The Guadalajara Reporter

JFK: early encounters, 1960 political lessons

Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post is a dutiful, sometimes thoughtful columnist specializing in economic affairs.  He got on the John F. Kennedy media train early (November 10) to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the 35th president of the United States.  He was six, he says, when JFK was killed. 

It appears since that time he has changed his young favorable opinion of Kennedy, but without gaining much thoughtful ground.  Age and time (as Samuelson and others teach us) does not invariably result in any magical deposit of wisdom.

Kennedy was still a senator when he gave a speech at the Los Angeles Press Club located in the Ambassador Hotel, the place where Robert Kennedy was assassinated years later.  In 1956, Jack Kennedy had come close to being nominated as Adlai Stevenson’s vice president candidate in that year’s presidential campaign, which Eisenhower easily won.  That near miss caught the attention of a number of young people tired of the usual political gabble, narrow-mindedness and conventional attitudes regarding what the United States should be doing in the world. 

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