Several hundred ordinary Britons made their way to the American Embassy as soon as they heard the news of President Kennedy’s death. Over 5,000 people joined the queue outside the Embassy next day so that they could sign their names as mourners. American tourists and residents were stopped on the streets by unknown persons who wanted to share their grief. The newspaper quotation, “He was our President as well,” was echoed and re-echoed in millions of hearts. With his assassination President Kennedy had joined the gallery of American heroes – Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
It is clearly impossible that the assassination of an American President even ten years ago could have made this tremendous impact here. Television has made the difference. It has helped to make foreign leaders as familiar as the national ones. President Kennedy had the kind of boyish looks which made it possible for millions of people in this part of the world to regard him as a family member. This might appear to be a sentimental and exaggerated picture in our country. It is not so. Here even young children are only too familiar with the pictures of President Kennedy, his wife and his children, particularly Caroline.
Spontaneous
For the common people he was known not as a mighty President of the most powerful nation in the world but as a laughing boy, husband of a charming woman and father of young children. Stories have been told of how he relaxed with his family even during the Cuba crisis. The grief at his murder was spontaneous and genuine, something quite different from formal tributes that are customary on such occasions.
From the day he came to occupy the White House President Kennedy enjoyed an unbelievable measure of popularity in these parts, sometimes in spite of the policies he was pursuing. The European mind – I can speak confidently of the British – was naturally drawn towards him and his wife. The way Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy redecorated the White House, and the Kennedys played host to scientists, artists and creative writers drew from the British writers comparisons with their own royalty. Even generally cynical writers like Malcolm Muggeridge wrote admiringly of the Kennedy court. Paris honoured Mrs Kennedy as the city has never honoured anyone else when she accompanied her husband there. President Kennedy had then introduced himself as the man who accompanied Jacqueline. He may have said so in good humour but the description was accurate. Millions now saw on television the heroic way she bore her grief.
Mr Kennedy was the youngest man ever to become the President of the United States but the picture he projected abroad owed more to his temperament than to his age. He was more youthful than young. After all nobody has ever thought of Napoleon at St. Helena as a young man though he was also 46 when his career was cut short. “He was the one authentic hero of the post-war world, and he has been killed”: this one sentence from the editorial of The Sunday Times sums up the popular response to the deceased President. He represented youth and hope.
Youthful
With the European and British scene dominated for long by ancient personages and old men giving way to only slightly less old men, the youthful Kennedy was bound to appeal to the imagination of the younger generation. There is, however, something more to the Kennedy mystique. The following passage from an article on contemporary drama in the current issue of Encounter might be relevant: “Youth in our dramatic past has been used variously … only rarely has it been accorded the protagonist’s part, as in Hamlet. Today its dramatic reassertion is comparable to the dramatic elevation of protagonist women by Ibsen and Shaw. We watch an interesting attempt not only to understand but to draw strength and wisdom from youth.” President Kennedy’s statement “the torch has passed to a new generation of Americans” has often been quoted by men like Mr Harold Wilson as if it was a text from the Bible. “The making of the President” was a best-seller here as in America.
Inevitably the American image here has been both heroic and villainous. Al Capone, for instance, has been as well-known as President Roosevelt. It is common knowledge, thanks to television, that in Dallas alone more murders take place than in the whole of Britain and only one out of ten murderers is detected. Rockefeller still reminds the people of robber barons. McCarthy stands for the most vicious witch hunt in human history as if the Inquisitions and Stalin’s terrors never took place. Dulles has few admirers here, to put it mildly. President Kennedy managed to push the villainous image into the background and present the other, the heroic image of his country.
The assassination of President Kennedy at once brought to the fore the other picture of America which showed that there the whites shot each other and lynched Negroes. The memory was quite fresh of the recent bomb outrage in a church in which five Negro children were burnt alive and it was not long before the assassination that Vice-President Lyndon Johnson as he was then and Ambassador Adlai Stevenson were insulted and spat upon in Dallas. This picture of America, racially divided and full of violence and hate, frightened most Britishers. Viewed as a background to the rise of men like Senator Goldwater it assumed the proportions of a nightmare. It took the British commentators several days to accept the view that with President Kennedy might have disappeared the chances of Senator Goldwater to become Republican nominee for the presidency. While this fear has not altogether been dissipated, another has been evident.
This other fear was that at the time of the election Mr Khrushchev might try to test the nerves of the new President. This fear arose from the fact that it was only after the awesome confrontation over Cuba last winter that President Kennedy and Mr Khrushchev began to understand each other and there grew between them private correspondence which provided an additional avenue for easing tension. The British have never been enthusiastic cold warriors. The present relaxation has aroused here hopes which might not be justified but no one wants to lose such cherished hopes. As the Soviet response became clear, the fear of Mr Khrushchev wanting to stimulate a crisis disappeared. The British Government is in fact now eager to explore avenues of agreement with Russia on measures to prevent surprise attacks.
Cold War
This desire to take the initiative is natural in the circumstances. President Johnson is new to the job and has yet to establish some kind of rapport with Mr Khrushchev who not long ago told him, “I do not know you. But I have read all your speeches and I do not like any of them”. President Johnson may also find it necessary to make some concessions to forces of conservatism at home which in the American context are closely identified with the cold war. But for Sir Alec Douglas-Home this is even otherwise a grand opportunity to seek to assume the role of the honest broker, a role which helped Conservative victory in 1959 under Mr Macmillan. There are sly hints of possible visit by him to Moscow in the classical form of denial preceding speculation. He has himself affirmed that electoral considerations are uppermost in his mind.
Meanwhile, the Conservative Daily Telegraph has not missed the opportunity of making the point that America was not mature enough to be entrusted with the monopoly of the western world’s nuclear defence. President Kennedy’s assassination “will powerfully influence the argument as to whether or not we should acquire either by our own efforts or in association with our neighbours, an independent deterrent, thus retaining the power in an emergency to act independently of a United States which may no longer be as it has been,” wrote Colin Welch in The Daily Telegraph.
The Times of India, 30 November 1963