Today marks the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy (JFK). Most people reading this will not know where they were when they heard the news of his death, because most of us weren’t born then. So why does his death still echo down the decades? I believe that it is partly because of the brutality and mystery around his death, and partly because of the sense of the unfulfilled potential of his leadership. The human mind likes order, structure, and meaning, and often struggles with incompletion.
Today we think that we live in challenging times, and maybe we do. JFK was President of America during a tricky period too. And with the benefit of hindsight, he seems to me to have been on the ‘right side’ of most of the political challenges of his time. He was a supporter of both the civil rights and the women’s rights movements. He became a proponent of manned US space flight, after the Soviets put Yuri Gagarin in space in April 1961. Kennedy delivered a speech at Rice University, in Huston, Texas, in September 1962, where he said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” He stood up to the Soviets over their treatment of West Berlin, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His firm yet flexible diplomacy ensured that the Soviets didn’t place nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, like a dagger at America’s throat. Sadly today, he is remembered more for the manner of his death rather than his accomplishments in office.
On 22nd November 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president from the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. But even that sentence is contentious. Many people do not accept the official narrative of the events of that day. The term conspiracy theory was first used then to denigrate people who didn’t buy the official story of the assassination. It is still used today as a pejorative term for people who step too far outside a mainstream narrative on a whole host of topics. I must admit that I do like a good conspiracy, because it allows you to test your critical thinking. But I don’t buy into many of them. Nor do I think the whole world is being run by some secretive cabal either. Eventually you must accept that you really don’t know all the facts and probably never will, and simply get on with your life.
What I think JFK should be remembered for the most is his leadership. Especially today, where world political leadership is so abject. During World War II Kennedy served as the commander of a small torpedo boat in the Pacific theatre. One night his boat was rammed and cut in two by a Japanese destroyer, killing two crew members. Kennedy and the remaining crew avoided capture by swimming 3.5 miles to an island. Despite receiving injuries to his back in the collision, JFK towed a badly burned crewman through the water to the island with a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth. He and one of the other survivors then made several forays into the surrounding area to find help. Eventually they found an English-speaking local, who was able to get sufficient information to the US Navy for Kennedy and his men to be rescued seven days later. During his inaugural address, after being sworn in as president, he said to the American people, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” The real power of a leader comes from empowering their followers. In the same speech he invited the nations of the world to join in a fight against the “common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” A message that very few people seem to have heard. Although he did authorise the disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, it was not his idea. It was a CIA plot carried over from the previous administration. But JFK took responsibility for it when it went wrong, and he negotiated the release of the men captured during the debacle. Though Kennedy was far from being a perfect human being, he does offer a good leadership model for today. Maybe if the events of Dealey Plaza 60 years ago had turned out differently we would be living in a better world today.
“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” John F Kennedy
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