Ah, Johnny…

With all the vagaries of movable feasts, today is both our American Thanksgiving and the thirty-forth anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

I was fifteen at the time. I recall the announcement over the school loudspeakers. There were gasps. A girl sitting next to me on my left started crying. I was fifteen and a snot with intellectual pretensions. I was confident I was one of a handful of classmates who even knew what party Kennedy belonged to, or who was his vice-president. Could even have been true. I leaned to the desk on my right and whispered to a friend, “I wonder what Johnson will be like?” with all the smarmy all-knowingness that only a fifteen year old can summon up. (Yes, I can hear my friends commenting that they don’t particularly notice any changes from then to now…)

Of course who knows what changes actually happened because of this event. One could argue it took Johnson’s iron drive and mastery of Washington to drive through the various social reforms that Kennedy proposed. One could argue Kennedy might have repented of his commitments in Vietnam before we sank neck deep in the Old Muddy…

Who knows? The “great what if’s” of history…

Today Kennedy seems more the subject for conspiracy buffs than much of anything else.

Too bad. There was something about that breath of hope that he stood for, and on which he rode to the presidency. His Nixonian younger brother also had that air about him. Another what if of American history.

And now we see the horse race in the Democratic party narrowing to Hillary Clinton (another Nixonian figure) and Barack Obama. And with Obama I can’t help but think of Kennedy and all the what if’s.

Young. Charismatic. A vision of a new direction.

Exciting, so exciting.

And also with the thought, if elected “they” will kill him…

My older self, still a tad smarmy, still obnoxiously all-knowing, is putting my money on the wily Clinton. I fear the coming years and think she could be the iron lady we will need.

But, some other part of me, thinks of the what if’s…

Sees more than a little of Kennedy in Obama…

And on this Thanksgiving Day, wonders…