THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION:U.S. HAS NEVER RECOVERED
THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION; OUR NATION HAS NEVER RECOVERED
by Bill Hessell, Ph.d
Fifty years and counting from a tragic day in Dallas in 1963, a case can strongly be made that our nation has never fully recovered from the shock and loss experienced on November 22nd that year. It is not just that we lost a president, it is not just that the circumstances of his death have never been fully resolved to the satisfaction of a majority of Americans. It is not just the fascination that many Americans continue to have with the unanswered mysteries of his shooting, and it is not that in his three years as president his accomplishments had been so notable. Historians say his marks as president were mixed at best. He handled the Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union brilliantly, but let the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba go forward, which was a total failure. He stimulated the successful development of our space program, and also of the Peace Corps.
But he also began to further our involvement in Vietnam by adding to the number of military advisors there, and may or may not have continued the military buildup that resulted in the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and years of escalation, tragic loss, and ultimate defeat. His legislative accomplishments were meager at best, it took LBJ’s legislative acumen to pass the Great Society legislation during his administration. So John F. Kennedy’s presidential record can be considered undistinguished and marginal. Yet something of extreme significance to the nation was lost with his death, it was not just his life which we lost, it was a sense of energy, of vitality, of youthful growth, of hope, which through his presidency had pervaded much of the nation, especially the young people, and which was killed by the assassin’s bullets.
We have not only never regained the positive exuberance that Kennedy brought to a nation that had been relatively sullen and stoical during the 1950’s, but the negativity the killing created began to reverberate throughout the nation repeatedly, and still does. Some analysts have stated that as a nation we lost our innocence, that we became jaded, much more corruptible. The history of the last 50 years supports this contention.
But he also began to further our involvement in Vietnam by adding to the number of military advisors there, and may or may not have continued the military buildup that resulted in the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and years of escalation, tragic loss, and ultimate defeat. His legislative accomplishments were meager at best, it took LBJ’s legislative acumen to pass the Great Society legislation during his administration. So John F. Kennedy’s presidential record can be considered undistinguished and marginal. Yet something of extreme significance to the nation was lost with his death, it was not just his life which we lost, it was a sense of energy, of vitality, of youthful growth, of hope, which through his presidency had pervaded much of the nation, especially the young people, and which was killed by the assassin’s bullets.
We have not only never regained the positive exuberance that Kennedy brought to a nation that had been relatively sullen and stoical during the 1950’s, but the negativity the killing created began to reverberate throughout the nation repeatedly, and still does. Some analysts have stated that as a nation we lost our innocence, that we became jaded, much more corruptible. The history of the last 50 years supports this contention.
LBJ’s years as president were full of tragedy, deceit, and failure. The military escalation in Vietnam, based on lies and the gross misreading of the nationalist-basis of the Viet Cong, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the sabotaging of Vietnam peace negotiation prospects in Paris by representatives of presidential candidate Richard Nixon, all added to the torment of those years. Nixon’s presidency was a consummate disaster, with repeated Vietnam escalations, overseas assassinations of legitimately elected leaders, and CIA personnel used as an extension of the president to conduct dirty tricks domestically as well as overseas. As Nixon himself said, and apparently really thought, if the president does it, it is legal. Any sense of integrity was out the window. Nixon’s crimes did lead to his resignation, but his full pardon, the sole real “accomplishment” of his vice president’s administration, just opened the door to more political foul play by politicians to follow. But the precedence was set: no real consequences, no punishment, for wrong-doing by people in high places.
Carter’s presidency gained no traction, a weak but well-intentioned leader who faced difficult economic times, gas prices through the roof and gas lines around the block. Carter mishandled the Iranian hostage situation, and led anunwise Olympic Games boycott. The country was ready for a change, but the change Reagan initiated, in spite of his popularity with the middle class, was hardly what the nation needed. He functioned mainly as an emissary of the economic elite and his policies led to the shrinking of the middle class and the weakening of the nation’s economic safety net. The net has been continually shredded ever since.
While the changes led to much accumulation of wealth in the top income levels in our society, and continued in the early Bush years and in Clinton’s terms, aided by financial corporation deregulation and the outsourcing of jobs consistent with the emerging world of international trade agreements and cheap labor overseas, the false economic prosperity, combined with the Bush 2 war expenditures, led to our economy collapsing, and the push for austerity in government. The sense of hope that Obama’s election tried to engender was dead in its tracks, with the GOP intent on blocking everything he tried to do, moneyed-interests strongly aligned against him, together with lingering racists in the deep south and right-wing Christians who don’t believe that Christ advocated a social gospel. So girdlock, stalemate, shutdown rein in the nation’s capitol, and throughout the country.
What does all this have to do with Kennedy’s assassination? How might it be said that we as a nation have never recovered? Remember Kennedy’s most famous words, “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. Those words, and that sentiment, have never been regained, they are but a distant, fading memory, never having been recaptured as a source of energy and motivation within our nation. Reagan, in fact, turned those words, and that feeling, around, when he campaigned on an anti-government sentiment: You can spend your money better than the government can, so let’s reduce taxes to a bare minimum. His concept of the ten most dangerous words in the English language “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”, lays out the feeling perfectly--the government is your enemy. This is quite the opposite of Kennedy’s statement, which implies that we are all in this together, that if we all are involved in a positive way, the great potential of our nation can be realized.
Too often in our last 50 years, the nation has acted as our enemy, engaged in needless wars, those involved in government service have been corrupted, self-serving, made their service all about themselves, not about serving the well-being of the nation as a whole. That positive feeling that the government is of us, by us, for us, and requires our involvement and service to fulfill its potential has been lost, and never regained, since Kennedy’s assassination. What we have experienced, tragically, has been 50 years of that sentiment’s dormancy. We desperately need it to arise again.
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