50 years after win, Kennedy's legacy endures

Fifty years after the election that sent John Kennedy to the White House, the impact of his thousand days in the Oval Office continues to be seen in positive repercussions from the civil rights movement and problematic ones from the Vietnam War. He pioneered the media age that has shaped national politics ever since and expanded the role of the federal government in ways that continue to reverberate.

The generation Kennedy inspired to enter public service is entering retirement age. More than half of those living in the U.S. hadn’t been born by the 1960 election, when he claimed a presidency that would be cut short by assassination.

Even so, a third of Americans in a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll rate JFK as a great president; three-fourths rank him above average. A survey of 65 historians by C-SPAN last year ranked Kennedy sixth in presidential leadership, just ahead of Thomas Jefferson and the only one of the top 10 who didn’t serve for more than one term.

When President Obama chose five quotations to ring his Oval Office rug, unveiled in September, he included one from Kennedy in 1963: “No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”

To be sure, there have been seismic changes in the country since then. The U.S. population has swelled from just under 180 million to more than 310 million. The nation is much more diverse, and the status and role of blacks and women have been transformed. An economy once based on manufacturing is driven by technology. The superpower conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union has been replaced by more complicated global struggles over resources and ideology.

Yet Kennedy’s name continues to resonate.

“It’s interesting that 50 years later, he still has such a hold and his presidency has such a hold on the American people,” says Dan Fenn, 87, a special assistant to Kennedy at the White House who later became director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum. “There are people who say, ‘Yeah, but he didn’t really do much.’ OK, without getting into that cat fight, why is it then?”

Historians and others say Kennedy’s legacy endures in part because he governed during an era of tumultuous generational change.

“We were coming to the end of the World War II aftermath, and … civil rights could not be ignored any more, especially because of Dr. (Martin Luther) King’s rise,” recalls Sander Vanocur, 82, who covered the Kennedy White House for NBC. “It wasn’t as if he brought these around, as the events brought him along — and he fit the role that the new age was demanding.”

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