A Gift From Long Ago - Bob Herbert on JFK's election 50 years ago.

[groovedaddy]

It was a half-century ago this month that John F. Kennedy won the presidency in a thrilling and heart-stoppingly close election against Richard Nixon. You’d probably be surprised at the number of Americans who are clueless about when Kennedy ran: “It was 1970, right?” “Wasn’t it in the ’40s, soon after the war?” Or whom he ran against: “Eisenhower?”

I’ve been surprised by the lack of media attention given to the golden anniversary of that pivotal campaign, one of the most celebrated of the entire post-World War II period. With Kennedy, the door to the great 1960s era opened a crack, and it would continue opening little by little until the Beatles flung it wide in 1964.

Kennedy’s great gift was his capacity to inspire. His message as he traveled the country was that Americans could do better, that great things were undeniably possible, that obstacles were challenges to be overcome with hard work and sacrifice.

I don’t think he would have known what to make of the America of today, where the messages coming from the smoldering ruins of public life are not just uninspiring, but demeaning: that we must hack away at the achievements of the past (Social Security, Medicare); that we cannot afford to rebuild the nation’s aging infrastructure or establish a first-class public school system for all children; that we cannot bring an end to debilitating warfare, or establish a new era of clean energy, or put millions of jobless and underemployed Americans back to work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/opinion/23herbert.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a212

[DBoon]

1. paraphrasing "Sunset Bouevard"

I *am* big. It's the *country* that got small.

[Still Blue in PDX]

2. "Self-interest and the bottom line had not yet become the be-all and end-all."

That is what makes me nostalgic for the 1960s.

I know it wasn't all Leave it to Beaver, etc., but it was better than today in a couple of ways, this being one of them.

[hay rick]

3. K&R

Herbert on point, as usual.