Newswise — What is John F. Kennedy's legacy as a president and a leader? How did Kennedy's risk-taking personality affect his leadership of the country? And how does the late New Orleans attorney Jim Garrison, immortalized in cinema as the man who challenged the single bullet theory and the Warren Commission report, fit into the mix of what really happened on Nov. 22, 1963?
Temple University experts are available to discuss these and other issues on the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
Kennedy's legacy
On Sept. 10, 2001, Temple history professor Jim Hilty was trying to convey to the students in his course, "The JFK Assassination: A Problem of Historical Analysis," how the nation felt the day John F. Kennedy was killed. On Sept. 11, they understood.
"On both days you knew that, as of that moment, nothing would ever be the same," says Hilty, a presidential historian and author of John F. Kennedy: An Idealist Without Illusion.
While Kennedy's death remains a watershed event in history, says Hilty, his legacy is still being debated. "Conservatives have done a pretty good job of tarnishing his legacy so that now he's viewed by many as this young president who screwed around," says Hilty. "There's this notion that if you tear down Kennedy the man you can tear down the ideas he stood for. But the fact remains that he inspired a generation of young people to get involved."
The activism of the 1960s, the creation of the Peace Corps, and promoting the idea of national service, as well as the conviction that one person could make a difference, can all be tied into the Kennedy legacy, says Hilty.
"The Kennedy legacy is also about the striving for excellence, for the full use of our talents in the service of others. In his mind, and his brother Robert's as well, politics was a noble profession," says Hilty.
"However, JFK's greatest accomplishments may have come through his demonstration of strength and resolve in the Cuban missile crisis and in developing a strategy for peace to balance the ever-present terror of the Cold War."
Hilty also is the author of the book Robert Kennedy: Brother Protector.
Kennedy as a risk-taker
Born into a family notorious for its physical risk-taking, Kennedy demonstrated throughout his presidency that he also was a mental risk-taker, says psychologist Frank
Farley, who has studied risk-takers and thrill-seekers for decades and developed the term Type T personality.
"T-types rise to challenges," says Farley. "They confront fears. They're more bold and more fearless. They thrive on uncertainty. And if you thrive on uncertainty, as Kennedy and Churchill did, you can rise to your finest hour. Big problems require, in a sense, big personalities."
Clearly, says Farley, Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis was the biggest "T-time" in his presidency. But other initiatives--the space program, the Peace Corps, and civil rights--also demonstrate Kennedy's vision, inventiveness and creativity, all qualities of Type T personalities, says Farley.
"All of those were risky political ventures," says Farley. "All of these things have a big Type T stamp on them."
Kennedy's physical risks were many--from his heroics on PT 109 to withstanding excruciating back pain and other health problems to Nov. 22, 1963, when, "despite a turbulent presidency," he chose to ride through the streets of Dallas in a convertible, Farley notes.
Jim Garrison's legacy
A leading Garrison expert and biographer, English professor Joan Mellen hopes to reconcile the celluloid, Kevin Costner version of Garrison in Oliver Stone's JFK with the man she first met in the late 1960s.
"The movie portrays Jim Garrison as a saint, as very one-dimensional. He does everything right, and he's a family man," Mellen says. "The real Jim Garrison was much more cerebral, complex and humane than the movie let on." Though Mellen concedes that Stone's film cemented Garrison's public image, she says he should be remembered for his legacy of "demolishing the Warren Commission report and coming pretty close to figuring out what happened in Kennedy's murder."
Mellen conducted more than 1,000 interviews and has spent the last seven years researching a biography of Garrison, A Farewell to Justice, scheduled to be published next spring. She will join other heavyweights of the Kennedy investigation, including Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, a key figure in the Warren Commission report, at a conference at Duquesne University on the 40th anniversary of Kennedy's death. Mellen hopes to restore the luster to Garrison's tarnished image with her presentation, Jim Garrison Vindicated: The Post-Investigation Evidence.
An online version of this release is available through the Office of News and Media Relations website at: http://www.temple.edu/news_media/nmr0311_403.html
RSS