Thoughts On JFK

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was my favorite president. That doesn't mean he was the best president (that honor falls to Abraham Lincoln) but he appealed to me more than all the others. He appealed to many people and that's likely why he was killed fifty years ago today.

The concept of the New Frontier still resonates today. We are a nation that moves forward and categorically refuses to be sedimentary. That's what President Kennedy represented when he took office in 1961. He made mistakes during his 1,000 days but his vision led to improvements in civil rights, stronger economic growth and landed a man on the moon. Any notion of foreign policy naivete was wiped away during thirteen days in October of 1962. In so many ways, he exhibited the core of the word leader.

I realize that a lot of this is rooted in romanticism. Yet our country changed 50 years ago today and it took a darker path. Had President Kennedy lived, our history would have been brighter. It's just that simple. Vietnam would have been completely different. We may have even not been involved at all which means millions would be alive today. The turbulence of the 1960s would have played out much differently with a more capable leader like JFK. Lyndon Johnson was the worst president this nation has ever seen (largely because of Vietnam) and Richard Nixon was mentally unbalanced as well as a criminal. Eight years of JFK would not have been perfect, obviously, but far brighter than the black veil cast over our country from the end of 1963 to 1970.

It doesn't really matter who killed President Kennedy although the answer is quite obvious. He represented a clear threat to those who had much to gain from war and unrest (the mob, the military-industrial complex, Texas elites) and he had to be taken out. The simple facts of that day in Dallas a half a century ago illustrate that there was more than one shooter in Dealey Plaza. From a pure ballistics and evidence point of view, this is apparent to anyone familiar with violent crime scenes but, again, it doesn't really matter. We lost a chunk of history that could have been remembered as our golden years, shining brightly like Camelot of old.

Through all the din of today's anniversary, let's not forget our dying king...