John F. Kennedy’s ideal remains elusive 50 years later: Editorial

JFK Kennedy in Florida

In looking back at the assassination of John F. Kennedy, America celebrates the life of a president who inspired its citizens to seek lofty goals, encapsulated by the key passage from his inaugural speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

The end of the Kennedy era was 50 years ago, and it seems longer.

We don’t hear a lot of “Ask what you can do for your country” anymore. And when a national leader does express such a sentiment, it invites more questions than it did then. Whose vision of the country is he talking about? Is he calling us to serve the country or his agenda? He’s about to raise taxes, isn’t he?

It’s not as if the United States ever was a paradise of unity, was ever quite the Camelot that Jackie Kennedy remembered; the Democrat’s victory over Republican Richard Nixon in 1960 came in one of the closest elections ever. But there was a common sense of purpose, of the nation’s challenges and moonward trajectory, to which it is hard to relate today.

Americans all want a working society and leaders worth following. But we’re fussier than ever about paying for it, and too many people don’t even ask what they can do to get themselves to the voting booth.

The question this week, as the anniversary of Nov. 22, 1963, nears, shouldn’t be the old “where were you when Kennedy was shot?” It should be, where have we gone from there?

It is impossible to agree on a single, biggest thing that changed on the day the corner of Elm and Houston streets in Dallas became a historical crossroads. It is impossible by definition, since one thing the shock of Kennedy’s death did was to create uncertainty of a kind America had never known.

This wasn’t the result of the assassination alone. The decade that followed, with the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War and anti-war movement, and Watergate, further shook our sense of security and heightened the distrust in government and antipathy toward Washington that colors much of political discourse today.

But it was the assassination that turned doubt into the national default setting, that made conspiracy theories mainstream. The assassination remains a blood-red inkblot test, its interpretations saying as much about the interpreter as about what happened.

Would the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement have gone as they did if Kennedy, not Lyndon Johnson, had been president? Would Nixon have been elected in 1968? What would have become of Bobby Kennedy?

(Without Nixon, no Watergate; without Watergate, no Jimmy Carter coming along in 1976 to clean up the capital? And where does Ronald Reagan fit into all this? The presidential succession is all speculation after Dealey Plaza.)

One issue surrounding the JFK assassination that reverberates today is guns. Lee Harvey Oswald bought his rifle by mail order out of the back of the National Rifle Association magazine. It sounds absurd to a reasonable person that a man, known to the FBI to be a communist sympathizer who’d lived in the Soviet Union, could send a check under an alias and get a military rifle sent to a post-office box. But Johnson’s attempt to outlaw such purchases went nowhere in 1964, despite the support of the leaders of the NRA of the day; it wasn’t until 1968, after the King and Bobby Kennedy shootings, that LBJ succeeded in passing gun control legislation that ended sales by mail as well as sales to felons, the mentally ill, drug abusers and minors.

Those of us who support tougher background checks for gun purchasers today must acknowledge that the 1968 gun-control laws didn’t stop political violence in this country. At the same time, though, gun-ownership absolutists must be honest and say if they believe the country would be safer if those laws were rolled back.

Certainly, sad to say, America is less shocked when violence hits the headlines today.

Looking back is a healthy, if painful, process. It is hard in many ways to identify with the America of 50 years ago. Much is better, and much is worse.

As election turnouts shrink, and public debate becomes less constructive, it is natural to despair that the “ask what you can do” ideal is lost. But as long as those words remain a touchstone, it is not lost. Kennedy lives on.

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