JFK's death wasn't just an end - it was also a crucial beginning.

[elleng]

'President John F. Kennedy's assassination 55 years ago this week permanently transformed American politics, thrusting the nation toward a long overdue -- and still unfinished -- reckoning with our democracy's painful history of violence and racism. For a brief moment, Kennedy's death produced a kind of national unity not seen since World War II, opening up political space for the new president, Lyndon Johnson, to push through watershed civil rights and voting rights legislation in 1964 and 1965.

President Kennedy's death on November 22, 1963 in Dallas shocked many Americans out of the political stupor of the Eisenhower years, a time mythologized by some even today as as a sepia-toned era of economic plenty and cultural innocence. Kennedy's greatest legacy and contemporary tribute remains the fact that, during his final months as president, he embraced a liberated American future, one that is still being debated today but came one step closer to realization through the strength of his leadership.

The advent of the 1960s came at a moment when Cold War liberalism had identified the Soviet Union as America's greatest existential threat. President Kennedy's only inauguration speech bore out this logic; he famously observed that America stood prepared to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."'>>>

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/21/opinions/jfk-assassination-anniversary-what-it-means-today-peniel-joseph/index.html

[NBachers]

1. *sigh* What was and what could have been