John f. kennedy

How should we assess the value of a US president? In the case of John F. Kennedy, who died sixty years ago, the box denoting youthful vigor clearly gets a checkmark. Kennedy was just forty-six at the time of his assassination, which makes him younger than Hunter Biden is now. The box denoting the “vision thing” gets checked as well, if only because Kennedy saw the potential for beating the Soviets in the race to put a man on the moon, famously declaring, “We choose to do this, not because [it is] easy, but because it is hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” Also to be considered is the collective trauma of the events of November 22, 1963.

Sloppy Joe Biden may face strong political headwinds with just seven months to go before the first presidential primary, but at least he’s in good company. Assessing the Washington landscape in mid-June 1963, when John F. Kennedy set off on a European tour designed to bolster not only the NATO alliance but his own poll numbers, the British ambassador David Ormsby-Gore cabled back to London: He will be leaving behind a disquieting domestic situation, [with] economic troubles to the fore... The Negro leaders are beginning to talk about large scale civil disobedience on a nation-wide basis... Moreover, the racial crisis is causing new difficulties for [Kennedy’s] legislative program...

‘You gotta swallow this one, they stole it fair and square.’ That’s a Republican hack speaking to Richard Nixon, as fabricated in Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic about our nation’s 37th president. The reference is to the 1960 election, in which Nixon’s opponent John F. Kennedy prevailed by 303 electoral votes to his opponent’s 219, although the popular margin was a scant 113,000, or about 0.16 percent, out of 68,837,000 ballots cast.

On night two of the Democratic National Convention, Jack Schlossberg, son of Caroline Kennedy and grandson of President John F. Kennedy, hammered a cynical final nail in the coffin of the more palatable and moderate party that his grandfather once represented.Speaking in a slight lisp, Schlossberg, who was named in 2017 to Vanity Fair’s ‘best dressed list’, intentionally perverted one of the most iconic quotes in American political history.‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,’ John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address on January 20, 1961.On Tuesday evening, the former president’s grandson tossed that old-timey sentiment aside, while still trying to capitalize on JFK’s memory.

Will the Kennedy assassination ever lose its cultural centrality? Even as organic memory of the event fades, new works of pop art like Jackie (2017) and 11.22.63 (2016) attest to the powerful ongoing significance of the event. The slain president turned out to have much more weight dead than living. Woodrow Wilson once claimed that while men die, ideas live. John F. Kennedy had no ideas but in death he became one. All the zesty confidence and breezy chutzpah of the American century became flesh in JFK, though like him it would never recover from what happened in Dallas. The United States now had a wound that was worthy of Shakespeare, what Don DeLillo memorably called the moment ‘that broke the back of the American century.

Peregrine Worsthorne, the hugely distinguished British journalist, has died aged 96. He was a wonderful man and a brilliant columnist, who once described his job as 'the articulation of an intelligent, well thought out, coherent set of prejudices'. He also worked as Washington correspondent for The Times of London and the Daily Telegraph. In 2014, he wrote the following piece about meeting various American presidents. It was his last contribution to The Spectator. RIP. I feel a bit of a fraud writing about the ‘presidents I knew’, since journalists do not really get to know the great figures they interview or shake hands with. Indeed the relationship between journalist and great personage is about as false as any relationship can be, since each is trying to make use of the other.