JFK's legacy resonates in a way that's alien to a younger generation

For those under age 45 or so, Nov. 22 is probably just another day.

Despite the predictable outpouring of television retrospectives from conspiracy theorists and Camelot nostalgia buffs, it's extremely difficult for those under a certain age to understand everything that died in Dallas 40 years ago, and why we are today in some ways so very much a poorer country.

Yet those of us who were around then have a duty to try to explain. Because as imperfect as America was in 1963 — and it was as flawed and unrealized as its gifted and eloquent young leader — we had a vision of ourselves and a sense of national purpose then, and we had been summoned to both of those by John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

To make a statement like that in today's cultural climate is to court derision as an ideologue or a sentimentalist, or both. JFK, we have been loudly and frequently instructed by cynical younger scholars, was that philandering hypocrite who got us into Vietnam; the overprivileged offspring of a Nazi apologist and near-mobster whose millions bought his son the 1960 election.

The Kennedy administration, we've been told, was a manufactured illusion we fell for — an illusion served up at the time by a sycophantic press seduced by an aura of brains and glamour. And there is more than a bit of truth in all of that.

But what today's cynics miss — remain, in fact, almost wholly blind to — is the way and the success with which John Kennedy called us to something larger than ourselves. This is called leadership and we haven't seen anything remotely like it since. From any candidate of any party.

It wasn't the product of party or ideology; rather the reverse. For all his amused affection for his brawling fellow Democrats, Kennedy was a skeptical partisan at best. "Sometimes," he said more than once, "party loyalty demands too much." He was even more skeptical of ideology. Liberals, he said, "tend to underestimate the importance of winning"; conservatives too often "close their eyes to society's needs."

Predictably, he was viewed with suspicion by both the left and the right. Liberals eschewed him for Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 Democratic National Convention; conservatives stampeded to Lyndon Johnson at the convention and to Richard Nixon in the general election.

But Kennedy did something no politician had done at least since Theodore Roosevelt. He electrified much of a generation, many of whom had previously neither known nor cared about politics and government.