By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 22, 2003; Page C01

For those under age 45 or so, November 22 is probably just another day.

Despite the predictable outpouring of television retrospectives from conspiracy theorists and Camelot nostalgia buffs, it is extremely difficult for those under a certain age to understand everything that died in Dallas 40 years ago, and why we are today in some ways so very much a poorer country.

Yet those of us who were around then have a duty to try to explain. Because as imperfect as America was in 1963 -- and it was as flawed and unrealized as its gifted and eloquent young leader -- we had a vision of ourselves and a sense of national purpose then, and we had been summoned to both of those by John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

To make a statement like that in today's cultural climate is to court derision as an ideologue or a sentimentalist, or both. JFK, we have been loudly and frequently instructed by cynical younger scholars, was that philandering hypocrite who got us into Vietnam; the overprivileged offspring of a Nazi apologist and near-mobster whose millions bought his son the 1960 election.

The Kennedy administration, we've been told, was a manufactured illusion we fell for -- an illusion served up at the time by a sycophantic press seduced by an aura of brains and glamour. And there is more than a bit of truth in all of that.

But what today's cynics miss -- remain, in fact, almost wholly blind to -- is the way and the success with which John Kennedy called us to something larger than ourselves. This is called leadership and we haven't seen anything remotely like it since. From any candidate of any party.

It was not the product of party or ideology; rather the reverse. For all his amused affection for his brawling fellow Democrats, Kennedy was a skeptical partisan at best. "Sometimes," he said more than once, "party loyalty demands too much." He was even more skeptical of ideology. Liberals, he said, "tend to underestimate the importance of winning"; conservatives too often "close their eyes to society's needs."

Predictably, he was viewed with suspicion by both the left and the right. Liberals eschewed him for Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 Democratic National Convention; conservatives stampeded to Lyndon Johnson at the convention and to Richard Nixon in the general election.

But Kennedy did something no politician had done at least since Theodore Roosevelt. He electrified much of a generation, many of whom had previously neither known nor cared about politics and government.

His famous call to "ask not what your country can do for you" is now so well known it's a cliche. Who remembers today how radical a departure that was from the lunch pail political rhetoric of the 1940s and '50s? Who had ever run for office before by asking us to give rather than take?

Politics in the 1950s -- at least in image -- was the province of greasy, balding fat men with wet cigars and wide ties. They were the ward heelers and aldermen and lodge brothers of a Ralph Kramden America, leavened out with the occasional plutocrat or statesman. They brokered candidates in smoke-filled rooms and wore funny hats in chaotic conventions where they thronged as much to get away from their wives as to choose our leaders. Younger political hopefuls had to butter them up or buy them out and wait their turn to run. Elections were "delivered" by "passing the word." Predictability was political gold. New ideas and faces were suspect, and politics usually catered not to the best in us but to the worst.

Onto that scene sailed John F. Kennedy with a gospel of sacrifice and vigor. The youngest president ever elected to the White House took us in a whole new direction. He invited artists and musicians and Nobel laureates to the White House because he said he wanted to celebrate the best in our culture. He played touch football and unleashed a fad for 50-mile hikes, because, he said, we had physical challenges to meet as well as mental ones.

He'd been a cipher as a congressman and only mildly attentive as a senator, but he grew with his responsibilities. He called for a New Frontier that would test us with something like the challenges our grandparents had met. He was hip and funny and smart as hell. He took the world situation seriously, but unlike most of the old pols posturing around him, he didn't seem to take himself seriously at all. He was almost flip about the pain of his lifelong back problems -- made worse by war wounds -- and the tragedies in his life. "Life isn't fair," he told us "but government should be."

What needs to be understood about Kennedy is that he was part of a cultural movement in 1960 almost as much as a political one. He came on the scene when Bob Newhart and Mike Nichols and Elaine May were doing to humor what Audrey Hepburn was doing to movies and Dave Brubeck was doing to jazz. College kids -- whose parents laughed at Milton Berle and listened to Lawrence Welk and liked Victor Mature movies and voted for Eisenhower and maybe hadn't even been to college -- sensed a kinship in Kennedy's quick, hip urbanity. He didn't seem to operate like their parents' politicians. He chose the smartest people for his Cabinet, not the biggest contributors. "You can't beat brains," he said. He didn't talk the same old BS. He talked about "pragmatism" and described himself as "an idealist without illusions."

When he committed us to land a man on the moon, he said he was doing so not because it was easy but because it was hard, and would call forth the best in our character as a nation. Challenges clearly called forth the best in him. When a little kid asked him how he got to be a war hero, he said, "It was involuntary. They sank my boat."

From the failure of the Bay of Pigs came the triumph of the Cuban missile crisis. There was a cyclical pattern to such things. He kept getting better. And so did we, because of what he showed us about ourselves.

One of the raps against JFK today is that he was slow to grasp the moral imperatives of the civil rights struggle. Like so many criticisms it is true as far as it goes. But it fails to acknowledge how he left African Americans, as he left so many of us, empowered with the sense of hope and possibility. Thirty years ago, when much of that sense had mutated to anger and frustration, I remember a black colleague in the Post newsroom recalling with wonder the sight of the cadet corps in his high school jogging the halls in unison as proud Cold War Warriors. "Even then, with all the scary stuff going on down South, Kennedy made us feel this was our country, too," he said. "Even before the Civil Rights Act, he made us proud to be Americans."

Of course, not everybody felt that way. Millions hated John Kennedy bitterly because he was too young or too cocky or too rich or too Catholic or too liberal or too conservative or too successful or not successful enough. But for millions more Americans the relationship between themselves and their government profoundly changed because of JFK. There was serious work to be done at home and abroad and now we wanted to help do it.

All this was very new. Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had been been good presidents, arguably even great ones. They were probably better human beings than John Kennedy, given Kennedy's now-legendary priapic excesses. But they never caught the imagination of the world. They never taught a whole generation to reach for the stars.

Unless one can understand and appreciate that electrifying sense of hope and possibility, one can't possibly grasp the enormity of the assassination 40 years ago. In the United States in 1963, assassination was an antique word: as alien to everything contemporary and American as Austrian archdukes and Serbian terrorists. Though there was violence aplenty in this country, that was not the way we disputed our leaders. The 1935 gunshot that killed Huey Long in Baton Rouge seemed a product of Louisiana's banana republic exceptionalism. Assassination, to Americans, was a 19th-century concept in 1963.

To focus, as recent historians have, almost entirely on John Kennedy's bizarrely irresponsible private life (that business with gangster Sam Giancana's girlfriend, Judith Campbell Exner -- can anyone really explain that?), and ignore his public hold on the world, is to not see the forest for the poison ivy.

It wasn't just young Americans he touched. The thousands of Americans who joined the Peace Corps or entered politics or enlisted in the armed services because of JFK have been documented exhaustively. But who remembers today the grief-shocked throng of world leaders at his funeral, everyone from France's Charles de Gaulle to Ethiopia's emperor, Haile Selassie? Why is it one can still today find JFK's picture on the wall in faraway huts in Africa and Latin America?

Perhaps because all of us alive then lost a sense of ourselves along with our president on Nov. 22, 1963. Perhaps it's because those gunshots in Dallas made us, as Ben Bradlee wrote at the time in Newsweek, "a lesser people in a lesser land."