This text first appeared in stern in November 2003. We are publishing it again here.
It was, his widow Jacqueline later told the Warren Commission investigating her husband’s murder, “terribly hot” that day in Texas; it was a Friday. “I heard these terrible noises. My husband didn’t make a sound. He had a strange expression on his face, his hand was raised. I saw a piece of his skull, I remember it was flesh-colored. I remember I “I thought he looked like he had a headache. That’s all I saw. No blood or anything. And then he grabbed his forehead with his hand and fell into my lap.” This is how the life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy ended on November 22, 1963 on Elm Street in Dallas. When the assassination of the 35th President of the United States was announced at 1 p.m. local time, paralyzing horror fell on the world in a way that had never been seen since September 11, 2001.
The thousand days are past, and the past is beautiful because it is past. It was a thousand days of presidency in which Kennedy thrilled the world, and style triumphed over substance. He was the hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis and disarmament, he was the hero of the Germans – “Ish bin ein Bearleener”. He was the most beautiful, the richest, the most vital, the youngest; His counterparts Konrad Adenauer, Nikita Khrushchev, Charles de Gaulle and Harold Macmillan, all born in the 19th century, seemed petrified in comparison to him at the top of government, honorably gray or bald seniors with the charisma of retired captains in their scant free time Playing bocce ball and wearing cardigans and otherwise showing how heavy the responsibility was on them.
Kennedy, on the other hand, sailed sun-tanned in an open shirt and demonstrated that power is fun. He casually put his feet on the most important desk in the world and yet he was smart and hard and fast. The others were fathers of the nation, Kennedy was the father of his children, the first president with sex appeal and sex life, who moved into the White House with a three-year-old and an infant, no Nina Khrushchev or Mamie Eisenhower at his side, but the beautiful and slim one Jacqueline Bouvier, an integral part of the Kennedy work of art. “Politics is the greatest show in the world,” said his son many years later when he launched the magazine “George”; his father was the first to prove this.
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