By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — Forty-eight years ago today, Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy, 46, was slain while riding in a motorcade in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. The world stopped; the kinetic, violent, transformational 1960s truly sprung, at 12:30 PM CST, when the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository Building. While the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of Jan. 1986 came to be the defining disaster of the X generation, and 9/11 has reconfigured the very gestalt of national tragedy, the public execution of the young president remains the crime of the 20th century.
Kennedy would have been 94 at this time. He was born in 1917, as American “doughboys” were being deployed to Europe at the closing frames of World War I. His gilded childhood and adolescence were shaped by his family-bred athleticism, the fervent paternalism of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy (the deeply-flawed US ambassador to the UK who would have appeased Hitler beyond any reasonable comprehension), and the future president’s own service in the Navy during World War II. An amalgam of facts and legend established his heroism as a PT-boat skipper in the Pacific; he wrote books, augmented by ghost-writers that nonetheless established his keen sense of history, particularly his affection for England—where he spent a lot of time as a young man.
His predecessor as president, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, actually did a lot more for the nascent civil rights movement (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954; federal intervention in the Little Rock segregation crisis, 1957) than JFK did—though Kennedy, of course, did not have anywhere near as much time to work on the issue. Kennedy was spirited and bold in foreign policy and relatively indifferent to civil rights and he even frowned upon the 1963 March on Washington—fearing that it might cost him Southern support in the 1964 election he did not live to see.
But President Kennedy was imperially literate, funny, truly young, and he lifted our spirits. David Brinkley, the late and eminent anchor of NBC News, once told me: “I just liked Kennedy so damn much. He made Washington sparkle.” And Congressman Louis Stokes, an old friend from Cleveland, who chaired the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and who believes that there was more than one shooter in Dallas forty-eight years ago today, said to me one night: “It doesn’t matter who killed him. It matters how it killed us.”
After the decidedly disastrous invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961, which deeply embarrassed the new president and called his youth into account, he stood before the White House press corps and stated: “I am the chief executive officer in charge and the responsibility is mine.”
Leadership seems to have been murdered in Dealey Plaza that dreadful day 48 years ago, Nov. 22, 1963.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com