Fifty years later the life and death of John F. Kennedy continue to engage historians and conspiracy theorists alike - the guesstimates on the number of books on the topic run as high as 40,000.
To those aged 16 to 45 who may not empathize with the emotions at play today, we ask: Where were you on 9-11? Kennedy's assassination in Dallas was like that — an event so incandescent that its memory remains hard-wired; adults remember exactly what they were doing the moment they heard the news while children recall the effect the news had on their parents.
Why? In a single word, Kennedy stood for hope. The New Frontier he invoked in his 1960 acceptance speech, was seen as attainable by Americans - not as Obama-like rhetoric.
Kennedy's administration attacked poverty, increasing social security benefits, minimum wage, expanded unemployment benefits and aid to farmers. Housing, city infrastructure and transportation were improved.
Yet we remember the man not for how he constructed his vision, but for how he painted it. A generation of Americans reimagined public service because of his words, while a generation of Germans imagined the end of the Cold War before it happened, and a generation around the world turned their eyes to the skies to imagine the possibilities in space.
Media created the image of the Kennedy Camelot, but such a naive view of politics would never have held if somewhere inside of us all we didn't want to believe politicians could be knights in shining armour defending the weak.
His murder began the Age of Cynicism.
