Certainly I think the election of John Kennedy and all he stood for was one that really was an inspiration.
The murder of John Kennedy in broad daylight in the streets of an American city remains, to me, an unsolved crime.
At the time of his death, John Kennedy had a national security establishment that was a writhing ball of snakes.
I told them how excited I would be to go into space and how thrilled I was when Alan Shepard made his historic flight, and when John Kennedy announced on the news that the men had landed safely on the moon, and how jealous I was of those men.
Movies, TV, sports, come and go, but what you stand for is what people remember. Mandela, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy are people who really stood for something and were willing to die for it. You don't see a whole lot of that any more.
We don't really know who killed Martin Luther King. We don't really know who killed Bobby Kennedy. We don't really know who killed John Kennedy. We don't really know who killed Tupac Shakur.
My recurring nightmare is that someday I will be faced with a panel: Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all of whom will be telling me everything I got wrong about them. I know that Johnson's out there saying, 'Why is it that what you wrote about the Kennedys is twice as long as the book you wrote about me?'
The language has changed. When I grew up and watched the campaigns of John Kennedy, even with Richard Nixon, there was a lot higher level of civility. Now we describe a disagreement as an attack.
Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.
I've learned to appreciate the thinking of John Kennedy.
