(The author lived the Kennedy years as a young boy growing up in England. He wrote this article to mark the 30th anniversary of the president's death, which will occur November 22.)
Washington -- Had he lived, John Fitzgerald Kennedy would now be 76, a sobering thought for a generation that came of age during his New Frontier and now is middle-aged or older. It is a generation that cannot forget him even though it will be 30 years this November since that bad day in Dallas.
He came to the office in 1961, our youngest president elected by the slimmest of margins. Yet when he was assassinated one thousand days later, the world was united in grief.
The passage of time has inevitably resulted in a reevaluation of his accomplishments. We have learned to separate his rhetoric from his actions, his vision from his policies, his wit from his wisdom, his private behavior from the public record.
But in the world of the early 1960s, Kennedy faced no easy task. From the beginning, his Camelot was beset by foreign policy crises unrivalled in gravity in the postwar world.
How to deal with communism in Cuba and Southeast Asia, the threat from Nikita Khrushchev over West Berlin, and threatening crises elsewhere such as in the Congo, dominated the attention of the young president and the bright, young men he brought to Washington.
Despite the intractability of many of these problems, there were clear successes that helped forge a new image for the United States as a country not only committed to a safer world, but a more caring world. The Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty were all shining examples of America at its best.
Domestically, there also were bold new attempts to fight poverty and racial discrimination that generated a new spirit of hope not only at home but also overseas.
But it is not the achievements, or the failures, of the Kennedy years that we remember, nor even the contradictions in this most complicated of men. What we remember is that John F. Kennedy made us feel we could remake the world, that we are the masters of our own destiny on this planet, that mankind is not doomed, that "on earth," as he said, "God's work must truly be our own." That is no mean accomplishment, despite falling short of his promise as we all do.
I was a young boy growing up in England when I watched the Kennedy Inaugural Address on television. We had to wait a full 24 hours to see it. This was in the days before satellites when videotape arrived by airplane much delayed. I recall being mesmerized by the speech, even though, at 13, I did not understand its implications.
Europe, as much as America, took Jack Kennedy to its heart that day, and for two years and ten months America's reputation shone more brightly than at any time before or since. To Europeans, he seemed the quintessential American ideal -- youthful, successful, energetic, optimistic, informal, yet possessing great style.
When he visited the Continent during his final summer of life in 1963, Europeans went wild, especially in Ireland, his ancestral birthplace. Yet it was as much John Kennedy the man they loved as John Kennedy the president.
To Europe's wily old leaders -- DeGaulle in France, Adenauer in West Germany, MacMillan in England -- Kennedy's New Frontier seemed naive. But Europeans were entranced. Lord Harlech, the British ambassador in Washington, said, "Everybody liked being led by the United States at that time. They liked to have President Kennedy as leader of the Western world."
It is a tribute to Kennedy's remarkable foresight that, despite the end of the Cold War, many of the issues he articulated so vigorously in the early 1960s are still at issue 30 years later -- the need to stop proliferation of nuclear weapons, the fight for racial justice, the worldwide chasm between poverty and plenty.
Inevitably, we are prone to wonder what kind of country, what kind of world would there be had John Kennedy lived, a nagging question long lost to history. As the French ambassador said at the time of his death, quoting Stendhal, "He was a brilliant 'maybe.'"
That is what still haunts Kennedy's generation today -- the promise of what might have been, the pain of dreams unfulfilled. For us, he became a metaphor, not only for the fragility of hope, but also for the awful uncertainty of life.
Adlai Stevenson, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, spoke to this feeling of lost promise in perhaps the most eloquent remembrance of John Kennedy given shortly after his death. "President Kennedy," he said, "was so contemporary a man, so involved in our world, so immersed in our times, so responsive to its challenges, that he seemed the very symbol of the vitality and exuberance that is the essence of life itself. Now he is gone. Today, we mourn him. Tomorrow and tomorrow, we shall miss him. And so we shall never know how different the world might have been had fate permitted his blazing talent to live and labor on man's unfinished agenda for peace and progress for all."
The world is very different now than it was in the early 1960s. We are, as they say, in an era of limits. But those of us who lived through those years will never forget the Boston-accented voice urging us on, doing the things that must be done to make life what it ought to be for all mankind.
If he had not been murdered 30 years ago, he would of course no longer be young, nor perhaps even vigorous. But I venture to assert he would still be involved, still committed to man's unfinished agenda of peace and progress for all.
On one occasion, he spoke of his hopes for America, words still relevant in 1993:
"I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will protect the great old American houses, squares, and parks of our national past and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future. I look forward to an America, which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America, which commands respect throughout the world, not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world that will be safe not only for democracy and diversity, but also for personal distinction."
