Kennedy assassination

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.

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.