President Kennedy was a very popular President in a very difficult time. A lot of my comments about his presidency here have not been terribly charitable, but he was a hero to many, and some of his calls here have unfairly not been noted. For instance, he exercised restraint during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost resulted in a Third World War, and he likewise kept the separation of Berlin from escalating into the same, even though his comments caused that crisis to come about.
In spite of repeated speculation about it, it's clear that the assassination was carried out as a lone, bizarre act by Lee Harvey Oswald. Indeed, the lone actor aspect of that has fueled the conspiracy theories surrounding the event, as people basically don't want to accept that a lone actor can have such a massive and unforeseen impact.
I was alive at the time, but of course I don't remember this as I was only a few months old. In my father's effects, I'd note, was a Kennedy Mass Card that he'd kept. No doubt, Masses were said around the country for the first Catholic President.
Often unnoticed about this event, Oswald probably had made an earlier attempt on the life of former Army Gen. Edwin Walker, who ironically was a radical right wing opponent of Kennedy's. That attempt had occured in April. And Oswald killed Texas law enforcement officer J. D. Tippit shortly after killing Kennedy. Oswald's initial arrest was for his murder of Tippit.
It's fair to speculate on how different history might have been had Kennedy lived. Kennedy's actions had taken the US up to the brink of war with the Soviet Union twice, but in both instances, when the crisis occured, he steered the country out of it, and indeed his thinking was often better in those instances than his advisers. Under Kennedy the US had become increasingly involved in the Vietnam War, but there's at least some reason to believe that he was approaching the point of backing off in Vietnam, and it seems unlikely that the US would have engaged in the war full scale as it did under Lyndon Johnson. If that's correct, the corrosive effect the war had on US society, felt until this day, might have been avoided.
All of which is not to engage in the hagiography often engaged in considering Kennedy. To the general public, the James Dean Effect seems to apply to Kennedy, as he died relatively young. Catholics nearly worshiped him as one of their own. In reality, Kennedy had a really icky personal life and was hardly a living saint. His hawkishness in a time of real global strife, moreover, produced at least one tragic result, and nearly caused others.
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