Even on Monday, 100 years after John F Kennedy’s birth, it is hard to imagine America’s 35th president as an old man. Everything about JFK is overshadowed by the lasting tragedy of the graceful young leader who was cut down in his prime by the assassin in Dallas.
It is easy to see now that Kennedy was the first charismatic politician of the television age. He set a media standard for presidentialism that others have tried to match, but none has equalled. When he decided not to wear hats, American hat sales plummeted. Even the Kennedy Presidential Library is marking his centenary under the slogan “Visionaries never go out of style”.
Yet there was more to JFK than his youth, his cool and even his death. When Garrison Keillor, then a student, heard the then Senator Kennedy give a campaign speech in 1960, he decided he was hearing a new kind of politician. “He had more keys on his piano,” Mr Keillor later recalled. “He had black keys and [the others] didn’t. There was playfulness in him. He quoted Dante [and] made you believe that at one time in his life he’d sat down and read the Inferno.” Of how many politicians could one say such things today? Not many, to our enduring loss.
