JFK -- FIFTY YEARS LATER

Fifty years ago today (Jan.20th) was cold and snowy.  In fact where I lived in a neighborhood called Ridgewood in the borough of Queens in New York City there was so much snow n the ground that school was canceled.  I attended Grover Cleveland High School named after the only Democratic President between the Civil War and WWI.  He had been a Governor of New York State.  The even better news than school closing was that I could watch the inauguration of President Kennedy on TV.  Not in color and not on a large screen but then that was 1961.

I had participated in my first political debate when in high School in the fall of 1960 I debated for JFK against a Nixon spokesperson.  As a youngster I had heard Eisenhower on TV but only folks older than me like my parents had heard FDR.  So Kennedy was a vigorous and vibrant speaker to us.  He punctuated every line orally.  The inaugural address reads well but it sounds even better.  Of course he looked younger than most of the old white men who populated the inaugural ceremony stand and the proceedings.  But Kennedy had a flare for the historic.  So the song was from Marian Anderson who was renowned for among other things here concert on the Mall in the 1930's.

The address was thrilling.  So many lines that we now remember and repeat.  “Let us never fear to negotiate but let us never negotiate in fear” “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” and of course “Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country” They were heady days -- we thought we could do anything even land a man on the moon (As Kennedy pledged we would do that decade).  There was a great deal of hope that we could solve some of the problems like racial discrimination that we had left unresolved as we ignored social problems during the fifties.

The thousand days of the Kennedy administration were filled with dramatic events. There was the building of the Berlin Wall (now down), the Cuban Missile Crisis (now seemingly anachronistic with the demise of the Soviet Union) and the stirrings of the great Civil Rights movement with tempered support – but significant support – from  the  President and Attorney General Robert F Kennedy.  There were the Peace Corps and the Alianza Para Progreso.  And there was the hesitant but eventually settled American policy shift from support of European colonial powers to the right of all peoples to self determination and independence.  Unfortunately due in large measure to the Cold War preoccupation with the perceived threat of  Soviet communism there was the initial involvement in the Vietnam War.

We have lost the human ties to the Kennedy years with the deaths of Robert Kennedy, Sen. Ted Kennedy, young John, and now Sargent Shriver. Of course looking back now everything is tempered by Dallas in Nov. 1963 when bullets shattered the dream.   Daniel Moynihan, who was Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Kennedy administration, wrote in a piece shortly after, that the Kennedy years were a time of Laughter and Youth.  He said then “we shall laugh again but we shall never be young again”.  He did not know how prescient he was.

I guess that was one of the things that made the Obama campaign of 2008 so exciting.  To my generation it was literally the passing again of the torch (personified by Caroline and Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama) and to those younger it was like feeling and hearing what we felt and heard in 1961.

We look back now and realize what those years were.  In the words of one of Pres. Kennedy’s favorites songs “Don’t let it be forgot ..that once there was a spot..that for one brief shining moment..was known as Camelot.” Our Camelot was all too brief but it was Shining!

1-20-2011