Memorial Day, May 29, 2017, was John F. Kennedy’s 100th birthday. We remember him as the man who was the first Irish-Catholic president, as a man with the sharp wit and a beautiful family, as a man with perfect class, so missing in Washington today. He was the man most responsible for putting Americans on the moon. He was the first president in the 20th century to stand up for civil rights, essentially giving his life to have those bills passed, exactly as he wrote them, by President Johnson in the years following his death. He was the man who faced nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis and who signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, making the world a safer place. He worked at his office and managed to inspire young people.
Happy Birthday, Mr. President. You made a difference.
A recent article, The Myth of John F. Kennedy In Film and Television by Gregory Frame in 49 Film & History Issue 6, page 21 (Winter 2016) tells how President John F. Kennedy continues to cast an enormous shadow on U.S. politics, despite the relatively short duration of his tenure. His impact on American culture, history, and society is far from settled, with liberals wondering, for example, whether Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam and would have sustained the cause of Civil Rights and with conservatives wondering how his personal character would have played out politically and whether his gun-shy approach to the military would have subverted American hegemony.
For a fascinating look at the legacy of President Kennedy, read the article by accessing it through the Brooklyn Law School Library’s OneSearch platform at this link. As the author concludes: “Holding on to the myth of Kennedy is like holding on to the myth of American exceptionalism, the eternally young nation, springing into the future with masculine vigor and promise and purpose. How much more desperate does a nation become for that myth after a financial crisis (2008) and extended wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), with little manifest appeal from its president (G.W. Bush) either to the intelligence of bookish academics or to the conscience of an international community? . . . . What yearning for the myth of JFK will emerge under Donald Trump? Or has reality television displaced myth as the paradigm for civic intelligence? Historians suggest that the presidency of John F. Kennedy might have been mediocre but that he nonetheless grasped the changing nature of politics in an image-dominated age; that he deserves credit for the skill with which he developed such an enduring image in the first place. And perhaps he does, for that image presides over the most powerful force in American culture: film and television.”
Also in OneSearch is a review by Iwan Morgan of The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy by Andrew Hoberek available at this link. In the review, the author notes that “Modernity is the theme of many essays ranging from . . . exploration of Kennedy’s unprecedented and still unmatched capacity to project himself on television as the epitome of cool when alive to the significance of the Camelot legacy.” Kennedy’s modernity was more symbol than substance. His brief tenure has become an infinitely renewable resource of hope for anyone invested in the promise of the United States.