedy with a gospel of sacrifice and vigor. The youngest president ever elected to the White House took us in a whole new direction. He invited artists and musicians and Nobel laureates to the White House because he said he wanted to celebrate the best in our culture. He played touch football and unleashed a fad for 50-mile hikes, because, he said, we had physical challenges to meet as well as mental ones.

He'd been a cipher as a congressman and only mildly attentive as a senator, but he grew with his responsibilities. He called for a New Frontier that would test us with something like the challenges our grandparents had met. He was hip and funny and smart as hell. He took the world situation seriously, but unlike most of the old pols posturing around him, he didn't seem to take himself seriously at all. He was almost flip about the pain of his lifelong back problems — made worse by war wounds — and the tragedies in his life. "Life isn't fair," he told us "but government should be."

Oh, for another such as him. As the song says, Where are They Gone?

(Via Defining Moments at Firedoglake)

Tags: Politics, John Kennedy