Moving memories, in Boston, of John Fitzgerald Kennedy

I visited the “John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum” in Boston yesterday. It’s a magnificent building designed by the late I.M.Pei at a prime location overlooking the city of Boston and is the nation’s official memorial to President John F. Kennedy.

For many of my generation JFK was what made politics interesting. Kennedy was the first President to have been born in the 20th Century and in my early teens I related to him in a way I couldn’t to the old guard.

JFK was multi talented but it was his speechmaking that truly excelled and probably won him (narrowly) the presidency. There was, as you’d expect, a fair bit of Blarney in what he said! The genes will out. Listen to any of his speeches and admire the cadences and the rhetorical balance, for example this from his inaugural address:

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Kennedy worked with Ted Sorenson on that speech and it’s perfect. It’s like a brilliant piece of theatre, or music. At the Museum it’s the first of the many video displays there to be in colour. A clever bit of symbolism about the new era Kennedy promised.

One of my favourite political quotes is “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” a remark made during the 1988 United States vice presidential debate by Democratic nominee Lloyd Bentsen to Republican nominee Senator Dan Quayle in response to Quayle’s mentioning the name of JFK. The point is, of course, that nobody could be.

Kennedy was in office for just over 1000 days – a period not without its challenges ! Had he completed two full terms how different would the United States and the world have been? This is the great unknown of 1960s politics. Obviously Vietnam being the key issue. Also in the inaugural address he says this:

“To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.”

This is a barely disguised commitment to counter the “tyranny” of Communism which suggests JFK could have escalated America’s involvement in Vietnam as his successor did. But who knows?

JFK’s father Joe had been less than complimentary about Britain when Ambassador in London during the war. Clearly Kennedy’s reference to “colonial control” is a reference to the imperialism of Britain and, in Indochina, France. Suffice to say he looked his happiest visiting Ireland the country of his heritage – and one that had ceased to be a colony!

As you walk through the Museum you follow Kennedy’s life before and in the White House. But , of course, you know the terrible ending that is approaching. You enter a darkened corridor where the only display is the date, illuminated in red in small type “22nd November 1963” on one wall. The only other displays are small screens showing Walter Cronkite’s announcement of JFK’s death:

This is astonishingly well done. The Museum is about Kennedy’s life and achievements not about his assassination, (Nor about his adventurous love life for that matter!)

My memories of JFK are about the good (Cuba, Civil Rights, inspirational leadership) far more than the bad and ugly (Vietnam, the assassination). He was irreplaceable and hasn’t been replaced. Was he a Saint and always right ? Of course not. Was he in a different league from some of the minnows who succeeded him in the Oval Office! Indisputably.