As the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination approaches on Nov. 22, UBC Prof. Carl Cavanagh Hodge reflects on JFK’s brief, charismatic presidency
Carl Cavanagh Hodge is a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus and the author or editor of nine books and numerous articles on European and American politics and history.
What was JFK’s legacy for Canada?
The legacy is very mixed. It is no secret that John Diefenbaker, Canada’s prime minister at the time of Kennedy’s election in November 1960, had hoped that Vice-President Richard Nixon would win the presidency. Relations between Kennedy and Diefenbaker were awkward due to a personal antipathy that ran both ways and significant differences over policy. Kennedy was nonetheless massively popular in Canada, and Canadians generally supported the president’s tough stand during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Because Kennedy’s charismatic and glamorous personality had changed popular expectations of political leadership all over the democratic world, one wonders whether his chief legacy to Canada was the rise to power of Pierre Trudeau.
Why does Kennedy still evoke strong emotions for the baby boomer generation?
Kennedy was cut down at the height of his popularity at a time when the baby boom generation was arriving at political consciousness. It’s not an exaggeration to say that many of that generation never wholly recovered from the shock. They tended to measure succeeding presidents against their memory of Kennedy, both what he was and what they imagined him to have been. Boomers who entered public life often modeled themselves after Kennedy’s optimism and idealism. Other Americans look back on Kennedy’s three years in office as a time when everything seemed possible. After all, he told them they would land on the moon – and they did.
Does the world need another JFK?
No. In politics charismatic personalities such as Kennedy encourage popular expectations of government that are, even in the best of times, unrealistic. Prominent among the reasons that JFK’s presidency is so hallowed is that a leader of such charm and persuasion died before he could disappoint the expectations he had raised. This is not a criticism of him but rather of us for wanting more from government than it is able to provide. In 2008, Americans elected Barack Obama, another president whose personal magnetism quickened the imagination. That president is now languishing in low public approval ratings, in part because of genuine errors on his part but also because the hopes invested in him were so out of proportion to what sober reason knows is possible.