Dan Rather ON SATURDAY, 40 years will have passed since that day when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was felled by an assassin's bullet. In the time between then and now, Dallas' Dealey Plaza has become as fixed in the collective American consciousness as has any place in our nation's history. In our minds and in countless books, articles, television specials and films, we have paced over every inch of the space between the book depository and the motorcade, and we have tried to piece together every detail of that autumn day, until little remains but the myths of memory.
There are times when it seems like yesterday. But more and more, with the passage of years, it feels as distant as another world. And it becomes harder to go beyond that day to reclaim any sense of immediacy from the Kennedy presidency itself.
AS LONG AS PRESIDENT BUSH
Forty years ago this week, John Kennedy had been president for exactly as long as has President Bush. It's a relatively rare confluence, and it is worth noting here, not for the sake of trivia but because it provides a point of reference for how far along Kennedy was, and how much of the road still stretched before him.
President Kennedy, who had already weathered foreign-policy crises, no longer seemed like a new president, any more than President Bush does now. However, several core pieces of what would become the Kennedy legacy had not yet taken full shape: his tax-cut plan, which was not passed until after his death; space exploration; and the growing American involvement in Vietnam.
Nevertheless, the Kennedy presidency had begun to establish itself in history and in the minds of the American electorate. And 40 years ago this week, with election day just under a year away, President Kennedy had started to strategise in earnest for his re-election campaign.
The guess was that Barry Goldwater, the conservative senator from Arizona, would be the Republican nominee, and Kennedy was confident that he could beat him. Given President Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory against Goldwater in 1964, Kennedy was almost certainly right.
But in 1963, there were still legislative battles to be won. And though the administration's economic record had been pretty good, South Vietnam, once obscure, had recently taken a prominent turn for the worse. Kennedy liked his chances, but neither he nor his political team felt they could take 1964 in any way for granted.
President Johnson said many times that his raft of mid-1960s civil rights legislation would finish the Democratic Party in the South for years to come. In 1963, President Kennedy had just begun to place his presidency solidly behind the push for black civil rights, and he and his political team could see that the deep, Dixie South might well line up solidly against him.
Because of this, Texas assumed ever-greater importance on the Kennedy electoral map. And in Texas, the first order of business was to settle a political feud - between its conservative Democratic governor, John Connally, and its liberal Democratic senator, Ralph Yarborough - that threatened to split the state party.
Having Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson as his running mate had enabled Kennedy to win the state in 1960, and it was to Vice-President Johnson that President Kennedy turned again for help in 1963. Johnson would go to Texas to mediate the feud, with Kennedy joining him to lend support and to do some early campaigning.
And so, on November 21, 1963, the president flew to San Antonio. Later that day, he and the vice-president would visit Houston. The next day would take them to Dallas.
Dan Rather is television news anchor.
