22 nov 1963 anni - JFK assassinated, LBJ assumes pres

Descrizione:

In 1961, three years before Johnson’s Great Society speech, John F. Kennedy had voiced a different but equally lofty idea in his inaugural speech. “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike,” he declared, “that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” He challenged his fellow citizens to “ask what you can do for your country,” a call to service that inspired many Americans, particularly a generation coming of age in the Cold War. The British journalist Henry Fairlie called Kennedy’s activism “the politics of expectation.” These “expectations” kindled an emerging spirit of liberal reform.

Kennedy’s legislative record did not live up to his promising image. This was not entirely his fault. Like many twentieth-century presidents, he faced divisions within his own party, resistance from the opposing party, and a slow-moving Congress. The Kennedy administration did not want for ideas, however. The president’s domestic advisors devised bold plans for health insurance for the aged, a new antipoverty program, and a tax cut. After enormous pressure from civil rights leaders — and pushed by the demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in April and May 1963 — they added a civil rights bill. None of these initiatives went anywhere in the Senate, where powerful conservatives, many of them from Kennedy’s own Democratic Party, used delaying tactics. As the autumn rolled around, all of Kennedy’s major bills were stalled.

In late November, the president traveled to Texas to meet with local leaders and raise campaign funds for 1964. The events of his fateful visit to Dallas would upend the political landscape. On the way to a luncheon, Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline (known as “Jackie”) rode in an open car through the city’s downtown. As the motorcade passed under the windows of the Texas School Book Depository, a sniper inside fired shots that struck Kennedy in the head and neck. The young president died within the hour. The accused killer, twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself assassinated two days later while in police custody by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Before Air Force One left Dallas to take the president’s body back to Washington, a grim-faced Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as Kennedy’s successor.

A sense of loss swept the nation in the wake of the assassination, heightened in part by Kennedy’s youthful image and popularity. The Kennedy White House was the center of a glamorous “Camelot,” where power, celebrity, and high fashion mixed. An admiring country saw in Jack and Jackie an ideal American marriage, even though JFK was in fact an obsessive womanizer. The forty-six-year-old president was celebrated for his robust health, but secretly suffered from a rare endocrine condition and chronic back pain from war injuries. Even though Camelot was a fantasy, the Kennedys’ popularity was real — and proved that image mattered as much as reality in conducting the modern presidency. Kennedy took on an even more profound mystique after death.

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