Jack Kennedy at 96: The torch is passed...

[n2doc]

Jack Kennedy would have been 96 on May 29, and for people over 55 or so, that seems a bit difficult to fathom.

Elected at the astoundingly young age of 43 (even at 47, Obama was at his election older than Kennedy when he died), he seems fixed in historical amber, impossibly young almost fifty years after his death.

For people younger than 55, he is a picture hanging on a classroom wall, a victim of a tragedy replayed almost nightly on some upper cable channel, a caricature of womanizing with Marilyn Monroe, or just another guy who was president. I had one friend, then in her early thirties, who told me that "Kennedy means nothing to me." I was rather taken aback, but I could see that in many ways, he had no resonance for her.

He should and does, of course, for anyone who remembers him, even in the slightest way.

For example, had Kennedy not been president for the brief period of time he served (two years, ten months, 2 days), this country might not have taken up the wildly improbable mission of going to the moon. Had he not been president, perhaps this country might have made different choices in Cuba in October, 1962, and we wouldn't be reading this. And, indeed, had Kennedy not been president, maybe we would not have had the also nearly inconceivable notion that a black man (with a white mother, no less) named Barack Hussein Obama would be currently sitting in the White House today.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/05/28/5453913/jack-kennedy-at-96-the-torch-is.html