Today marks the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas Texas on the 22 November 1963 by a communist.
A Democrat, Kennedy was the first Catholic president of the United States at a time when the WASP aristocracy still dominated American public life. Kennedy was an ardent anti-communist and in his inauguration speech on 20 January 1961 stood for natural rights declaring, “and yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe. The belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God”.
Kennedy ended his speech with the now famous challenge to the American people: “And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”It was a challenge that electrified America.
This stands in stark contrast to today where generally people demand that their country does ever more for them, while offering very little in return.
I believe that the assassination of Kennedy in 1963 marked when things began to fall apart in the United States. It was not until 1968 however that the deep divisions in the United States became permanent, when the centre finally “could not hold”.
Kennedy, being a fierce anti-communist, had escalated US involvement in the Vietnam War, something that his Vice President and then-President Lyndon Johnson had to inherit. However, at the time of Kennedy’s election in the middle of the Cold War there was a sense of hope. He and his beautiful and glamorous wife Jackie were the new generation. Kennedy was 27 years younger than his predecessor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. There was still a sense of unity and shared values among Americans even if they shared different political or religious views.
It would be naive to suggest that the political landscape was not cut-throat; it was, and there was much hatred and religious bigotry targeted against Kennedy. Nonetheless most Americans watched the same TV and women and men did not hate each other as the feminist revolution had not yet crashed on American suburbia. Americans with a wide range of incomes shared the same neighbourhood and their kids went to the same schools, unlike today as explained by Charles Murray in Coming Apart.
It was a huge development and achievement for Irish Americans and Catholics to claim the President as one of their own. President Kennedy was a member of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal charitable order. His assassination caused devastation for the Catholic Community in the United States.
George Weigel, when marking the 50th anniversary of the tragic killing of Kennedy wrote, “On Nov. 22, 1963, the seventh grade at Baltimore’s Cathedral School was in gym class when we got word that President Kennedy had been shot. A half-hour later, while we were climbing the stairs back to 7B’s classroom, Sister Dolorine’s voice came over the p.a., announcing that the president was dead. Walking into 7B, my classmates and I saw something that shocked us as much as the news we’d just heard: our tough-love homeroom teacher, a young School Sister of Notre Dame, was sobbing, her faced buried in her arms on her desk.”
The same George Weigel also wrote that the then-Senator Kennedy’s 1960 speech, made in response to the vicious anti-Catholic bigotry of the election campaign, on church-and-state relations delivered to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association had the effect of privatising and side-lining religious belief.
Kennedy stood up for religious freedom, but he also said, “I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.
“Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.”
The result was that other politicians could bring their moral conviction into their public roles, based on who knows what, but it became difficult if not impossible for a Catholic politician to do the same.
This approach created problems. As GK Chesteron observed, “when a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.” We can see that removing God from people’s lives does not leave logic and reason. Instead, this God-sized void has been filled with dangerous nonsense that is woke-ism.
Nonetheless Kennedy remains an inspirational figure to many. A brilliant man cut down by the communist forces he so fiercely opposed.
(John and Jacqueline Kennedy pictured leaving a church (PA))
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