SEMO professor talks about historic JFK moment

The United States ground to a halt 50 years ago today as news broke that President John F. Kennedy had been shot during a presidential motorcade in Dallas. The memory of Jackie Kennedy, dressed in pink, climbing toward the back of the vehicle that was carrying the slumped president is seared in many people's memories.

The news of President Kennedy's assassination devastated many Americans because they felt such a connection to the young presidential family that everyone seemed to know and love.

Dr. Joel Rhodes, history professor at Southeast Missouri State University, teaches a course called "The Sixties Experience in America," which covers the Kennedy administration and the aftermath of the president's assassination. He is writing a book titled "In a Land Called Honah Lee: The 60s Experience in the Lives of American Children," about the '60s as seen through the eyes of American children.

Rhodes on Wednesday spoke of John F. Kennedy's presidency and what his assassination meant to the 1960s generation and the ones that followed.

Q: What did John F. Kennedy bring to the table that other presidents didn't?

A: Well I think to understand Kennedy you have to begin with the divide between the '50s and the '60s. Kennedy's election, and more specifically his inauguration, is deliberately for him a demarcation between the '50s and the '60s. In the inaugural address and in his presidency, he preached a gospel of teens and vitality and progress, and he compared that to the complacency, the stasis, the self-satisfaction of the 1950s. And symbolically, you've got in Eisenhower, who was more of a caretaker as a president. ... He was at that time the oldest president the United States had ever had -- passing the torch to the youngest president that the country had ever had. And Kennedy set his administration up very immediately as an administration of progress -- "We're not going to stand still, we're not going to be self-satisfied" -- and he preached that gospel of commitment, of sacrifice, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

A big part of the Kennedy mystique is what might have been. It's the politics really not of what he accomplished, but it's the politics of expectation. That's what makes Kennedy still so fascinating. It's not just the trauma of his loss, which certainly is substantial, I mean it sears itself into the national consciousness, but it's "what if?" The expectation. Kennedy expected to do so much more. That New Frontier had so much potential. And there was a romance to it. We're going to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, we're going to eradicate all these historical problems that the country's had, we're going to take care of poor people, we're going to take care of handicapped people, we're gong to take care of the elderly, we're going to provide civil rights to black people. That's still so tantalizing to us -- what might've been.

Q: What kind of president was he?

A: The Kennedy presidency is certainly more, more style and stagecraft than substance oftentimes. Kennedy's image was very carefully crafted, stage-managed from the very beginning of his presidency, even past his death. This whole image of Camelot, that was largely crafted by Jackie after he died.

And if you think about it, here is a man who is remembered for being young and vigorous and active. The guy was incredibly sickly, damn near debilitated physically. He was a man who was known from this wonderful, charming family, this very idyllic family. He's a chronic womanizer. I mean his marriage is strained to the extreme. So largely, what we remember of Kennedy is that image, it's the style that was created, the aura of Kennedy.

What's interesting about him personally is that Kennedy always a sense that he had a very short window of opportunity. His entire life he had a very keen sense of his own mortality. And even as president, it's not that he had a premonition of his assassination; his health was so bad. Kennedy just always felt that he had to live life faster than people around him, that he would not live a full life.

Q: Why was his death such a shock, and why did the nation take it so hard?

A: I think it goes back to those politics of expectation. And people have commented time and again that the death of Kennedy hurt them more profoundly, hurt them more deeply, than did the death of their own parents. And I think what they're trying to say is that when your parents die, or when somebody close to you dies, it's as if your past dies. Part of you, nostalgically dies. Kennedy was the future. Part of the future died, and that hurt people more. That's why it's traumatized the nation the way it did -- is that that potential was gone. Where was the New Frontier going to go? And for the baby boom children who were inspired by Kennedy, they had all this energy. They wanted to follow him in this crusade of commitment and sacrifice, bearing any burden and so forth, and when he was gone, they had all this energy, but they weren't sure how to channel it.

Q: Not so much the population of the United States, but what did it mean for the country of the United States? Lyndon B. Johnson took over afterward -- how was that transition?

A: Johnson, very masterfully, is able to reconcile his own political instincts with Kennedy's agenda. Unlike Kennedy, who was a much more pragmatic politician, Johnson's a true believer in most of that stuff. And another historical argument is all of the things that Kennedy had introduced -- the tax cuts, the civil rights legislation, what's going to be become Medicare and Medicaid -- all of those things -- those were Kennedy initiatives. But there is a great deal of debate whether or not those would've ever actually come to pass, if they would've ever actually become law had Kennedy lived. Because Kennedy may well not have had the political skill that Johnson did.

[Kennedy was] a very well-meaning person, but a lightweight, a political lightweight who didn't have the skill to actually create policy. He could talk a good game and he had a great vision, and he certainly had a great feel for the country, but he couldn't do the heavy lifting. Johnson could do the heavy lifting. And Johnson did the heavy lifting.

Q: In your opinion, how do you think he was assassinated, regarding bullets, number of people who were [involved]?

A: I think there is more than meets the eye. I have a hard time logically believing, as a hunter, that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The shot selection is odd. How deep the conspiracy goes, if there is a conspiracy, if there is a cover-up, I don't know. But I don't personally believe in the single-assassin theory.

But, that being said, generally the longer things tend to go, the longer crimes tend to go unsolved, the more of a conspiracy unravels. If there is a conspiracy, the fact that they have now kept it so tightly together for 50 years, that's a hell of a feat. I mean, generally people spill the beans, they make deathbed confessions, word gets out. That's a hell of a conspiracy that has remained relatively airtight for 50 years. I have no doubt that there is more information than what the country has ever been given. What type of information, I don't know.

Q: Fifty years later, America's changed a lot. Do you see any of John F. Kennedy's influence going on today? Do you think he would be happy with how our nation is now?

A: No, no. Not at all. I think, sadly, Kennedy's legacy has largely become very stylistic. I think Kennedy is more [of an] icon now more than anything else. He means different things to different people, but the actual historical significance to Kennedy I think is largely gone. Part of that was overshadowed by the assassination. ... I think his image has taken on a momentum of its own. I think people have lost the historical Kennedy. And that's sad. People really don't understand much of his politics, much of his approach to the presidency. He has become, unfortunately, a celebrity president, I think, more than anything else.

Part of it I think also is America's inherent desire to have a royal family. And the Kennedys are as close as we've ever had to that.

But as far as the gridlock and the partisanship and just the blood sport that is now our politics -- Kennedy would be repulsed by that. He was too practical, too pragmatic, but also too idealistic.

ashedd@semissourian.com

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