John Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline, cherished her privacy. Nevertheless, she consented to a handful of interviews just days after an assassin had claimed her husband’s life. Amid her grief, Mrs. Kennedy focused on JFK’s legacy. She sought to paint a picture that would endure, talking about a song from a recent Broadway musical that her husband liked to play at night. The last lines were:
Don’t let it be forgot,
That once there was a spot,
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot.
Camelot was fictitious, a glorified version of King Arthur and the Knights of his Round Table where good triumphed over evil in the relentless pursuit of honor and justice. But to Jacqueline Kennedy and millions of Americans, Camelot had become real with the presidency of John Kennedy. That reality was a grand mixture of style and substance. The Kennedys were celebrities, near royalty, in the eyes of many, creating an aura around a presidency that became enmeshed in folklore after he was taken so suddenly from the world of the living. In terms of substance, Kennedy represented an idealistic optimism in an era of global peril, where the possibility of a nuclear holocaust remained ever-present. Behind the scenes of his life of privilege and pain, Kennedy often struggled to live up to his own lofty ambitions, both personally and professionally. He was politically cautious for much of his career, often yielding disappointing outcomes. He was convinced that death was always right around the corner, and responded in his personal life by seeking to maximize life’s every moment, bringing both joy and pain to those around him.
The question remains: Would Kennedy make the cut in a presidential version of his Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles in Courage? For much of his political life, the answer would be no. For the vast majority of his 14 years in Congress and his first couple of years as President, John Kennedy provided vision and inspiration but rarely took the courageous step to put his career on the line for a righteous cause. But the last year of his life was different in a profoundly impactful way. He crafted a solution that avoided thermonuclear annihilation, in part by being courageous enough to stand up to his over-zealous military advisers, but the steps he took after the Cuban Missile Crisis represent an even stronger alignment with the disinterested political ideal that he had championed in his award-winning book. Kennedy’s poll numbers dropped in his final year in the White House because he finally embraced the moral nature of civil rights. He was finally willing to put his career on the line to pursue justice and opportunity for Black Americans. Jack Kennedy would not live to see the fruits of those efforts, but they may have never gotten off the ground without him finally putting the whole weight of his presidency behind his push for civil rights for all Americans. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Kennedy story is that just when he seemed to finally be maximizing his embrace of political courage, an assassin ended his life in a matter of seconds on the streets of Dallas, Texas, at the tender age of 46.