The JFK obsession: 40 years and still going strong

Where were you when you learned John F. Kennedy was murdered? If your answer is something along the lines of fifth-grade civics class in the 80s, it’s probable your feelings are much different than those of us who experienced the event firsthand.

Why the lingering fascination with the 35th president of the United States? Certainly some of it is attributable to the myriad conspiracy theories.

Take your pick. The Central Intelligence Agency killed him. Or the Mafia. Or rich Texas oilmen. Or Castro. Or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Or the Soviets. Or Lyndon Johnson. Or fill in the blank.

It’s unlikely the question will ever be settled. The only smoking gun belonged to Lee Harvey Oswald, and he’s not talking.

Then we have the Camelot image. Jacqueline Kennedy knew the importance of shaping the JFK legend and immediately went to work. She wasn’t going to wait for the "bitter old men," as she called them, who write history to determine her husband’s accomplishments.

Many Americans looked at Kennedy as a hero even before he was elected president. I was in grade school. The nun told us that we should urge our parents to vote for Kennedy. This was because he was a devout Catholic, a good family man, and had a wonderful smile. Well, the good sister was right about the smile anyway.

At the time, I’d not yet developed into the skeptical curmudgeon I’ve become. I was then only an apprentice skeptical curmudgeon. So I took the nun’s guidance and got involved in my first political campaign.

Dutifully stuffing Kennedy literature in neighbors’ mailboxes, I did my part to move us forward, with vigor of course, to the New Frontier. We had so many Kennedy signs in our yard and posters in our windows that on election day voters stopped in thinking it was a polling place.

The man was undeniably charming and witty. Fit and tan, he gave the impression of radiant good health, an impression far from reality. Kennedy cultivated the press and flattered reporters as needed. The initiative paid off handsomely in terms of positive media coverage.

As it turned out, JFK was at best a middling chief executive. There was the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The Berlin Wall was put up after Soviet premier Khrushchev had taken the measure of the young president. The dictator said he pitied the American people for having so ineffectual a leader.

The Cuban missile crisis is sometimes viewed as a major Kennedy achievement. Yet to resolve it JFK promised to not invade the first Communist state in the Western Hemisphere. Part of the Kennedy legacy is Fidel Castro still in power.

The day Kennedy was inaugurated, there were a few hundred American soldiers in a far off place called Vietnam. By the time he died, there were almost 20,000, with more on orders to go there.

Domestic successes were few and far between. JFK led a staggeringly shallow life and rumors suggested he might not be as virtuous as originally thought.

On November 22, 1963, none of that made a difference. The president – our president – had been murdered. The first reaction was disbelief. Things like that didn’t happen in the United States.

Then came the sorrow. We grieved together. Men and women, blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, Republicans and Democrats, the old and the young, everybody.

It was so incredibly sad. Think of Jackie, for heaven’s sake. And the children. How would they ever find the strength to make it through the next few days?

The assassination was a national nightmare. Many cried themselves to sleep that night.

The long Friday afternoon turned into an even longer weekend. Then, finally, the funeral was held. If ever a woman conducted herself with a composed dignity, grace and courage, Mrs. John F. Kennedy did that day. She set an example for the rest of us.

Many baby boomers, some of them now years older than JFK was when he died, shared that experience. They’re the people who turn out newspaper stories and TV programs and magazine articles about John F. Kennedy and what might have been.

That we’ll never know. We look at the black and white images of the 35th president and think of the unfulfilled promise, the destiny unrealized. We share a common memory of those dark November days of so many years ago and reflect on how we, and the world, were changed.

The South had been solidly Democratic at virtually all levels since 1876 through the time of the Kennedy-Nixon Presidential race. Voters motivated by racial issues would have been upset at the Republicans because Eisenhower demonstrated at Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 that he was willing and able to enforce the Brown v. Topeka ruling that declared public school segregation as un-Constitutional. The GOP had been the "civil rights" party from Reconstruction onward. Its main strength in the South was among blacks (until they were effectively disenfranchised in the last 20 years of the 19th Century) and in Unionist areas such as East Tennessee and the Texas Hill Country.

By 1960, conservative Southern Democrats had become increasingly wary of the liberal wing of their party, as represented by Adlai Stevenson. However, John Kennedy, an Irish Catholic from Boston, was not perceived as a liberal, especially in light of his father's conservatism and his refusal to condemn Joe McCarthy. His religion was a detriment in the South at that time, but more so in the Upper South, where there were few blacks and the white population was predominantly Scotch-Irish, with their historic animosity to the Irish Catholics. Race was more important an issue than religion in the Lower South, which also was home to the South's small white Catholic minority, from the port cities of Savannah and Charleston through South Louisiana to the German and Czech Catholic settlements of Central Texas.

By 1963, the region's image of Kennedy had changed. He was as willing as Eisenhower had been to enforce Brown vs. Topeka. His "best and brightest" bore many similarities to Roosevelt's "Brain Trust," a group of East Coast, Ivy League advisors that made Southerners uncomfortable. Unlike FDR, JFK made little effort to assauge the South and relegated LBJ to the outer fringes of his administration.

Had Kennedy not been killed, he would have found himself in an awkward position in 1964 as Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders intensified public pressure for greater Federal protection of black access to public accomodations and the voting booth. Acceeding to black demands or holding the line would have jeopardized the political base that enabled him to gain a narrow victory in 1960. Kennedy just didn't have the political skills that Johnson had to get things done.

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