John f. kennedy

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.