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Remembering the Kennedys

The act of commemorating John Fitzgerald Kennedy's death twenty years after was more instructive than anything done, written or said within that act. Taken as cold fact, from the standpoint of your friendly neighbourhood Martian, it is fairly dotty. Twenty years is, after all, a ridiculous interval whence to base satisfactory reassessment. Centenaries are arbitrary enough, and certainly the longevity of persons whose birth centenaries are recalled can inhibit serious investigation depressingly. For one thing, the New Wisdom invoked at the moment of commemoration can prove much more imprisoned in its own time than what it commemorates. At Shaw's birth centenary the best the age could do apart from reminisce was to put out a film with Mr Colin Wilson (who was, does anyone remember, the guru of the day or, as it proved, of the half-hour) asserting that "Shor is a mystic," and at Franklin Roosevelt's, for all the 37-year-interval, even Americanists had difficulty in thinking of 1982 as the 100th anniversary of the birth of that man. Professor Garry Wills's work came out a little before the fatal day of 22 November 1983 but the far-flung exercises in nostalgia would fit in nicely to his theses on Kennedy's being made for the media and the media's ecstatic and apparently perpetual response to that programming. Certainly Kennedy was a Media President. Professor Wills shows how hard he and his organization worked to achieve this result; in fairness he could have added that Kennedy's most engaging feature was probably his boyish enjoyment of give-and-take at press conferences. While Kennedy had been far less of a journalist than the family pub licity suggested, he was enough of one to mix with journalists on something close