But there was JFK before that fateful day, and there is still a rich history of his achievements and failures in what turned out to be a very short administration.
He was the first president I felt I had any first-hand remembrance of. I was too young when Truman was president, and Ike was no one I ever thought about until as a kid I wrote to him suggesting how the flag 's stars should be re-arranged (7x7) now that Alaska was admitted to the Union in 1959.
I did get a reply, but it's nowhere to be found. I saw Kennedy campaigning in October 1960 when he rode through Union Square in New York, sitting atop the back of an open limo waving to the crowd, in what was a thick garment union area of the city.
He was probably going to Roosevelt Auditorium to give a speech, a building that once housed Tammany Hall, the legendary group of NYC grafters who pulled all the levers for Democratic favors.
My father and I watched his debates with Nixon on a grainy black and white TV that even made Kennedy look like he also had a 5 o'clock shadow. A teacher gave us an assignment to watch the debates and write something about it.
I did, and years and years later I came across my juvenile scrawl that said: "I thought they were both very serious about the whole thing." It wasn't meant to be graded, but the red ink comment said. "what were they serious about?" Jesus lady, what the hell was she expecting? An Op-Ed analysis from an 11-year-old on campaign strategy? Not oddly enough, today's 11-year-olds would be expected to give one, and for sure would be offering one. It's a different world.
When JFK's inauguration came around in January 1961 there was a decent snow storm in New York that closed my school. I thus got to watch the inauguration, see his breath from his hatless head, all while not wearing even a top coat.
Years later it came out that a Dr. Max Jacoby on Park Avenue was prescribing a mixture of vitamins and amphetamines to the rich and famous. It was then I thought no wonder Jack and his brother Bobby were always trotting off on 50-mile hikes and not feeling the cold. They were warm on ups and full of energy.
JFK's favorite poet, Robert Frost, attempted to read a poem he wrote for the event, but had trouble reading the words of his own hand because of the sun glare, his thinning white hair blowing over his face, making it even worse.
It didn't take Kennedy long to piss people off. When I met my wife in the '70s her father, a retired IRT motorman who was a staunch unionist and probably a Democrat from County Sligo, Ireland who venerated Mike Quill who got hem the sweetheart union contract in 1966, HATED Kennedy. Why? Because on Kennedy's watch the IRS said you had to pay income tax on your passbook savings. 1099s were born. People of that era were big passbook, savings bank savers. The government intrudes.
JFK's fiasco came early in his short administration. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961 when 1,400 Cuban exiles were assembled by the CIA in an attempt to storm Cuba on Cuba's south shore via the Bay of Pigs, in an attempt to overthrow Castro, who was by then openly courting Russia for support and tilting decidely toward Communism in the Western Hemisphere.
Saying it didn't go well is an understatement. It was a rout and led to the capture of all those who tried to invade. Castro must have been tipped off, or the operation had more holes in it than Swiss cheese. President Carter's failed attempt to free the U.S. hostages held in the Embassy by the Iranians looked better by 10 than the Bay of Pigs.
I don't remember paying too much attention to the Bay of Pigs. Maybe because it wasn't a success. There was no chest thumping.
Fidel continued to court Moscow's favors, willing to be an annex of Communist Russia and build a missile base on the island that put true weapons of mass destruction 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The Cold War's temperature went to near absolute zero.
The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 was JFK's shining moment, getting Russia's premier Nikita Khrushchev to back down and remove the missiles. The crisis of course is thoroughly written about and is always offered as the time that two nuclear power nations nearly started lobbing nuclear warheads at each other.
As a kid, I remember the mood of an impending war was palpable. I remember one kid blabbing away, moaning that he didn't want to die. For some reason, I assured him he wasn't going to die. Just a cock-eyed optimist. (I have no memory of who this kid was, and he might even be dead now, but it wasn't a Soviet missile that got him.)
I write all this about JFK because I realize there are people out there who are have pushed 50 who might not have any idea of JFK's presidency. If my father at my age were to reach back 60 years and tell me about the president at his time, he would be writing about Calvin Coolidge.
So, who is the dead man whose tales from the crypt tells us something we didn't know?
Jean Daniel, Journalist and Friend to Leaders worldwide, Dies at 99.
And of course passing away at 99 will nearly guarantee you Robert McFadden had the advance obit on file.
Mr. Daniel gets the equivalent of a 21-gun salute, because his obit spans the full six column, half a page deep, with two photos, one in color and one in black and white from different stages of his life.
The color photo shows him in 2013 getting the title of the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor from France's President François Hollande. The black and white shows Mr. Daniel in 1979, posing with one of the many book he wrote. He described himself as a non-Communist leftist, a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sarte and Albert Camus..
Apparently, Mr. Daniel was a go-to guy when leaders and diplomats needed someone to deliver he message, and it just such a message he was entrusted to deliver to Fidel Castro from President Kennedy in November 1963.
Mr. Daniel arrived in Havana on November 19th in order to meet with the Cuban dictator. He gained a meeting with Fidel on November 22nd and were discussing the contents of the letter where President Kennedy was offering to open talks in order to thaw the icy relationship between two countries 90 miles apart, one of which was basically a Soviet satellite that could still be rearmed with nuclear weapons.
Mr. Daniels meets Fidel over lunch and start to hear on the Spanish radio that something has happened in Dallas. The president has been wounded. Turning to a Miami radio station to hear more detail and in English, they learned hours later that President Kennedy has succumbed to his wounds and is dead.
Mr. Daniel recalls that Fidel stood up and said: "Everything is changed. Everything is going to change."
I had never heard that JFK was in the process of trying to look to come to some better understanding with Castro. I asked a friend, and he remembers nothing ever coming out. And why would it? Talk about a moot point. It's like someone passing away before they can even begin to act on a promise. The word goes with them
History is of course full of these turning points. What ifs. I wonder if the letter to Fidel is in among the Kennedy papers at his presidential library.
What a read that could be.
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