[hanamizu]

” What explains the enduring live affair with Kennedy?!”

---

I guess it’s one of those ‘you had to be there’ kinds of things. I was in 9th grade for the election of ‘60. Kennedy was young—so unlike the Presidents who preceded him, Ike, Truman, FDR. “First President born in the 20th century!” We were told he was a war hero (I know, I know, that’s what we were told). He had a pretty, classy wife, and two toddlers.

He was a democrat, so the press loved him and he ran against Nixon whom the press despised. But the election was close, close enough that it might well have been stolen.

And then he got assassinated. For four days all that was on TV and radio were retrospectives of what we had all lost. By the time he was in the ground he was a secular saint. Franklin was removed from the half dollar to be replaced by JFK. Idyllwild Airport in NYC was renamed JFK, Cape Canaveral in FL was renamed Cape Kennedy, dozens of schools were renamed in his honor. Even his official Presidential portrait portrays him almost in mourning, looking down.

Time has passed and those who remember those times are passing as well and people now look back and wonder what all the fuss over him was about. As I said earlier, you kinda had to have been there.

The article talks about how McKinley never got the treatment JFK got, but neglects that his VP, Teddy Roosevelt kind of did.

[Inyo-Mono]

I guess it’s one of those ‘you had to be there’ kinds of things.

You're right, I was in 8th grade at the time and had even drawn a political cartoon of the Nixon Kennedy debate which was published in our local newspaper. I remember all of what you described quite well.

[Viking2002]

I was going to say that I was born when JFK was in office, but you don’t make me feel so old now. LOL I dabble in coin collecting (when the whim and wallet are both aligned), and have a Brilliant Uncirculated Franklin half from my birth year. There’s just something eye-catching about silver coins.

[spel_grammer_an_punct_polise]

“close enough that it might well have been stolen.”

There is absolutely no question that Joe Kennedy bought the Chicago, Illinois vote. Years later Tip O’Neill was on national TV and ADMITTED that the vote had been bought.

[Verginius Rufus]

JFK gave a few good speeches (not that he wrote them) and had "wit." He was a Cold Warrior--but not a very competent one. We did not have a TV at the time of the 1960 debates but I remember us listening to them on the radio--Quemoy and Matsu were among the topics. I didn't remember what Kennedy's position was until I saw the debate recently on C-SPAN: Nixon was for defending Quemoy and Matsu but Kennedy wasn't. Strangely enough the Red Chinese have never bothered to take them. Of course those islands are trivial compared to Formosa/Taiwan.

We can't know how Nixon would have handled the Berlin crisis or Indochina...but probably better than Kennedy. And he might not have done such a poor job with the Bay of Pigs invasion. I suppose Nixon would have supported the effort to land a man on the moon--the space race was considered an important part of the Cold War--but he might not have recklessly committed to getting the astronauts there and back by 1969.

[MayflowerMadam]

JFK — pfffft!

[smalltownslick]

Yes, I remember all this, too. (Nor a Kennedy admirer, just explaining the times.) but it was a defining moment in time for us. I was a senior in high school. The first traumatic event in our lives - the Buddy Holly plane crash, was the first time we knew that young people could die. The second such incident was the Kennedy assassination. It never occurred to us such a thing could happen. And all while we were in school and our teachers were telling us all about it. I think that’s all it was - it was a traumatic event to very young people. And it took a long time to get over it. It all seemed so unreal.