The final act of the U.S. presidency's 'golden age'

Fifty years after the murder of President John F. Kennedy, the event is scarcely less saddening than it was in its immediate aftermath. It must rank with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as the most graphically shocking and horrifying moment in modern American history.

The United States had endured a presidential assassination three times before — but not in the electronic age. In the cases of Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield in 1881, and William McKinley in 1901, the assassinations were vividly sketched and described, and the country was profoundly shocked in every case. But the endless televised reruns of the motorcade in Dallas, the solicitude of Jacqueline Kennedy, and then the horror within the presidential car and on the roadside when it was clear that a terrible wound had been sustained, is a ghastly and indelible recollection to everyone, in a way that a drawing, however skillfully executed, cannot be.

Unlike Lincoln, President Kennedy was not a gigantic statesman who had saved the Union, emancipated the slaves, and seen the country through a horrible war in which more Americans died than in all other American wars in history combined. JFK was only 46, and was not three years into his presidency. Lincoln, by contrast, announced that he was "an old man" in his famous leave-taking at Springfield in 1861 as he went to his inauguration, "not knowing when or whether ever I may return," though he was only 52. It was a century earlier, and Lincoln had led a hard life. He was departing his home to assume the headship of a country that was already in the deepest crisis in its history, with states seceding preemptively each week.

The greatest contrast with previous analogous tragedies in American history was that JFK was glamorous; he was a star. Abraham Lincoln, for all his greatness, and partly because of it, was not glamorous, nor was his harridanly and somewhat maladjusted wife. John F. Kennedy was a fair and tousle-haired, intelligently ingenuous, stylish scion of a wealthy family. It was an altogether different appeal from that of the craggy product of the log cabin and the rail-splitting youth and itinerant frontier lawyer, Abraham Lincoln. For her part, Jacqueline Kennedy was only 34 when her husband was murdered, and was an elegant, trilingual, stylishly dressed and refined woman.

Garfield had been a university head in his twenties (Western Reserve), a distinguished combat citizen general in the Civil War, and was the only person ever to make the jump directly from congressman to president (though he had already been elected senator but not installed). But he was not glamorous, and glamor was not in 1880 what it was in the 1960s.

William McKinley had had a good war as a middle officer, and the war with Spain was a walkover. He was a journeyman senator and a solid plough-horse, but he, too, was in no sense glamorous.

Of presidents who died in office, the closest in some respects to President Kennedy was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was a great star; at least lived in the era of films, newsreels, and glossy magazines; and who captured and held the imagination of the nation and the world in a way that Kennedy consciously tried to replicate, down to the smiling countenance and the identification by his three initials. But FDR, though only 63 when he died, passed on from a stroke in his great office in his fourth term, was 17 years older than JFK, and cannot be claimed to have died entirely prematurely.

The deaths of FDR and JFK provoked the two greatest outbreaks of public grief in the nation's history, apart from the death of Lincoln. Two million people stood silently beside the track at all hours of the day and night, as the funeral train bore the casket of President Roosevelt back from Warm Springs, Georgia to Washington, and on to his ancestral home at Hyde Park, New York.

As president, Kennedy followed and concluded what must in hindsight be considered the golden age of the U.S. presidency, through the distinguished incumbencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. The record of those leaders, taking the country out of the Great Depression and to victory in World War II, and through the worst phase of the Cold War, founding NATO and creating the Marshall Plan, defending Korea, and proposing Atoms for Peace and Open Skies, and delivering a peaceful and prosperous America beginning to desegregate, were probably the greatest sustained period of presidential accomplishment in the history of the office.

© 2024 Conrad Black