This month marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of America’s 35th president. On 22 November 1963, John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, after only 34 months in office. His is the ‘Unfinished Life,’ in the words of his biographer Robert Dallek. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, built upon his work, and carried through his civil rights agenda, with the Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Act 1965. Nonetheless, he will always remain the ‘What if?’ president, his ultimate promise unfulfilled, though Stephen King’s new novel 11.12.63 seeks to imagine what it might have been like had Kennedy lived.
Kennedy’s enduring appeal is multifaceted. Conspiracy theories about his death still abound today. Millions of people remember where they were when they heard of his assassination. The 1960 presidential election, which Kennedy narrowly over won against vice-president Richard Nixon, had only 100,000 votes in it, and was the first to feature the televised debate between the contenders. His handling of the Cuban missile crisis brought the world back from the brink of nuclear catastrophe.
Kennedy was also one of the outstanding orators of the 20th century. His speeches have stood the test of time, their content analysed time and time again. But Kennedy’s addresses are about more than words: they have become historic symbols. On 15 July 1960, Kennedy spoke to accept his nomination for the presidency at the Democratic National Convention. The speech is remembered for its ‘New Frontier’ theme. The crucial point is that the 1960s were to become a ‘New Frontier’: with dramatic social changes, and America had to put human beings on the moon before the end of the decade.
His inaugural address of 20 January 1961 is one of the century’s defining speeches. Famously, his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was sent off to study the key elements in other speeches. Abraham Lincoln’s ‘Gettysburg Address’ of 19 November 1863 was taken as a model. Kennedy delivered his address on a cold winter day, his breath visible as he spoke; the torch had truly passed to a new generation – the 43-year-old Kennedy was the first American president born in the 20th century. His couplets contained not only an approach to the cold war, but symbolised the bipolar world: ‘Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.’
On 26 June 1963, in west Berlin, the tiny island of freedom in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, Kennedy declared, ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner.’ Less than two years after the erection of the Berlin Wall, Kennedy used his visit to champion the freedom of peoples against oppression. For those who believed in human freedom, west Berlin was a symbol. Whatever the Soviets said about the purpose of the Berlin Wall (excluding ‘Fascists’ from the west), the reason for its construction was obvious: to stop people escaping from east to west.
As historians and columnists debate Kennedy this month, it is worth remembering that he never lived to write a memoir in self-defence. But his words – through his magnificent speeches – still speak to us in the 21st century.
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Nick Thomas-Symonds is the author of Attlee: A Life in Politics published by IB Tauris (2010). He writes the Labour history column for Progress and tweets @NThomasSymonds
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