John F. Kennedy

I am in Dallas, Texas, in a city park called Dealey Plaza at the western edge of the central business district.

Although it is sometimes called the "birthplace of Dallas" this spot is best known because it was the place were President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated by gunfire on November 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade.

His was the fourth presidential assassination in American history, the first in the nuclear age. The violent death of the leader of the strongest free nation in the world sent shock waves around the globe.

Today, some decades after the shooting, hundreds of millions still remember hearing the awful news of the death of the young American president.

Some of them come to Dealey Plaza in search of a resolution to lingering pain; I am here, as a younger visitor, unaffected by first-hand memory, visiting the site seeking knowledge about a powerful and confusion event that changed the course of history.

Dealey Plaza, like Ford´s Theatre, Pearl Harbor, and the Alamo, is a tragic historic site. It serves as a reminder that history is not necessarily celebration, that things sometimes go terribly wrong in America, or in locations all over the world. 

George Santayana observed in 1905 that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

Following my last blog posting about “Houston, we have a problem” it comes to my mind a very powerful quote that President Kennedy said on September 12, 1962 “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.

President Kennedy inspired a generation to accept responsibility for its government, and its world, by taking political and social action. As president, he fought to ensure equal rights and opportunities for all Americans.

He encouraged Americans to lift up those less fortunate than themselves, both at home and abroad. He challenged the nation to reach for the impossible and land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. He set new directions for international diplomacy, seeking better relations with Latin America and newly independent nations. He reduced the threat of nuclear war by opening the lines of communication with Moscow and offering to help “make the world safe for diversity.”

As the President of the United States of America, he had to face very complex situations, such as an early crisis that occurred in April 1961, when President Kennedy approved the plan to send 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles in an amphibious landing at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Intended to spur a rebellion that would overthrow the communist leader Fidel Castro, the mission ended in failure, with nearly all of the exiles captured or killed. That June, Kennedy met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna to discuss the city of Berlin, which had been divided after World War II between Allied and Soviet control. Two months later, East German troops began erecting a wall to divide the city. Kennedy sent an army convoy to reassure West Berliners of U.S. support, and would deliver one of his most famous speeches in West Berlin in June 1963. 

Kennedy clashed again with Khrushchev in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. After learning that the Soviet Union was constructing a number of nuclear and long-range missile sites in Cuba that could pose a threat to the continental United States, Kennedy announced a naval blockade of Cuba.

 The tense standoff lasted nearly two weeks before Khrushchev agreed to dismantle Soviet missile sites in Cuba in return for America’s promise not to invade the island and the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and other sites close to Soviet borders. In July 1963, Kennedy won his greatest foreign affairs victory when Khrushchev agreed to join him and Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in signing a nuclear test ban treaty. In Southeast Asia, however, Kennedy’s desire to curb the spread of communism led him to escalate U.S. involvement in the conflict in Vietnam, even as privately he expressed his dismay over the situation.

Although Kennedy was an enormously popular president, both at home and abroad, at home, he was unable to achieve much of his proposed legislation during his lifetime, including two of his biggest priorities: income tax cuts and a civil rights bill. President Kenedy was slow to commit himself to the civil rights cause but was eventually forced into action, sending federal troops to support the desegregation of the University of Mississippi after riots there left two dead and many others injured.

The following summer, Kennedy announced his intention to propose a 2comprehensive civil rights bill and endorsed the massive March on Washington that took place that August.

From that time, it is his famous quota that said: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed form the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed for social and economic oppression. And this nation for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free”

Just to finish this post, remember one of the most famous  President Kennedy quotas when addressing the people during the Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961:

"ask not what your country can do for you, 

ask what you can do for your country"