What makes a great politician?

[David Lockmiller]

(12-20-2017 08:42 PM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  President Kennedy's inspiring words of September 12, 1962 were: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade."

I was in class at MacArthur High School in Decatur, Illinois when it was announced over the intercom that President Kennedy had been assassinated. It was a very sad day for me and I felt that it was a very great loss for the nation. After the Cuban missile crisis in October, 1962, I remember that my history teacher said at the time that he had been prepared to enter a nuclear bomb shelter that he had built for his family. Those were very serious times and President Kennedy showed great courage and determination as I vividly recall.

I also liked President Kennedy's sense of humor. I was watching a taped news conference at the time and a female journalist got up and asked the President a very long and loaded question about his support for the women's movement and whether he thought his efforts in behalf of this cause had been sufficient. The President's first words in response were: "Obviously, not enough."

Jackie dazzled all of Paris when the Kennedys visited May 31-June 3, 1961. So much greater was the attention paid to her than to him that President Kennedy remarked to the press, with some pride and humor, “I do not think it altogether inappropriate for me to introduce myself. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”

I should like to add another voice to my opinion regarding President Kennedy. Tonight (January 12, 2018) syndicated columnist Mark Shields on the PBS News Hour was responding to the moderator on the issue of President Trump's obscene remark yesterday in discussing the immigration issue in the White House with prominent members of Congress. Mr. Shields, for whom I have a great deal of respect, made the following authoritative comment apropos of Presidential character (and lack thereof):

Mark Shields:

… I used to do political campaigns.

I worked for Senator J. William Fulbright, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in his last campaign in 1974 in Arkansas. He was a man who was not falsely modest. He’d been president of the University of Arkansas at the age of 34, a Rhodes Scholar, and the Fulbright scholarship program was his creation.

And in talking one night about presidents with whom he had served, not under, whom he had served — with whom he had served, six, and he said, of John Kennedy, he said, “Whenever I went to the White House when John Kennedy was president, I was proud as an American that he was my president.”