`Despite suffering from a number of ailments that the public didn’t know, Kennedy was always coherent in his public appearances.’
FIFTY-EIGHT eight years ago today, close to noontime on the streets of Dallas, Texas, President John F. Kennedy was felled by two bullets that brought to an end the so-called “Camelot” years.
The assassination of JFK seems to have tipped America into a “death spiral”: civil rights became a source of local unrest especially in the deep South, and soon the Vietnam War itself became the reason for deep divisions within American society. The dark mood that the Kennedy assassination in 1963 seems to have triggered continued with the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy five years later, ending only, in some ways, with the departure of Richard Nixon from the presidency in 1974. For the last 50 or so years, so many commentators (American as well as foreign) have wondered in print or aloud what America and the world may have become had Kennedy not been killed in 1963. It was not so much because he had accomplished a lot in the first 3 years of his presidency; it was more because of the promise that his presidency provided, a promise of a younger, more caring and fairer society not only for the 50 states of the USA but even for the world – a promise that was ended by the assassin’s bullet on the streets of Dallas.
I have to admit that my fascination for JFK began as early as my elementary days. I would go to the library and read what I can about him (which wasn’t much), buy books from National, Alemars, Goodwill – and later on even Erehwon; watch documentaries on his life and death and listen endlessly to “Abraham, Martin and John,” and then, when I finally found myself in America, travel to all relevant Kennedy places: Dallas, Arlington, and Boston for his birthplace and presidential library. My fascination with JFK is also the reason my sympathies lie with the Democrats; it is also the reason why I am ambivalent about the issue of “dynasties.”
But what was it about JFK (and his brothers especially Robert) that fascinated me? What made him, to me at least, my type of a leader?
First and foremost, I guess, is the fact that JFK represented that type of leader who seeks to inspire others to do good or to better themselves. He wasn’t the type of leader who projected himself as the messiah, one who had all the answers to all the questions and all the solutions to all the problems.
He was a leader who painted a future that was achievable – if one worked hard for it and if society worked together. It was a future that was more fair or just than what he had been born into, especially for the “coloreds” in America, and the struggling “Third World” that was susceptible to the lure of communism.
But he was also a leader who was willing to raise the bar high – like going to the moon before the decade of the 1960s was over. Note that challenge – had Kennedy lived and won a second term he would have stepped down in 1968; but his “man on the moon” promise was one that would outlive his term – not a short-term goal that would be of political value to himself.
He knew how to use the art of communicating to spread his message and to inspire his audience. He may have been the first full-time TV president, using the medium to his advantage. Since he was fairly good looking and was articulate, it was perfect for him.
Despite suffering from a number of ailments that the public didn’t know, Kennedy was always coherent in his public appearances. Of course he was also debonair and had a wife and two kids who were “picture perfect.”
From substance to style, JFK had it all. It would take almost 20 years before the White House was home to another great communicator in Reagan, whose experience in the celluloid world helped a lot. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were the two other great communicators after Kennedy and they, too, were able to use the White House as a pulpit from which to share their own vision of the future of America and the world. But call me biased – neither Reagan nor Clinton or Obama came close to the magic that JFK brought to the stage.
(Let’s not even talk about leaders in the Philippines!)
It has been 58 years since that day in Dallas, Texas when magic died. And America – and the world – have never been the same since.
