John F. Kennedy and his Administration

My parents remember when John F. Kennedy was shot. They remember, even more importantly, when Kennedy was president. Because I was born years after his Camelot administration, his magical reign of 1000 days. I have read about the events of his presidency, in particular about the Cuban missile crisis that seems to me to have been one of the most frightening moments of the modern world the time that we have all most truly come face-to-face not only with our own deaths but with the chance that we might take along with us all of the glory of this world, bringing to an end the language of Shakespeare and of Cicero, the melodies of Mozart and the trill of hummingbirds, the flash of trout in fast-flowing water and the ripple of muscle under a tiger's pelt. But what I have never been able to understand - because I can only experience the events from the outside - is a sense of the magic of the times.

When I talk to people who remember Kennedy's administration, when I am always struck by is the respect with which they speak of him. Even people who say that they did not vote for him speak of him as a man whom they respected. This is very different from the current situation in which people seem to have very little respect for their political leaders - often even for the leaders that they have themselves voted for. I am not quite sure why this should be. In reading Robert Dallek's biography of Kennedy An Unfinished Life (2003) it is not at all clear to me by Kennedy should have command

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Category: Government - J