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It was one of those mild November days, typical of Washington autumns, the temperature pushing 70. Because I worked nights, I was trying to nap between picking up the 3-year-old at play school and her older siblings at 3.
But excited voices interrupting the music on my favorite oldies station jostled me awake, talking of shots fired in faraway Dallas. That was how I learned of the tragedy I would never forget, the event that helped transform the post-1950s United States.
Most of the 330 million Americans have been born since that November day and only know of John F. Kennedy's assassination from the history books or television commemoratives.
For them, the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and the 2021 Capitol insurrection — events that many witnessed on television in real time -- have far greater salience than what happened 60 years ago this month in Dallas.
But many of us in our 70s or older remember vividly the 35th president's assassination — and the events that stemmed from it.
It was the first major news event other than a scheduled presidential inauguration, political convention or State of the Union address carried live on television, in real time. For four days — through Kennedy's burial — millions stayed glued to their TVs.
At that point, fewer than 2 million households had color television. But Kennedy was innately colorful, handsome with a shock of reddish hair, a beautiful wife and two winsome children — dramatically different from his older predecessors.
At age 43, as the youngest president ever elected, he succeeded Dwight D. Eisenhower, at 70 then the oldest.
Moreover, he was the first celebrity president, a television star who launched, for better or worse, an era that culminated with the 2016 election of a billionaire businessman best known for hosting a reality television show. (Ironically, Donald Trump's obsessive self-absorption contrasts sharply with the sense of detachment that was one of Kennedy's most appealing traits.)
Sixty years later, Kennedy's popularity persists — only Abraham Lincoln and George Washington ranked as more popular in a recent YouGov poll.
Still, the era's written history may not do full justice to Kennedy's appeal, especially as his positive attributes are offset for some by the later learned details of a personal life that might not pass political muster today.
In those days, politicians were judged primarily on their official lives, regardless of personal indiscretions or perceived character flaws. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon changed that.
Kennedy's election was a political trailblazer, and not just because he was the first Catholic president. A World War II hero, he was the first of seven from what became known as the Greatest Generation.
In those days, primaries were few, and the power to pick the convention delegates who determined the nominees lay with governors, senators and party bosses. Kennedy's victories over more liberal rival Sen. Hubert Humphrey in the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries convinced Democratic Party leaders to back him, despite his religion.
His triumph -- and the abuses in the nominating system -- helped transfer the presidential selection power from fellow pols, who knew well the attributes and flaws of prospective candidates, to the voters, often influenced by candidates' television skills or various campaign trivialities, rather than their governing abilities.
Campaigns might have changed even more had Kennedy lived to face Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. The two, good friends though political rivals, had agreed to fly the country together, holding a series of issues-focused televised debates. Without them, the debates that electrified the country in 1960 lapsed until 1976, the next election where both candidates needed them.
Like other such dramatic events, Kennedy's assassination changed the flow of history, though we can only speculate how.
It brought to the presidency Lyndon Johnson, whose unappealing television persona made him unlikely to win on his own.
Taking full advantage of what became an inevitable landslide a year later, Johnson and a heavily Democratic Congress enacted more ground-breaking federal programs than any president but Franklin D. Roosevelt: Medicare, Medicaid, federal education aid, two landmark civil rights laws and a tax cut that propelled a decade of economic growth.
At the same time, he planted the seeds of his political demise by vastly increasing the American military presence in Vietnam, from 16,300 advisers at Kennedy's death to 536,000 mostly combat troops in 1968, all ultimately for naught.
Kennedy, more cautious, might have achieved less of Johnson's domestic agenda. As for Vietnam, his top aides, many of whom I interviewed 20 years after his death, disagreed.
Ted Sorensen, Mike Feldman and Larry O'Brien all told me they believed that, after the 1964 election, Kennedy would have found a way to extricate the United States. Another top adviser, Kenny O'Donnell, wrote in “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye” that Kennedy told Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield in 1963 that he planned to end U.S. involvement after the election. “So, we had better make damned sure that I am re-elected,” O'Donnell recalled Kennedy telling Mansfield.
Others disagreed. “I have great doubt that he would have done anything different than Johnson did,” said former Undersecretary of State George Ball, who served under both and became an outspoken war critic.
Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War and subsequent urban disorders cut short a potential Democratic era, precipitating the 1968 election of Richard Nixon — like Johnson, someone who might otherwise not have reached the White House. He launched a string of five GOP victories in six elections and a modest rollback of Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society.
Because Kennedy's presidency was so short — just over 1,000 days — It's often seen as one more of promise than achievement. But he laid the basis for Johnson's domestic successes, and his dramatic rebuff of the Soviet effort to put offensive missiles in Cuba and ground-breaking nuclear test ban made the world safer.
Beyond that, he inspired a generation of Americans to become involved politically, an impact still being felt three decades later when one of them, Bill Clinton, ended that long Republican political era.
The immediate impact of that weekend was epitomized in a memorable televised exchange between two Kennedy enthusiasts.
“We'll never laugh again,” columnist Mary McGrory told Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future U.S. senator.
“Mary,” Moynihan replied, “we'll laugh again, but we'll never be young again."
Carl P. LeubsdorfThe Dallas Morning News (TNS)
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.
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