Letters to Jackie by Ellen Fitzpatrick

Author:Ellen Fitzpatrick
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

Yours sincerely,

Dora W. Wildesen

* * *

John F. Kennedy was the first American President born in the twentieth century. At forty-three years of age, he was also the youngest man ever elected to lead the country. (At forty-two, Theodore Roosevelt was younger than Kennedy when he assumed the office after the 1901 assassination of William McKinley.) Those facts shaped perceptions of JFK and his administration from the moment of his inauguration. Eight inches of fresh snow had fallen early in the morning of January 20; the temperature hovered near 22 degrees when Kennedy was sworn in. “Rejoicing in his youth,” one newspaper observed, Kennedy stood without a top coat in his morning suit to take the oath of office. He made a striking contrast to his predecessor—the seventy-year-old Dwight D. Eisenhower. As Kennedy delivered his stirring inaugural address, telling the nation that the “torch has been passed to a new generation,” each breath seemed to etch his promises in the freezing air. “The Inaugural will be recalled and quoted,” it was then predicted, “as long as there are Americans to heed his summons.”

“The new generation,” Kennedy invoked was, of course, the World War II generation. And yet his call to service, his emphasis on change, his high ideals and faith in the future excited many younger Americans. Men and women in their late twenties and thirties, college students, teenagers, and even still younger children of the postwar era claimed John F. Kennedy as “their” President. And when he died, they wondered how to integrate the harsh fact of his brutal assassination with their once exhilarating expectations. As one young man put it, the night of the assassination, “It is the legacy of great men, dead before youth is fully spent, to disturb the foundations of our thoughts. For me Kennedy did just that—he showed me in no uncertain terms that if the ‘good’is at all attainable it can only be through a total commitment of self. To understand the Kennedy experience,” he hazarded, “Americans are going to have to go beyond the examination of events and happenings, and go to a land of ideas and dwell there for awhile. Kennedy’s personality was so strong that he tempered the environment of a nation very quickly…. I inately comprehended a political force speaking to me in a language I could understand. I now feel lonely without it.”

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