45 Years Ago Today

I wasn't even born when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. If the timing is right, my mom was actually just pregnant with me at the time, so obviously everything I know about the event is second hand information; books, television news reports, magazine articles and stories told by people who were alive at the time.

Still, I feel like it's a part of my own personal history. Kennedy is like a national Hamlet's ghost, a powerful figure who hangs over us all, always in the background but ever present, influencing not only who we were but who we are and will be. His life and death fascinates us as it defines us as a nation and a culture. We replay the Zapruder film time and time again, we re read the Warren Commission Report and sit glued to the television during assassination anniversary retrospectives. To this day we call Democratic presidential candidates to "Kennedy-esque"; I honestly think that it was Barack Obama's ability to remind people of John F. Kennedy that helped win him the 2008 election. Personally, the image of John F. Kennedy was strongly ingrained in my mind from a very young age. My father (and his whole family) were strong supporters of Kennedy and his family, and I can recall with almost crystal clarity the velvet wall decoration that depicted Kennedy in the Oval Office. I can still remember the eyes; haunting and almost disturbing in their intensity and realism.

I don't think much about Kennedy's political views on this day, or his effectiveness as a president. That's grist for historical mills and while it's interesting too, I'm more likely to consider the way the assassination has affected us as a people. It's become a cliche that everyone who experienced that day can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news, and it seems to be true. Perhaps even moreso than 9/11, the Kennedy assassination seems to have frozen people in time and bound them together by the shared shock and grief and fear that characterized that time. I wonder if it's possible that anything will ever be able to unite us in that way again. One would think with the advent of the internet and 24 hour news channels that the instantaneous flow of information would provide a much stronger link than was possible in 1960.

But there's a difference between the zeitgeist of that era and today's, and that I think provides the key as to why such a communal shared event won't likely have the same resonance. In 1960, while the country was divided on many issues, there seems to have been an underlying core of unity that defined the American people. 9/11, of course, did unite us but it wasn't long afterwards that the division and finger pointing began, not only over "who was to blame" but over the wisdom of the war on terror and on the way it was executed. The influx of information that we are bombarded with in 2008 makes it virtually impossible for a single event to ever again unite people in a common mood. It can galvanize the world community and make them focus on that moment, but it seems very unlikely that our country, let alone world, will ever again have the luxury and benefit of feeling the exact same way about an event.

Diversity of opinion is healthy and necessary, of course. It's not wise to yearn for uniformity of thought that's based upon depriving information from those who must try to judge based on it. Diversity is also a great way to elicit new ideas that you might otherwise miss. But there are times when it's good for societies to join together in common purpose; to celebrate, to learn, to fight, and to grieve. We saw a bit of Kennedy's death echoed in the death of Princess Diana in 1997, when the whole world seemed to hold its breath in shock and horror at another beautiful icon cut down in the prime of her life. But Diana's appeal wasn't as deep, as genetic, as mythic as Kennedy's seems to have been. Diana was a revered, generous, intelligent and glamorous woman, but she passed in a post Kennedy era, one in which we had already long ago dispensed with the notion of the invulnerability of its gods. Diana's death was shocking and horrifying, but it wasn't revelatory; it didn't teach us that no one is immortal and it didn't usher us into an era of abject cynicism about the possibility of change by common goal.

Not everyone liked Kennedy, of course, and in the years since his death I've heard a lot of people say that it wasn't Kennedy's effectiveness as a president that makes us remember him, it was his youth, his charisma and the shocking way that he died. OK, maybe, but so what? Dreams, by their motivational and potentially transformative nature, are just as important as reality, maybe moreso, and the dream the country in general had of Kennedy was a good one, a dream that prompted action and dispelled skepticism. Not a single revelation about his womanizing, his drug dependency, his father's mob connections or the shady nature of his win in Chicago can dim the power, the vitality of the man and what he stood for, not by one iota. If his presence focused and solidified optimism, isn't the reality of the man less important than what we needed and wanted him to be?

In the 21st century, no political or public figure will ever again enjoy the press' "look the other way" approach to Kennedy. In many ways, that's a very good thing. But while we celebrate and honor the depth and immediacy of today's seemingly inexhaustible news sources, let's also acknowledge the power of communal bonding, and consider how to balance the need for truth and information with the equally powerful need to know how to process that information in a way that doesn't render us all "islands in the informational stream."