The American dream of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, sixty years later
What John Fitzgerald represented for the USA and for the whole world, his charisma, the charm of the "great American dream" have passed into the collective memory of those who lived those years and among historians and posthumous scholars as an unrepeatable season that concerned the 'America certainly but also the whole world. The intervention of Francesco Provinciali, former MIUR inspection manager and Min. PI
If at 12:29 pm on November 22, 1963 the presidential Lincoln Continental – where JFK sat in the second row – entering Dealey Plaza in Dallas had continued straight on Main Street, as initially planned, instead of turning right onto Houston Street at a speed of about 18 km/h, slowly passing in front of the book depository of the Texas School where his assassin had strategically lurked, perhaps President Kennedy would have been saved from that dangerous electoral trip to Texas, full of ominous premonitions and full of a climate openly hostile to that visit.
But John Kennedy, who was aware of the risks he was running – so much so that he had a premonition of them that same morning – decided to face his uncertain and risky destiny.
History does not wait for 'buts' and 'ifs' and carries out its parable inexorably: everything had been orchestrated so that at that exact moment, a few tens of meters away, Lee Oswald took aim and hit the President in the neck and head he collapsed into the arms of Jacqueline who sat next to him. The sudden death at Parkland Memorial Hospital and what happened that fateful day – the macabre details of that event, with the mourning flyers distributed to the crowds along the route from Dallas Airport to the place where John would have given his speech, Lyndon Johnson's rapid swearing-in, the investigations, the red herrings belong to the history of one of the most dramatic events of the 20th century. Including the subsequent killing of the only suspect – Lee Oswald – by a certain Jack Ruby. Television, for the first time in history, followed a non-stop live broadcast for four days. The assassination of President Kennedy was the longest uninterrupted news story in the history of television news until 9:00 am on September 11, 2001, when networks broadcast live programs for 72 consecutive hours following the attack. terrorist attack at the World Trade Center in New York and at the Pentagon in Washington.
Countless official memorials and popular books have been written (including Kennedy's America and John F. Kennedy. The new American dream by Furio Colombo who was then living in the USA and had a profound knowledge of it) on that terrible event but not all areas of shadow were illuminated by the truth. The whole affair appears to be wrapped up in a gigantic, orchestrated conspiracy that involved politics, the underworld, economic interests and powers, and the big lobbies. The most important investigative document to get to the bottom of a truth which, despite the immense amount of work – the FBI investigations provided over 25,000 interviews, 2,300 reports, 553 interrogations – subsequently remained veiled by doubts, inconsistencies, cover-ups, connivances and lies , was the one developed by the Warren Commission which presented its final report in September 1964: “Lee Harvey Oswald single-handedly killed the President; Jack Ruby single-handedly killed Lee Oswald.”
What John Fitzgerald represented for the USA and for the whole world, his charisma, the charm of the "great American dream" (the end of the Cold War, the opening to the Soviet Union which passed through meetings and exchanges of letters with Nikita Khrushchev, the beginning of an era of lasting peace, attention to ethnic minorities, ideal harmony with Martin Luther King, the end of the crisis after the Cuban missiles, the idea of a participatory democracy extended to all the segments of the population, in fact still today a concept of democracy unsurpassed in every part of the world, which was inspired for example by Tony Blair) a vision later inherited by his brother Robert who also tragically died in an attack in 1968 by of the Jordanian-Palestinian immigrant Shiran Shiran, have passed into the collective memory of those who lived those years and among posthumous historians and scholars as an unrepeatable season that certainly concerned America but also the entire world.
Because – as JFK said – "talking about peace must be the only rational aim of every rational man": observing today the new world (dis)order that is taking shape, the devastating war in Ukraine, the aggression of Hamas against Israel and the terrible conflict that resulted from it, the pending threat on Taiwan, the emergence of new economic and nuclear powers such as China and India, Islamic fundamentalism, the latent bomb of an Africa ready to explode, today as and more than then, the theme of harmony and peaceful coexistence of peoples and nations once again imposes itself as crucial.
It was the early 1960s, those who lived through them remember the hopes linked to the great themes of civil and social rights, the openness of the Catholic Church to science and dialogue between different faiths, economic growth, equality between peoples, to the archiving of post-war ideological residues: remember Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Pope John XXIII. A significant and dense segment of history included in the period considered by Eric J. Hobsbawm in his book The Short Century 1914-1991 , which goes from the end of the First World War to the fall of communism.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the man of great collective hopes, and he marked an indelible presence in the context of that time, architect of a "New Frontier" that he opened but failed to achieve.
Aware of the barriers to be broken down, starting from his country but also of the ideological walls inherited from the Second World War, as when on 26 June 1963 in Berlin in the midst of the Cold War and with a city just divided by the wall, "Jack" pronounced "Jack" at the Gate of Brandenburg the historic phrase: “Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I am a Berliner”).
But already in his inauguration speech on January 20, 1961 in Washington as the 35th President of the USA, when addressing the citizens he said “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America wants to do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man." An invitation to a sense of duty that the long season of the tumultuous ride of rights alone seems to have truly forgotten.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/il-sogno-americano-di-john-fitzgerald-kennedy-sessantanni-dopo/ on Sat, 11 Nov 2023 06:52:16 +0000.