He sprinkled his public remarks with quotations from poets and philosophers. Kennedy had graduated from Harvard, and stocked his administration with the school’s professors. The Kennedys lit up the White House with writers, artists, and intellectuals: the famous cellist Pablo Casals, the poet Robert Frost, the French intellectual André Malraux. A friend of his, the journalist Ben Bradlee, wrote a 1964 book about Kennedy called That Special Grace. He had a captivating wife and children, a photogenic family.
He not only had grace, in the sense of performing and acting gracefully he was also a man who seemed to receive grace. Borrowing a motto from his prep-school days, putting your country in place of Choate, he exhorted Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you-ask what you can do for your country.”Īnother contributor to the Kennedy legend, something deeper than his personal attractiveness, is the image of what many came to call grace. His celebrated inaugural address was filled with phrases that seemed designed to be carved in stone, as many of them have been. To watch him on film today is to be struck by the power of his presence and the wit and elegance of his oratory. A witty and articulate speaker, he seemed built for the age of television. In shaping his legend, Kennedy’s personal charm helped. John Hersey’s powerful account of Kennedy’s wartime bravery, published in The New Yorker in 1944, helped him launch his political career. He was the first president born in the 20th century, the first young veteran of World War II to reach the White House. He symbolized-as he well realized-a new generation and its coming-of-age. Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected to the presidency, succeeding the man who, at the time, was the oldest. But most of these bills became law after his death-in part because of his successor’s political skill, but also because they seemed like a monument to a martyred president. Few of these proposals became law in his lifetime-a great disappointment to Kennedy, who was never very successful with Congress.
He also proposed a voting-rights bill and federal programs to provide health care to the elderly and the poor. The following day, after almost two years of mostly avoiding the issue of civil rights, he delivered a speech of exceptional elegance, and launched a drive for a civil-rights bill that he hoped would end racial segregation. In an address at American University in 1963, he spoke kindly of the Soviet Union, thereby easing the Cold War. Kennedy, during his short presidency, proposed many important steps forward. Afterward, both Kennedy and Khrushchev began to soften the relationship between Washington and Moscow. In the end, a peaceful agreement was reached. Kennedy, aware of the danger of escalating the crisis, instead ordered a blockade of Soviet ships. Most of his military advisers-and they were not alone-believed the United States should bomb the missile pads that the Soviet Union was stationing in Cuba. The most important, and most famous, was his adept management of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, widely considered the most perilous moment since World War II. Yet he was also responsible for some extraordinary accomplishments. Most of his legislative proposals died on Capitol Hill. His 1961 summit meeting in Vienna with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was a humiliating experience.
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The Bay of Pigs invasion of Communist Cuba was only the first in a series of failed efforts to undo Fidel Castro’s regime.
His first year was a disaster, as he himself acknowledged. President Kennedy spent less than three years in the White House.
But in the eyes of the world, this reticent man became a charismatic leader who, in his life and in his death, served as a symbol of purpose and hope. The contradictory realities of Kennedy’s life don’t match his global reputation. Visitors from all over the world have signed their names in the memory books, and many have written tributes: “Our greatest President.” “Oh how we miss him!” “The greatest man since Jesus Christ.” At least as many visitors write about the possible conspiracies that led to JFK’s assassination.
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The windows are cluttered once again with cardboard boxes, just as they had been on that sunny afternoon when Oswald hid there. The museum itself is an oddity because of its physical connection to the event it illuminates the most memorable-and eeriest-moment of a visit to the sixth floor is when you turn a corner and face the window through which Oswald fired his rifle as Kennedy’s open car snaked through Dealey Plaza’s broad spaces below. Every year, nearly 350,000 people visit the place where Lee Harvey Oswald waited on November 22, 1963, to shoot at the president’s motorcade. Kennedy, perhaps the most striking is the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, in the building that was once the Texas School Book Depository.
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