President John F. Kennedy The fiftieth anniversary of 11/22/63 has been marked by Jewish and Israel recollections of the day that JFK died, including Chemi Shalev in “Haaretz” recalling how his fellow students at a West Los Angeles public school convinced themselves that “Lyndon Johnson has sent emissaries to kill all the Jews,” and a report that Golda Meir harbored “dark” forebodings about the assassination. The reaction in opinion journals reflected our current political polarization—from the “New Republic” running a ridiculous piece rerunning and rehabilitating the notion that “right-wing Dallas politics” somehow explains malcontent Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald’s decision to make history, to Jonah Goldberg’s dismissal in “National Review” of Kennedy as “a beautiful mediocrity.” Even the usually sagacious Jonathan S. Tobin diagnosed ‘Our National Camelot Overdose” with the first television-created presidential celebrity whose successful management of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis will be remembered by future historians only as a “relatively minor Cold War skirmish.” Of course, Kennedy’s cut-short life requires the Scotch verdict of “not proven” in the case for the greatness of his presidency. Yet avoiding hagiography is no excuse for cynicism. It may be characteristic of Baby Boomers (like me) to wax nostalgic about what was lost on 11/22/63, but that doesn’t mean that nothing was lost beyond our generational innocence. As shown by Irving Bernstein’s sober reading of the presidential archives twenty years ago in “Promises Kept: John K. Kennedy’s New Frontier” (1991), Kennedy’s new frontiersmen laid the policy foundations for the civil rights and social welfare legislation that became landmark achievements of the LBJ presidency—with the difference that, under Kennedy, the reforms might have been introduced with less hubris and overreach. While Johnson became bogged down and obsessed in Vietnam as the Middle East careened toward the 1967 War, there is a reasonable hope that Kennedy would have maintained better global priorities. Critics on the Center-Right are now offering the jaundiced judgment that in another half century historians will treat the Kennedy assassination as no more consequential than that of another young, promising president: James Garfield in 1881. I think a better analogy is suggested by a reading of an underappreciated historiographical classic—Geoffrey Blodgett’s “The Gentle Reformers: Massachusetts Democrats in the Cleveland Era” (1966), published, perhaps not coincidentally, just as American politics began to descend into the extreme polarization with which we now live. Of course, portly President Grover Cleveland’s persona was as far removed from the charismatic Kennedy as imaginable, yet Blodgett empathetically shows how liberals (not “progressives”) in the 1880s fashioned a humane reform agenda that may be modest by twentieth century standards yet raised a banner for sane and sensible progress. The economic collapse of the 1890s superheated American political passions in a way that eclipsed the moderate mood of these “gentle reformers”—Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. Future historians—if they are capable of empathy—will not forget but will instead reimagine a subsequent era of moderate liberal reform: that symbolized and presided over by President John F. Kennedy before his assassination. It was that which was ended prematurely by an assassin’s bullet, followed by the generational upheavals of the later 1960s. The disappearance of that kind of liberalism—probably incapable of being recreated in our century—was very real and involved more than the disappearance of innocence. America and the world is still paying the price, just as it paid perhaps an even steeper price when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated a century before, to be succeeded by another Johnson—President Andrew Johnson—who possessed many of Lyndon Johnson’s vices but none of his virtues.