He would be 86 now and, judging by the physical evolution of his brother Ted, more round and full-faced than the trim, tailored figure that millions of Americans recall. Instead, John F. Kennedy survives only as that memory, a youthful image extant solely on film, with warm eyes dancing and jutting jaw set. That image was forever locked in place 40 years ago this Saturday when shots from an assassin’s rifle ended a young president’s captivating, turbulent life at the age of 46.
Having died with his agenda unfulfilled, the nation’s 35th president is recalled more vividly today for the manner of his death than for the 1,000-plus days he served in the White House.
Even with the advantage of hindsight, it is difficult to measure the man against the myth. History still is mulling his record, uncertain whether to declare him a president of great accomplishments–or a sentimental favorite whose accomplishments add up to . . . not much.
That is an unfair fate. It is driven by Americans’ overweening focus on issues domestic rather than foreign–and by our collective ability, even eagerness, to forget what was arguably the most dangerous era this nation ever faced.
By some measures, Kennedy’s truncated term did possess the gossamer, seemingly unsubstantial sheen of Camelot incarnate. In truth, though, his short presidency was shaped by confrontations that, none of us should ever forget, threatened to tear apart the world. More, probably, than any president before or since, JFK was forced to peer deep into the very real prospect of a nuclear holocaust. He foresaw a brief and devastating war that would have joined the United States and the Soviet Union in history’s most tragic duel.
It is to Kennedy’s credit, although not to his credit alone–oddly enough, Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev also played a role–that just such a debacle didn’t occur.
What’s also remarkable is that Kennedy was able to cope with his era’s international crises despite the serious physical maladies–not to mention his reckless penchant for womanizing–that plagued his years of public life. He must have wondered privately what would happen if his medical afflictions–or a scandal of his own making–had debilitated him during one of the hothouse moments he faced. “Kennedy made a bet that he could be an effective president [despite his problems],” presidential scholar Robert Dallek, author of the Kennedy biography “An Unfinished Life,” said last month during an appearance at Elmhurst College. “He won the bet. He carried it off.”
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To almost no one’s surprise.
John F. Kennedy had a way of prevailing. His heroic efforts in 1943 to rally and rescue men who served under him on a naval patrol torpedo boat after it was rammed by a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands came only after the Army rejected his effort to join that service because of his weak back.
After graduating from Harvard, he worked briefly as a reporter in San Francisco covering the creation of the United Nations. But he soon headed home to Boston to start the political career that had been planned for his older brother Joseph, a casualty of World War II.
JFK was elected three times to the U.S. House and twice to the Senate. In 1960 he became the youngest man ever elected president. This despite fears among anti-Catholic bigots that if Kennedy reached the White House, the pope would have an office in the basement.
Kennedy is remembered best for urging Americans to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. Yet his inaugural address, warning Americans of “a long, twilight struggle” against tyranny, focused almost exclusively on foreign affairs–the realm in which his four most dangerous challenges erupted.
First, shortly after he took office in 1961, was the Bay of Pigs, a failed, CIA-backed invasion by anti-Castro Cuban exiles that became an instant international embarrassment. Next came a crisis over Western access to free West Berlin, a dispute with the Soviets that precipitated their construction of the infamous Wall to keep East Berliners from fleeing communist rule.
A year later, Kennedy was shown aerial reconnaissance photos demonstrating that the Soviets had constructed missile bases in Cuba–the better to launch nuclear warheads against the U.S. Kennedy feared that if he authorized an invasion of Cuba to take out the missiles, the Soviets might well fire them at the eastern U.S.–and also sweep from East Germany through West Berlin. He instead slapped a quarantine on the shipment of offensive weapons to Cuba. For a week the world waited to see if war would follow. In the end, Krushchev blinked.
Perhaps Kennedy’s most enduring (if, today, least celebrated) success came in 1963, when the U.S., the Soviet Union and Great Britain signed a treaty to block atmospheric nuclear tests. It was a triumph of diplomacy after years of U.S. wrangling with the Soviets over nuclear tests; it was also the first major restraint on nuclear expansionism since the rise of the Cold War. In brutally frank terms it was, as Kennedy told the nation in a televised address, a seminal effort “to check the world’s slide toward final annihilation.”
But his successes in the international realm remain eclipsed today by the more heartwarming uplift he gave to the psyche of a nation weary of those same world tensions. Kennedy summoned his fellow citizens to a “New Frontier.” It was a frontier in which Peace Corps volunteers would carry American values and kindness to the poorest corners of the Earth, and in which space exploration would affirm U.S. resolve not to cede technical superiority to the Soviets.
A torch had been passed to a new generation–and it was JFK who now wielded that torch, a leader thoroughly mesmerizing those he led. The president and his photogenic family so dominated the nation’s popular culture that a grumpy California woman complained to Life magazine about one such portrayal: “It is the picture of a happy family with a new toy–us.” This was, in short, a time when a camera captured young children dancing lightly on the carpet of the Oval Office as their daddy clapped in delight.
This is the president Americans of a certain age recall: affable, beloved by the camera, eager to build both world peace and a better life for the poor and the downtrodden among his countrymen. “Kennedy is remembered for having given the country a hope, a vision, a better time, a better day,” biographer Dallek said at Elmhurst College. “He spoke to our better angels.”
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Dallek’s generous view goes against the grain of other historians who acknowledge the appeal of JFK but don’t think his record as president marks him as more than mediocre. The trend through the last decades of the 20th Century was for historians to criticize Kennedy as a beloved figure to whom Americans tend to give more credit than is due.
That argument isn’t entirely unfounded. From a war on poverty to education to the creation of Medicare and certainly in the realm of civil rights, initiatives Kennedy discussed with ardor and optimism didn’t actually come to be until his successor, Lyndon Johnson, pushed them through Congress.
Johnson, the consummate insider, knew how to browbeat the Congress–how, for example, to invoke the popular memory of Kennedy as a cudgel against southern senators who sought to block civil rights legislation in particular.
Kennedy had spoken passionately about civil rights–most memorably in June of 1963 after he watched television footage of dogs loosed against African-Americans rallying in the streets of Birmingham, Ala. But he also worried that too rapid an assault against segregation would alienate not just the South, but its representatives in Congress whom he needed to help pass a wide array of legislation. As a result, Kennedy is remembered–probably accurately–as a president who simply didn’t do enough to resolve what he clearly understood to be a moral crisis facing his country.
That said, this focus on domestic priorities that Kennedy did or didn’t master misses a larger point that is beginning to get more attention from historians, says Mark Leff, a professor who teaches modern American history at the University of Illinois. That emerging analysis can be boiled down to one sentence: In a world fraught with genuine peril, Kennedy did manage to stave off nuclear Armageddon.
He did that, unlike his predecessor, by confronting rather than soothing the Soviet bear. “Kennedy was more willing than Dwight Eisenhower to court crises,” Leff says. “He was willing to take on these crises in an activist way. So it’s not a coincidence that so many crises occurred during his presidency. He saw himself as calibrated, measured, so able to manage the crises that he would never have to shrink from one.”
So we can argue, 40 years after his death, about whether future generations will view JFK as a domestic underachiever or as a maestro of Cold War showdowns with the Soviets.
Leff thinks history ultimately will reward Kennedy for both his diplomacy and his spirit. “Here, before so many things fell apart later in the 1960s, was a president with this confidence, this sense of promise,” he says. “That’s how we Americans like to see ourselves and our leaders. Kennedy avoided nuclear war but he also spoke of sacrifice, of activism. He inflated our expectations of what we could do. Here was a resolute, glamorous, articulate, humorous leader who gave us a vision of what we can become.”
That is an assessment Leff expects to survive the generation of Americans–essentially those over age 50 today–who have first-hand recollections of the magic that Kennedy worked and the world peace he helped preserve.
Forty years after an assassin broke a nation’s heart, the story of that magic, and that heartbreak, is so entrenched in American culture that it is likely to transcend time. But the 86-year-old John F. Kennedy, having had 40 more years to work the magic, is but an opportunity missed.
