ON THIS DATE – AT 8:01 A.M. ET:  This is the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of President Kennedy.  No matter how you feel about JFK, it is a moment to reflect on the event.

Kennedy was many things, some good and some not.  His family was more than problematical, his father a fascist sympathizer and minor-league bigot whose fortune made Jack Kennedy's career possible.  Kennedy himself had been a junior senator with an intellectual bent but one who'd made little impression in the Senate. 

I worked in the 1960 campaign as an aide to Senator Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, when I was on the other side politically.  Douglas's preference for president that year was Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, the former secretary of the Air Force.  But he was close to Kennedy, whom he described to me as "brilliant, but cold."  It turned out to be an apt description.  We traveled with Kennedy often when he came to Illinois.  He was a dazzling performer up close, but had to work hard to overcome the feeling, far more widespread than history has acknowledged, that he was underprepared for the job of president.  The incumbent, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been a five-star general in the same war in which Kennedy was a Navy lieutenant.  Americans noted the contrast.   

Kennedy's inauguration was the most dazzling Washington had seen, with movie stars dropping from the rafters.  For Jack Kennedy was glamour and poise.  Frank Sinatra, later to become estranged from the president, organized the entertainment.  It was Kennedy who brought Hollywood to Washington, big time.

And yet, although his name is constantly evoked by the Democratic Party, the fact remains that Jack Kennedy could not be nominated for president by his party today.  He was a national-defense liberal/centrist.  His stirring (although cliché-ridden) inaugural address would anger the controlling faction of today's Democratic Party, which would regard Kennedy as militaristic and nationalistic.  Kennedy's was the party of Harry Truman.  Today's party is the party of George McGovern and Barack Obama.

Say what you wish about Jack Kennedy and the privileges that allowed him to become president, but he did inspire a new generation of Americans to contribute, and he inspired them correctly – putting military service at the top. 

It might be wise today to go back and look at the Kennedy administration, with all its faults, and compare it, especially at the moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, with the Obama administration.  Kennedy, in his words, was willing to pay any price in defense of freedom.  Obama wants a discount. 

January 20, 2011