Was JFK that generations BHO?
Yes. I was very, very young at the time, and remember more about his funeral and how it interrupted the regular TV programming, but my Mom was a huge Kennedy supporter and clipped and saved tons of newspaper articles from his campaign and the “human interest” stories published after he was elected. Much like the Obama gushing I’m seeing on the Blue, so many news reports at the time expressed hope for a “new” America because of a President who was as handsome as a movie star and had an attractive young socially-connected wife. I remember looking at Mom’s Kennedy scrapbook many years ago and thinking that so many of the newspaper articles were more about JFK’s “cuteness” (for want of a better term) than about his policitics. One of the newspaper articles in her collection simply features a photo of his bandaged finger and goes on to explain that he’d cut himself while slicing a loaf of bread for his children. (Oh, how homespun!
I was a teenage Republican, and the night Kennedy won it was the end of the world. My friends and I were devastated by the Republican loss. Except for two quietly smiling friends who, it turned out, were teenage Democrats. I had seen Kennedy bumperstickers all through the rural parts of our county, but I underestimated their potential impact. I thought everybody who liked Ike would like Nixon. (This was near Gettysburg PA, where nearly everybody did like Ike.) I don’t know that Kennedy-mania affected me immediately, but I remember that at his inauguration he expressed American ideals in a way that inspired me and I became a convert. It was a big deal also because JFK was the first Catholic president. That was a scary hurdle for some people.
Wasn’t there, but my sense is definitely, yes. Here is an account by someone who remembers: we were too liberal to be happy with President Eisenhower and, our other choice, Adlai Stevenson, was too cerebral for us. Of course, my parents, being FDR Democrats, loved Stevenson but we needed someone in between. In 1960, that man came along and he was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He had the popular appeal of Eisenhower and was also very intelligent, being a Harvard-educated United States Senator from Massachusetts. He was young and good looking and smart and had a terrific sense of humor. He was our man! …We didn’t think Senator Kennedy stood much of a chance and that only made us work harder. …My friend, Mary Hewes Schmitt, and I distributed flyers and pamphlets and hoped for the best. Mary had five children and I had four but we did what campaigning we could on behalf of our candidate.
Perhaps the problem is that though we repeat it often, it is patently untrue that “history repeats itself”. History is a one-way street. We can compare the victory of the first catholic president to the victory of the first black president, but to think that the blacks of the 00’s are the catholics of the 60s is wrong; then who were the blacks of the 60s? The whole reason the first black president is so cathartic is because racism was so rampant and outspoken as recently as the 60s that there are many people still alive who grew up afraid for their lives and called n—–r at school who just helped elect a black man to the oval office. That’s a whole different level of triumph than Kennedy, and that’s why there were multiple faces covered in tears on Tuesday night. Plenty of people who elected Obama were there when Kennedy was elected, though plenty of them had trouble voting at the time, for instance…
