American Hero or Pied Piper? The Ambiguous Memory of JFK

Since I was born six years after President Kennedy’s assassination, I didn’t have any personal experience when I was growing up to compare with the previous generation’s stories about remembering exactly where they were and what they were doing in that moment of national trauma. When I was in my twenties, though, I lived in Israel, and experienced firsthand that country’s parallel trauma, the November 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, which occurred on a Saturday night, the news breaking just as I finished my first shift of guard duty as part of required military basic training. A few years later, I returned to the United States in plenty of time to experience the next great American national trauma — the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

My family have been liberal Democrats for multiple generations, and my father has in his possession an autographed letter from Eleanor Roosevelt assuring him of her support for Kennedy’s successful 1960 campaign for the presidency. It was hardly a sentiment universally shared. That was the closest election of the twentieth century, and polls show that in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, far more people claimed to have voted for him than actually did. The youth, wealth, self-confidence, obvious wit and intelligence of the Kennedys, not to speak of their sheer physical beauty, attracted a good deal of visceral dislike right from the start of their appearance on the national stage. Even the dyed-in-the-wool liberals like my dad had to be won over from their devotion to the previous, twice-unsuccessful Democratic candidate for presidency, Adlai Stevenson.

Not that Jack Kennedy himself was really such a flaming liberal. He won the presidency in 1960 by convincing Americans that he’d be tougher than his opponent, Richard Nixon, in dealing with the Soviet menace, not by blowing up the by-then century-old Democratic White racist “Solid South,” which he had no interest in doing. One senses that his famous phone call during the campaign to Coretta Scott King when her husband Martin Luther King, Jr. was in jail for leading civil rights protests was very carefully calibrated: just enough to win what was then called the Negro vote, not enough to alienate crucial numbers of White Southerners. JFK thought his job was to win the Cold War, not to solve the race problem…

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