50 Years Later, Why Is America Still In Love With JFK?

The Daily Beast, Wednesday, January 19, 2011, 8:58pm (PST)

On a frigid day, exactly 50 years ago, John F. Kennedy took office with the words, “Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.” The world had high hopes for this dashing fellow from Boston — at just 43, the youngest president elected to office, and the only Catholic.

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While other presidents' anniversaries come and go without fanfare, Kennedy will be honored this week with celebrations worthy of a king. Congressional leaders will host a tribute in the Capitol Rotunda and JFK's daughter Caroline will host another event an hour later with astronauts and civil rights leaders. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will launch a week of celebration by introducing a National Symphony Orchestra composition incorporating text from his speeches, narrated by actor Morgan Freeman. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, singer-songwriter Paul Simon and Diane Sawyer will also honor his memory at the concert, while Tom Brokaw and the JFK Library host a forum online. Not to mention the TV specials! In other words, the love affair with JFK is far from over.

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The public's relationships with politicians are generally complicated, but the day Kennedy was assassinated, less than three years into his presidency, one might say America's affair was frozen in time, unable to ever run its natural course.

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"There was no finished resolution, for however you felt about him. You don't know what the end of the story is," said Shannon Perich, associate curator at the National Museum of American History, who co-authored, The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family with photographer Richard Avedon.

"Whatever was going to happen was cut short ... his legacy was unfulfilled," she told BLTWY.

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“Martyrs are powerful things,” historian and author Rick Perlstein told BLTWY, noting that you don't see TV memorials to Dwight Eisenhower or most other presidents. “It's so interesting, this line we have between the presidents we think of as heroes and the ones we think of as goats.”

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Perlstein researched that era extensively for his book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and argues that Kennedy wasn't even all that popular at the moment he died — that he might not have been reelected. Even if he had, he says, he might have expanded involvement in Vietnam in a way that might have corrupted his hero status.

Few would deny, however, that Kennedy's presidency was the start of something new and different. Glamorous and young, broadcast on TV for all the world to envy, Jack and Jackie made up the first true celebrity political couple. It was what many — including Perich — call “the beginning of the modern presidency.”

“The Kennedy image of a wonderfully attractive, energetic, aspiring family was in many ways the American ideal,” author and historian Thomas Maier, who wrote The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings, told BLTWY.

For Maier, the anniversary of Kennedy's inauguration speech on that cold January day “marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the new America we live in. This is when it started,” he says. As an Irish-Catholic, Kennedy symbolized the fact that America was now officially more than a white Anglo-Saxon nation, Maier says.

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Naturally, amid all the events Thursday -- the Congressional event, the Caroline Kennedy-led tribute with civil rights leaders and astronauts, the concert in the evening at the Kennedy Center and the TV specials — there will be many different takes on what JFK's presidency means to America. As The National Symphony Orchestra Everyone has their own way of making sense of a relationship that tragically ended, of separating reality and nostalgia.

Furthermore, amid all the photographs and videos of JFK's charming smile, Jackie's perfect wave and the happy little children, there's something a little eerie. Perich described the feeling of walking through Avedon's portraits of this glamorous family, taken right before he took office.

"There is so much excitement around them, but you know all the drama to come, and you feel tense for them. You just want to protect them in some way.”