After Thanksgiving break, Daniel Bryant’s U.S. History students at A.L. Brown High School will take up John F. Kennedy’s presidency.
His students, all juniors, will start with an analysis of Kennedy’s inaugural address, listing the goals Kennedy set and debating whether he was able to fulfill them or not.
“As with any topic in U.S. history, you’ll find a few students who have a passion about it,” Bryant said. “They’ll have read about it and they’ll have picked up background information from other classes.”
Today, the “new generation” that Kennedy spoke of in his inaugural address is reaching retirement age.
And the schoolchildren of today don’t necessarily see Kennedy as their elders did, Bryant said.
“Unlike my parents’ generation or my generation,” said Bryant, 39, “you really have to find something that’s happening in today’s time that the kids can relate to.”
For example, Bryant said, some students can relate to Kennedy’s establishment of the Peace Corps, “because they volunteer in their community, they’ve gone on mission trips.” Civil rights issues are another key subject.
Scholars may see Kennedy differently. “When we think of Kennedy’s brief time in office, we tend to concentrate on the hard power, or military aspects of his foreign policy,” said Chris White, professor of political science at Livingstone College.
And White said the Peace Corps remains “one of the most enduring legacies of his presidency.”
“It’s certainly a generational shift,” said J. Michael Bitzer, associate professor of politics and history at Catawba College, “and I think it’s certainly had a profound impact on the Baby Boomer generation.”
“For Americans of a certain age, this is an almost revered time period,” Bitzer said. “With the assassination started the lore of Camelot.”
But, Bitzer adds, “as we’ve moved through further generations, that mystique is not as much as it was with that Baby Boomer generation.”
There’s another impact that Kennedy’s short presidency had on American life, alongside other tragedies before and since 1963.
“What the assassination did is firm up the idea that each generation has its moment, that they remember where they are when (this) happened,” Bitzer said.
Key eras in U.S. history can be traced to moments of “national trauma,” Bitzer said – the attack on Pearl Harbor, assassinations, the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
“The question is, what is the legacy of that impact?” Bitzer said.
White said that JFK’s death, along with the killings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968, “left Americans with a profound sense of loss and uncertainty about the future.”
And, White said, a list of questions about how the future might have been different: “Would Vietnam have escalated like it did? Would there ever have been a Nixon presidency? Would the civil rights movement have unfolded differently?”
Catawba College Professor Gary Freeze also sees Kennedy’s death as a chance for people to imagine how the past could have been different.
Freeze was a fifth-grader in Troutman when Kennedy was assassinated, and remembers it being announced in school.
“But the thing in retrospect that I remember … I had a classmate who clapped her hands because the president had been killed,” Freeze said.
As a historian looking back at his own life, Freeze said, “that was the moment when the conservative movement was presented to me.”
“I naively believed that a young, handsome president had the whole nation behind him, and that wasn’t true,” Freeze said. “And from that day, I began to see, to use the academic phrase, the complexity of history.”
Freeze said Kennedy’s legacy lies in his charisma. “Kennedy made people believe, even with his flaws and his shortcomings, was that we were entering an age when anyone could be anything,” he said.
“What died in Dallas that day was the proof of that belief, and we’ve been struggling with whether it’s true or not ever since,” Freeze said.
In 2013, there is no shortage of conspiracy theories involving how and why JFK was killed.
Likewise, from terror attacks to President Obama’s birth certificate, any number of events and issues are fodder for those who believe in a hidden truth.
“I think there’s always a natural-born suspicion in American society that gets played out in events like this,” Bitzer said.
However, Bitzer added, “I have to wonder if at times that critical analysis goes beyond a rational point of view.”
Freeze said the problem he sees with many conspiracy theories is that the so-called conspiracy always seems to work.
In the real world, Freeze said, “you can’t win a war in Iraq, you can’t launch Obamacare, so why do conspiracy theorists do things so perfectly?”
At the same time, Freeze said he doubts the official explanation of the JFK assassination.
“I don’t believe all the conspiracy theories, but I am not convinced that Oswald acted alone,” Freeze said.
At A.L. Brown, since many students’ knowledge of Kennedy’s life is wrapped up in the story of his death, Bryant covers that as well.
He asks students what they already know about it, and shows the Zapruder film of the assassination.
Bryant and his class then discuss some of the conspiracy theories, as well as a forensic study that claims to disprove some of those theories.
Still, Bryant said, there’s simply not enough time to explore Kennedy’s life, or death, in full detail.
“It being a general survey course, you have to try to get them to make as many connections as they can,” Bryant said.
For Freeze, part of the Kennedy legacy is the debate that comes about every four years when the nation elects a president.
“Who can be president? What do you have to believe? Who did you have to include?” Freeze said.
“That’s what the long-term (Kennedy) legacy is going to be,” Freeze said. “It became a shadow on the American soul, and we still try to figure out where the shadow’s being cast.”

Contact Hugh Fisher via the editor’s desk at 704-797-4244.