Next Saturday it will be 40 years since JFK was shot - ensuring a golden legacy. But had he lived would he have fulfilled all the hopes of his people, asks Conor O'Clery, North America Editor
We still do not know for certain whether President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, or as part of a plot. Some years ago I tried to figure it out for myself.
I bought several of the 2,000 conspiracy theory books that put the blame on the Mafia, the Cubans, the Communists, the Vietnamese, the CIA and even Lyndon Johnson. I poured over the 888-page Warren Report, which concluded that Oswald was the lone gunman. I went to Dallas and peered through the window of the sixth floor of the book depository in Dealey Plaza, now an assassination museum, and listened through headphones to a recording of the shots being fired. I walked over and around the grassy knoll where a second gunman might have been hiding. I watched again Oliver Stone's 1991 film, JFK, about New Orleans attorney-general Jim Garrison, who tried to prove Kennedy was killed by US intelligence to prevent an American withdrawal from Vietnam. I then contacted surviving members of Garrison's team, such as criminal lawyer F. Lee Bailey, who said he was convinced Garrison was on to something, and veteran reporters, such as Mary McGrory of the Washington Post, who told me they despised Garrison as a fraud.
I read up the 1989 report of the House Assassination Committee, whose chief counsel, Robert Blakey, believed Kennedy was killed by organised crime, and which concluded that Oswald had an unknown accomplice who shot, and missed, from the grassy knoll.
I studied the 1993 book, Case Closed, by lawyer Gerald Posner, which clinically laid out the case that there was no conspiracy: Oswald had got the book depository job long before he could have known that the president would drive by; he had had time to fire the three shots, and Kennedy's head had snapped back not because he was shot from the front by a second gunman but because a bullet fired by Oswald from behind caused a neurological reflex.
In the end I came to much the same conclusion as Posner, but too many troubling questions remained unanswered to say "case closed". And for the majority of Americans, according to several opinion polls, the case is definitely not closed and probably never will be.
The enduring belief that there was a plot to remove President Kennedy from power has had a marked effect on how he is perceived today, 40 years after his death. It has added intrigue to the question of what might have been had he survived.
How we remember him also helps explain the extraordinary public attachment to his memory, not just in the US but across the world. He is still in our minds the boyish, witty, enthusiastic 46-year-old president, with a dazzling, stylish wife, whose life was cut short in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963.
The impact of Kennedy's assassination on individuals throughout the world was similar to that of the attacks on the US in September 2001. Everyone alive then remembers vividly the moment they heard he had been shot, just as people recall where they were on 9/11. I can still remember the shocked silence in Nugent's barber's shop in Newcastle, Co Down as the news from Dallas was broadcast from a tiny TV screen high up on a shelf, and then someone saying, unbelievingly: "He can't be dead." But he was.
And just as happened after 9/11, the assassination of President Kennedy plunged the US into a darker, more menacing era. Post-Kennedy America was riven by divisions over race and an increasingly bloody war in Vietnam, and then bitterly disillusioned by Watergate.
Historian Robert Dallek points out in An Unfinished Life (2003) that in his 1,000-day presidency Kennedy had raised global expectations that he "could improve the state of world affairs". His sudden violent death therefore "seemed to deprive the country and the world of a better future". JFK's presidency, Dallek also notes, was actually hesitant and unfulfilled, despite a domestic programme that seemed "fresh and bold and likely to advance the national well-being".
A survey of 78 historians conducted two years ago put Kennedy in 18th place in order of merit among American presidents, not far above the average category. It was President Johnson who fulfilled the goals of Kennedy's New Frontier agenda on civil rights, Medicare, education reform and urban renewal.
Thomas Maier, author of the just- published America's Emerald Kings, believes there were solid and unacknowledged achievements that contributed to his legacy. JFK, he points out, was author of the small 1958 book, A Nation of Immigrants, and introduced an immigration reform bill in 1963 that Bobby and Ted Kennedy got through Congress two years after his death. The 1965 Immigration Reform Act enabled millions of new immigrants from Central and South America, the Caribbean, Asia and Europe to reinvigorate the nation.
"It was barely recognised by the press at the time," Maier says. "Immigration was down to a trickle and essentially limited to white northern Europeans."
Other historians point to Kennedy's Peace Corps and the Apollo space programme, which put the first man on the moon, as among his finest achievements. In his handling of the Cuban crisis, which Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger called the "most dangerous moment in human history", he also took nuclear war off the US military agenda. Former president Bill Clinton is prominent among those who say today that they believe Kennedy would have got the US out of Vietnam sooner, and certainly would not have alienated the young as did his successors, Johnson and Richard Nixon.
If he had lived, if he had survived to become today an 86-year-old Palm Beach retiree, Kennedy's legacy might have been different. The reckless womanising and mobster contacts we now know about could only have led to personal calamity. He had affairs with women ranging from Mary Meyer, sister-in-law of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, to Hollywood stars and call-girls and a 19-year-old intern who couldn't type and who distracted him with phone calls when he visited Ireland. Potentially the most dangerous liaison was with Judith Campbell Exner, who claimed she acted as a conduit between Kennedy and Mafia boss Sam Giancana during a two-year affair. It is doubtful indeed that Kennedy would have survived a second term without something damaging coming out.
Notwithstanding all of this, the belief persists - as a reading of the heartbroken comments of visitors to the Dallas book depository makes clear - that if he had lived, JFK would have made the US a better place. The avalanche of tell-all Kennedy books have failed to destroy the legend of Camelot, of a stylish court of the best and brightest artists, writers, scientists, poets and musicians. A poll of ordinary Americans in 2000 put Kennedy at the top of the list of the greatest US presidents, ahead of Abraham Lincoln.
The Kennedys continued to be regarded as the US's new royal family after JFK had died. There was a notion that the mantle would pass to his younger brother, Robert Kennedy. But on June 5th, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot dead in the food service pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles while campaigning for the presidency. There is another sizeable body of literature about that assassination, for which a Jordanian nationalist, Sirhan Sirhan, is serving a life sentence.
Many of Robert Kennedy's admirers believe he too could have changed the course of American history if he had lived, though he too would have been called to account one day for personal scandals such as his affair with Marilyn Monroe and his role in the days leading up to her death.
There was still Edward Kennedy, the youngest brother, who had inherited JFK's Senate seat in 1962. But on July 18th, 1969, Ted Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge over the Chappaquiddick River in an accident that left his companion, Mary Jo Kopechne, dead. The Senator's career survived the scandalbut it wrecked his ambitions to become president.
By the time Bill Clinton came to office, Ted Kennedy had recovered to be a Democrat force in the Senate. Clinton was mesmerised by the Kennedy legend. As a boy he had shaken hands with President Kennedy in the White House. In his first year in office he went sailing with Ted Kennedy and other family members off the coast of Massachusetts. He took Kennedy's advice on many issues, among them Northern Ireland.
In 1993 Clinton appointed Jean Kennedy Smith ambassador to Ireland. The diplomatic wheel had come full circle. To advance his political ambitions, Joe Kennedy, the wealthy father of the clan and former US ambassador to the Court of St James, had always down-played the family's Irish roots. He believed he had succeeded, according to a letter to a Vatican contact, reproduced in Maier's book, in which he wrote: "I think the Irish in me has not been completely assimilated, but all my ducks are swans."
Indeed, the most elegant swan, Jack Kennedy, was never really that passionate about Irish issues. He refused to raise Partition when he met the then British prime minister, Harold Macmillan. After the Northern Ireland Troubles erupted in the late 1960s, however, agitation among Irish-Americans, and lobbying by John Hume and successive Irish governments made Ted Kennedy the most important advocate for constitutional Irish nationalism in Washington. President Clinton's initiatives in the Northern Ireland Peace Process, such as his appointment of Jean Kennedy Smith as ambassador and his award of a US visa to Gerry Adams, came at the urging of Senator Kennedy, whose support on a range of domestic issues was critical to the White House.
Another legacy of the Kennedy era was the removal of obstacles to members of minority groups becoming president. The fact that retired Gen Wesley Clark is a Catholic is not an issue in his current presidential campaign.
Another candidate, Senator Joseph Lieberman, who is Jewish, told Maier that he felt Kennedy had opened the doors of opportunity "not only for Catholics but for everybody in America".
On Friday last week several members of the Kennedy family were on display at an unlikely event in the city of College Station, Texas, not far from Dallas. This was the presentation of the annual George Herbert Walker Bush Award for Excellence to Senator Edward Kennedy, by former president George Bush. Also there were Jack Kennedy's three sisters, Jean Kennedy Smith, Pat Lawford and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, his daughter Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, and Bobby Kennedy's widow, Ethel Kennedy. There were the inevitable jokes at the ceremony about family dynasties.
Ted Kennedy, white-haired and patrician now, told George Bush: "Mr President, the only thing I ever resented about you was the fact that you got ahead of us on the basis of a famous family name."
The elder Mr Bush, who helped defeat Ted Kennedy's presidential bid in 1980 by attacking him as part of the "loony left" (as opposed to JFK, who cut taxes), credited Kennedy with waging "a purposeful battle to improve the human condition". The Bush award was for Kennedy's unparalleled legacy of 41 years of public service in areas such as defence, unemployment and elementary and secondary education.
The most powerful Kennedy figures are ageing now but the family is still enmeshed in public life. Ted Kennedy's son, Patrick, is a Congressman.
JFK's niece, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, was Democrat candidate for governor of Maryland in 2002. His sister, Eunice Shriver, is founder of the Special Olympics, and her daughter, Maria, a national broadcaster, campaigned last month for her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in California's recall election. Caroline Kennedy writes books, runs the family's Profile In Courage awards and raises funds for New York's schools.
JFK's second child, John Kennedy Jr, died on July 16th, 1999, aged 38, along with his wife, Carolyn Bassette, when the plane he was piloting crashed over the Atlantic off Nantucket. He was editor of a political magazine called George and just might have run for the Senate in 2000. If anyone could have carried on the legacy of Jack Kennedy it was his son. He would have carried all before him. Maiers records Ted Kennedy's remark at the funeral service that the world knew John Jr's name even before he himself did.
Forty years after Lee Harvey Oswald changed the course of history Mike Barnicle's comment at the time of John Jr's funeral tells it all:
"We don't know our neighbours and we don't know the people upstairs," said the Boston columnist. "But we know the Kennedys."
Generation gap: Kennedy's changing leggacy Compiled by Breda Heffernan
Sean Og O Ceallachain (80) Broadcaster
J. F. Kennedy had a huge impact on Irish people in America. I saw that he was widely revered, certainly among the Irish in New York and especially in the GAA. He was a father-figure for them. From a political point of view, he was one of the strongest presidents the US has had, particularly during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he took a very big risk making the threat to Khrushchev. I thought that was one of his strongest moves. Kennedy is still a very big man.
John de Courcy Ireland (92) Maritime historian
The whole of his life and career was interesting but a disappointment. I don't know just how far his death was a conspiracy or the work of one man. I do feel he was a disappointment, possibly to himself, and certainly to those who thought he would follow his vision more closely than he actually did. Some of my generation would remember him fondly, but I think a great many of them would think of him much as I do. Quite a number seem to have completely forgotten him.
Damien English (25) Fine Gael TD
JFK is an inspiration. He proved a young person could do it, and what better role model is there than the youngest president of America? A lot of the time young people in Ireland are given a clap on the back and told you'll be grand in a couple of years. He was also an inspiration in relation to peace and was a good man to avoid conflict. You have to wonder if he, or someone like him, was in the White House, would we have the whole mess in Iraq?
Ivana Bacik (35) Barrister and law lecturer
I don't think he is as influential a figure for younger generations of Irish people, not for people born after he was killed. He belongs to that golden era of Marilyn Monroe and Hollywood. I think he's more a cultural than a political icon: a lot of us have seen his political flaws. He's not influential at all - I'd say Marilyn Monroe is possibly more significant. Clinton did so much more for Ireland and the Peace Process that he's more of a political icon for us.
Dave Fanning (49) Broadcaster
His influence has waned but he's just so iconographic. He was a fantastic person. The reason the Beatles did so well in the States was that they arrived there six months after JFK's death when the US needed a lift. Who would have thought at the start of the 1960s that by the end of the decade there would be 30,000 half-naked people dancing on the streets and a man on the moon? JFK kick-started that generation.
Louis Copeland (54) Tailor
I'm of an age where I remember when it happened. I think for Irish people he's the most impressive American president. And he was always a good natty dresser - we have one of his shirts in the shop at the moment. I still remember where I was when he was shot. I was at home at the time and remember listening to all the news bulletins.
Maeve Binchy (63) Author
When he died in 1963 I was 23 and it was a huge shock because he was hugely important to all of us. He was one of our tribe and he had done well. We Irish didn't have as much confidence in ourselves then, so the idea that an Irish-American Catholic rose to that post made us much more confident. Nowadays Irish people rightly think we can run the world - if we are asked nicely. We have so much more self-confidence now and that's great because we don't have to rely on token people to help us up in the world.
Frank McCourt (73) Author
JFK was everything if you were Irish-American. He was the unexpected man, Mr Glamour. He was irresistible, had the beautiful wife, was intelligent and read books. He could dip into 18th- and 19th-century works and was a writer himself. He was the culminating figure for Irish-Americans. Everything's gone downhill since him. The Irish don't mean anything in the US any more. He was almost orgasmic - finally we had ended up in the White House. A light went out when he was assassinated.
Emma Bolger (8) Stars in In America
Me and all the kids my age have heard of him. He was a very nice president and he was very kind and generous to everybody. I heard about how he was shot. He was in an open-top car with his wife but I don't know who shot him - it's a big mystery. My mammy and my uncle saw JFK when he was walking down the street somewhere in Dublin but they didn't get to meet him.
Carla Young (17) Plays Ciara in Fair City
In this day and age teenagers know the story of JFK from the movies. But he's more of an historical figure that we learn about in history class at school rather than somebody we'd really connect with. Teenagers know who he is but he isn't a major influence on our generation. I suppose Tony Blair is the most prominent political figure we'd see in the news but I don't know if we really look up to him, or any politicians at all.