Why John F. Kennedy's Legacy Endures 50 Years After His Assassination

 NOVEMBER 22, 1963
It began like any other day, but that day and its aftermath soon became hard-wired into the American psyche, black and white images still tainted with emotion in the minds of millions of Americans. For most of those old enough to remember, it holds a prominent place in their memories—the day JFK died—and the day when a bullet tore through the fabric of 20th Century America.
The news came suddenly, without warning. Gunshots in Dallas shattered American complacency about their national superiority. Nesting within a warren of cardboard boxes, a lone gunman with a mail-order gun had attacked the elected leader of the world’s foremost democracy. As Americans rushed to get the latest news and later mourned the president’s death, many immediately drew comparisons with Abraham Lincoln’s murder. However, few Americans recalled Presidents James Garfield and William McKinley, who also lost their lives to gunfire and many Americans in 1963 may have expected Kennedy’s death to be similarly lost in American memory.
However, it has been fifty years since that sunny autumn day in Dallas, and yet, many Americans still mourn and still exhibit fascination with the youngest man ever elected president. Neither Garfield nor McKinley could claim such a lasting hold on the American imagination.

For a variety of reasons, JFK remains a vibrant figure a half century after his death. Perhaps the most important contributor to his “afterlife” in American culture was the then-nascent news medium of television. Kennedy became the first president to conduct live televised press conferences, and from those sessions, many Americans felt a stronger connection to the man
occupying the White House. When he died, television was there, in a way that no other news medium could rival. With non-stop coverage, the three television networks produced a memorable weekend, cluttered with indelible images: broadcasters’ initial scramble to get information, the chaos surrounding assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as he was led from one location to the next in the Dallas Police Department, the muffled drumbeats, the riderless horse, the brave widow, the adorable toddler saluting his father’s casket, and more. Televisions joined the nation in one big congregation, mourning and stumbling through the following days in shock. And two days after the president’s death, millions of stunned Americans watched the murder of his assassin, Oswald, on live TV. A week earlier, it all would have been unthinkable.
The enormity of these events had an almost paralyzing effect, even on Americans who never voted for Kennedy. The loss of a president is a non-partisan event, both because of its inherently unsettling nature and because the loss of one president inevitably leads to the rise of another to replace him. Often, the new president has been positioned out of the limelight through his entire vice presidency, as Lyndon Johnson had been, and his sudden ascension creates a long list of questions for a shaken nation.

The suddenness of his death probably elevated Kennedy’s place in American memory, but we must remember JFK was not just any president. At 43, he became president and behaved like the youthful leader that he was. Playing with his toddler son, he seemed like any young father delighting in the mischief of his child. And yet, he was not any man: He was an eloquent speaker who consistently challenged the nation to do better. Furthermore, during his presidency, he was more popular than any of his predecessors since pollsters began gathering presidential approval ratings during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. And JFK still holds that record. No president has come close to matching his average approval rating of 70.1 percent.

Most Americans had an emotional response to John F. Kennedy. Either they loved him, admired his youthful vigor, and enjoyed his great wit; or they hated him, thought his father had stolen the presidential election for him, and distrusted him because he was the first Catholic to claim the presidency. In either case, those emotions became tangled up in the story of his death.

Since 1963, psychologists have studied American responses to the assassination, and those studies enabled them to identify a phenomenon known as “flashbulb memories”—astonishingly clear recollections of traumatic national events. These memories do not merely capture the momentous news that engendered them: Individuals with “flashbulb memories” remember precisely where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news.

Even today, a common topic of conversation among older Americans is exactly how they remember those long-ago days and the events that occurred in Dallas and Washington. In that process, they recall that he seemed so alive, and then, he was gone. Because the moment of his fatal injury was captured on film, the gory spectacle of this handsome man’s death also found a place in American memory. And of course, lively and passionate debates still revolve around the issue of whether Oswald actually killed the president, whether the government lied about the details of his demise, and whether there was a conspiracy to bring him down.
Some historians see JFK’s assassination as the true beginning of “the long 1960s”—a period of growing disillusionment that began with the firing of a rifle in Dallas and ended with Richard Nixon’s 1974 retreat from Washington after resigning from the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The inadequacies of the Warren Commission’s report on JFK’s assassination and the monumental failures of his two immediate successors offered fertile ground for growing doubts about the United States and its future. In the Kennedy era, many Americans had said they could not think of a better time to be alive: That is not a declaration we hear much today, except in discussions about technology.

There is irony here: When John F. Kennedy ran for president, his theme song was “High Hopes,” and in many ways, his appeal to his constituents perfectly matched the message of that song. Kennedy’s often-inspirational speeches about America’s future fed the nation’s imagination. If we could land on the moon, it seemed, we could do anything. After his death, the JFK that-might-have-been became a constant rival to living presidents who followed him. His youth left many Americans believing that we had not seen him reach his full potential and that he would have avoided some of the pitfalls that hobbled his successors. For many Americans, Kennedy’s assassination opened the door to increasing cynicism and began a steady drain of the nation’s high hopes.
 last drop of blood. My love and sympathy to his family.
Over the years, we would move on, leaving behind many of the defining points of his political moment—postwar optimism, legalized racial segregation, the space race, and even the Cold War. We would travel beyond the 1960s, but instead of leaving JFK behind, we brought him with us as a part of American popular culture. That handsome face never seems absent from bookstore shelves or magazine covers. He represents something we lost on the way to the twenty-first century.