How The Life And Death Of JFK Changed The World | The Kennedy Half-Century | Timeline

this channel is part of the history hit network stick around to find out more [Music] there was something about john f kennedy from the very beginning the way he came across his rhetoric the notes of idealism that he struck every one of us will go home with the most profound impression of what a strong vital people can accomplish there was substance there but it was much more than substance it was reaching the public and especially young people emotionally in a way that's lasted for a lifetime [Music] i don't think you can separate the emotional tie that the public had you know you have an intellectual tie you admire his vision his knowledge his judgment his strategy his eloquence but the emotional tie through the family i think was really a very important one he inspired us all to be better people he inspired us to try to work to make this country better he inspired us to seek things that we didn't think were ever possible when you die young when you're martyred an aura exists about you and you're lifted up and that happened to john f kennedy to the detriment of those who came before him and even came after him but it's not just the tragedy not just the assassination the questions that still surround the assassination kennedy was the first modern president before that presidents were always just you know sort of fat and bald white men you know it was kind of you know you didn't really think much about them in terms of you know their star quality in a way and kennedy had that i think the legacy is still about service and also about building a just america building an america that all can participate in and i think that part of his legacy is very strong i don't think the kennedy legacy is camelot i don't think it is psy hershey's version either where it was a cd and see me undertaking but to me his legacy has always been his charisma and sort of the standard he set for later presidents [Music] [Music] the entire dallas trip was an attempt by kennedy to prepare for the 1964 campaign in fact it was really the kickoff to the 1964 campaign texas had become ground zero for the split in the democratic party that's why he went to texas to try and put the pieces back together he could lose some other southern states he could not lose big texas the anti-kennedy sentiment in dallas was considered especially strong and there had been incidents involving both vice president johnson and also our u.n ambassador at the time adlai stevenson a nasty incident where they were spat upon yelled at hit over the head with a placard kennedy wanted to demonstrate and the democrats wanted to demonstrate that the president wasn't afraid and the president could receive a good reception even in dallas the trip had gone very smoothly he had been in fort worth the night before he had given a speech that morning then they boarded air force one for the very short hop from fort worth to dallas [Music] had a warm reception at the airport he frightened his secret service guards by moving to the fence to shake hands [Applause] the people there had not been screened anybody could have had a gun anybody could have fired a shot it was considered the way presidents had to operate in those days [Music] history hit is a streaming platform that exclusively releases quality historical documentaries covering fascinating figures and moments in history from all over the world from ancient neolithic cultures to the dawn of the space race history hit has thousands of hours of content with unrivaled access to the world's best historians we're committed to bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a 14-day free trial and timeline fans can get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code timeline at checkout my friend and i gene hill we decided we wanted to come to see the president but mainly to come see jackie [Music] we walked over to the plaza couldn't decide exactly where to stand and we just kept moving we were sitting about here waiting for the car to come down i had stepped out in the street twice to take pictures of the motorcycle policemen [Music] when they turned the corner and all the people were yelling and clapping and showing that they were glad to see him and the car got closer to us and gene yelled she said mr president look this way and about that time i snapped a picture [Music] that was the first shot that i heard i heard jackie we were so close and she said oh my god he's been shot and on the second shot that i heard i thought i saw that man's hair jump and i'll never forget that as long as i live it was not his hair jumping it was his head it was obvious to the doctors from the very beginning that there was no real hope but they did the best they could they eventually fixed the time of death at 1 pm but he was actually dead instantly it was total mass confusion we didn't know if this was the beginning of world war three we didn't know if it was some sort of an attempted coup uh we didn't know what it was and and we were literally people were terrified [Music] at the university of texas where i was going to school i was in the dorm and my former roommate called me and she said stay where you are i'm coming to get you shock and disbelief and she had heard the president had been shot in dallas and she knew that my parents were there and then she took me to a room where they had a radio they had the radio on and i listened and i just fell on my knees and started praying that it wasn't so [Music] it was a polarized airplane you had the new president and his assistants and a few of the kennedy aides and secret service men who realized they had to serve a new president in the front of the plane the back of the plane you had mrs kennedy the kennedy loyalist for whom john f kennedy even dead was still the president the one public piece of the trip back was the swearing-in of president johnson mrs kennedy to her great credit decided that she owed this both to her late husband and to president johnson in the country to appear before the public before the photographer so that they could see that there was continuity she however refused several entreaties on the plane to change into a clean dress or even to remove the blood stains from her face and legs and other parts of her body [Music] as she said repeatedly on that trip and after she got back to washington i want them to see what they've done to jack like everyone else earlier that evening watching on television is the sad events unfurled and the phone line and my wife came with us very very large and said it's the white house mrs kennedy had expressed the wish for the east room to appear as it did when lincoln lay in state there we needed to get some illustrations of what the room looked like i went down in the bios of that enormous library of congress looking for harper's weekly and fight lesnar's illustrated newspaper i found the copies i wanted a couple of the white house people got me and said we've got to find a place to go to look at these and we went in the oval office [Music] that's when it all got to me to see the two white sofas and the rocky trail we got down and spread out everything and they saw what we needed to do and then we went into the eastern [Music] we actually had the lincoln caterpillar the original platform on which they put the president [Music] certainly it was an important step to associate him in depth with lincoln because you insert the ingredient of martyrdom in there and as well as the legend you [Music] mourns john created kennedy mrs kennedy deserves full credit for this spectacular funeral and the other services connected with the long goodbye to president kennedy she knew what she wanted by the time the plane landed she started expressing it almost immediately mrs kennedy ignites an eternal flame at the head of her husband's grave if you go back to the actual kennedy administration you can't find a single reference to camelot camelot came about in the mind of mrs kennedy in the week after the kennedy assassination she thought about how she wanted her husband to be remembered she wanted to put the whole administration in some kind of context that would carry on through the generations and even eons and so she remembered an album that the president and first lady liked to listen to late at night and it was from the broadway play camelot [Music] she thought that encapsulated the kennedy administration and how people viewed it as a very special moment that was gone forever when john f kennedy was elected in 1960 he received a shade under 50 of the vote by the year after his assassination a gallup poll showed that 64 of americans claimed they had voted for him in 1960. that gives you a sense of the overwhelming grief that existed and even a sense of guilt about what had happened to president kennedy that was transformed into legacy a legacy that president johnson and his successors have used for their own purposes in the white house's sense on the 20th day of january in 1961 john f kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished in the first thousand days nor in the life of this administration nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet but he said let us begin today in this moment of new resolve i would say to all my fellow americans let us continue obviously the work of lyndon johnson and many of the great initiatives that he took were a continuation of the work of john f kennedy some of it executed in a way that only lyndon johnson could do daddy because of his close contacts with the congress because he was one of the congress's people he knew how to try to get some of the legislation through [Music] daddy did a lot of talking with republicans as well as democrats to try to persuade them to pass things like some of the unfinished business daddy would say of medicare of clean water acts civil rights it was proposed more than one year ago by our late and beloved president john f kennedy the succession of lyndon johnson to the white house made all the difference in passing civil rights laws he could do what john f kennedy either couldn't do or wouldn't do he had an affinity for working the legislators he had been one of them in a way that john f kennedy had not been he knew how to get things done in the senate he was just a better politician than john kennedy had been and used that to great effect [Music] if you list the civil rights activities of all the presidents lyndon johnson is number one there's no one better from that day to this day [Music] in all of american history there probably hasn't been a more controversial commission than the warring commission while there were some wonderful people serving on the warren commission it's also very clear that those in charge from president johnson to fbi director hoover and others decided within 24 hours of the assassination that lee harvey oswald did it alone and that it was in the national interest for the commission to conclude that naturally when you conclude that x did why before there's an investigation you're going to have people for years and decades questioned the conclusion and that's exactly what's happened [Music] future historians looking beyond tv images news conferences or texas accents would undoubtedly find the accomplishments of those 1037 days amazing when gauged against the past performances of other presidents the one giant fly in the ointment for johnson which will affect the view historians have of him forever is vietnam i believe that now no less than when the decade began this generation of americans is willing to pay any price bear any burden johnson insisted to his dying day that he had done what john f kennedy wanted done and would have done in vietnam the more you study the kennedy record the more you realize that just isn't true the debacle of vietnam has in a way ruined the johnson historical legacy it ended his presidency i shall not seek and i will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president the johnson presidency was bracketed by two kennedy assassinations in june of 1968 on the very night that he won the critical california primary bobby kennedy was gunned down in the ambassador hotel in los angeles [Music] linda johnson once again had to go out in public and insist that one man had done the shooting but there were fewer and fewer people who believed it most people in the back of their minds realized that for five years he was serving out john kennedy's term kennedy almost certainly would have been re-elected in 1964. so it was never fully lyndon johnson's presidency but johnson to his credit was able to use john f kennedy and the concept of legacy to accomplish a long list of legislative programs [Music] it's not a terribly original point but a lot of people have noticed that jack kennedy was really the first president of of the television era your candidates for the most important office in the free world seek your concern your thoughtful judgment he perhaps wouldn't have been elected president first place in 1960 had the televised debate between he and richard nixon only happened on radio most people who listened to it on radio polls are to be believed thought nixon got the best of it mr nixon is appearing in the doorway now richard nixon had been trying out for the presidency since the late 40s and early 1950s so when he finally achieved it in early 1969 it was somewhat ironic that the biggest event of his first year as president was one initiated by his great rival john f kennedy the moon landing [Music] i believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth most people associated that program with john f kennedy certainly the members of nasa did and the astronauts did for nixon it was pleasant to preside over it but i suspect he was unhappy that the focus was so heavily on john f kennedy he really didn't mention kennedy he didn't have his name on the plaque that was put on the moon that was noted by newspapers and people connected to politics and it was felt that nixon had shown a lack of finesse and grace this has to be the proudest day of our lives i suspect if one looks closely and listens closely to some of the nixon taped conversations they will find indeed that he thought that as opposed to the kennedy presidency he was getting the short end of the stick by the news media he's probably correct in that as well [Music] nixon in his own mind had wanted to achieve a great deal more than john f kennedy he referred frequently on the white house tapes and to aids and in memos what he had accomplished with dayton with the soviet union the opening to china comparing that to the near disaster of both the bay of pigs and what could have been a terrible disaster with the cuban missile crisis so that was very much on nixon's mind he was still competing with john f kennedy but you don't compete with a ghost you compete with a live human being i really think the candidate he thought he was going to be running against in 1972 was ted kennedy and like all good politicians ran scared when chappaquiddick happens he sees this as a golden opportunity and has erlichmann take a private detective that they have working for the white house and send him to chappaquiddick within hours of the tragedy up there he thinks it is not likely something that ted kennedy can overcome if he runs in 72 [Music] from that day forward he just wants to make sure that teddy kenney isn't somehow moving in the background against him [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] teddy kennedy just drifts throughout these conversations the last set i happen to listen to is he's trying to get a secret service plant on teddy kennedy they're all prepared to do this and they actually have agents in place that will undertake the assignment teddy kennedy doesn't want the protection and he can't obviously force the protection on him so kennedy was one step ahead of uh of the whole situation in recent months members of my administration have been charged with involvement in what has come to be known as the watergate affair i had been acting as did my predecessors president truman president eisenhower president kennedy president johnson nixon was absolutely correct to suggest that other presidents including john f kennedy and lyndon johnson had misused the fbi and the cia and the irs in various ways [Music] and the american public was very resistant to hearing negative information about president kennedy i think when you look back at the nixon presidency i'm not one of those who would say that it was it was all bad you look at his arms control work that he did with the russians the opening to china he was far ahead of his own party he was far ahead of american public opinion the things he did that were right remain right [Music] ford was president at a time when americans started revisiting the kennedy assassination the government had lied to them repeatedly during watergate and also during vietnam they began to doubt other conclusions that had been sold to them by the government over the years and the kennedy assassination and the warrant commission was an obvious choice [Music] gerald ford was a member of the warren commission and in a sense his direct connection with john f kennedy was always that commission ford didn't want to deal with it and the house of representatives which was controlled by the democrats did want to deal with it so the house set up a select committee on assassinations focusing specially on president kennedy at the time president ford had very little to say about it later on he insisted that the conclusion of that house committee that there was indeed a conspiracy in the assassination of president kennedy was completely wrong from his perspective ford to the end of his life insisted that the warren commission had gotten it right [Music] when a limousine can parade openly through the streets of dallas there's a change that's come over america after a decade of tension the people and their president are back together again [Music] the historical oddity is that ford was the president after president kennedy who suffered two assassination attempts i gerald r ford have granted and by these presidents do grant a full free and absolute pardon unto richard nixon president ford probably was not elected to a full term because he pardoned president nixon in the most controversial action of his short administration at the time the american public was totally opposed to the nixon pardon i was one of those who spoke out against his actions then but time has a way of clarifying past events and now we see that president ford was right his courage and dedication to our country made it possible for us to begin the process of healing and put the tragedy of watergate behind us we are honored to present you president ford with the john f kennedy profiling courage award for 2001. [Applause] [Music] carter as a southern baptist and an evangelical christian came under fire for his religion in the 1976 campaign in order to get over that hurdle and it was a real hurdle in much of the north he invoked john f kennedy simply quoted what kennedy had to say about catholicism in 1976 because ted kennedy decided not to run for president there wasn't great antagonism between the kennedys and the carters once carter won the presidency though everything changed we had a little problem with my uncle ted kennedy and he wasn't respectful at all you know people want to be welcomed in and offered a place at the table president carter had a problem with that and particularly with the problem with that with our family [Music] it wasn't long before ted kennedy was unhappy with president carter about his budgetary policies which were more conservative and the fact that he didn't push for a national health care which had long been a ted kennedy focus [Music] jimmy carter had run a very unpopular presidency he was quite literally in the 20s and 30s in popularity by 1979 [Music] and early polls showed ted kennedy defeating jimmy carter for the democratic nomination by a margin of two to one ted kennedy couldn't resist that today i formally announce that i'm a candidate for president of the united states in the first year or so that i was president with my best supporter and then he decided firmly to run for president against me in 1980 he was my worst problem [Music] jimmy carter was able to use the hostage situation to run a rose garden campaign to ignore the challenge from ted kennedy to rally the country behind him temporarily while the hostages were under iranian control it caused ted kennedy to carry the challenge all the way to the democratic nomination in august [Music] the kennedy people were barely speaking to the carter people and vice versa i've called them the hatfields and the mccoys the carters and the kennedys i am confident that the democratic party will reunite on the basis of democratic principles and that together we will march towards a democratic victory in 1980. they were simply unable to reconcile their differences even with the looming threat for democrats of a presidency by ronald reagan for me a few hours ago this campaign came to an end for all those whose cares have been our concern the work goes on the cause endures the hope still lives and the dream shall never die after i got the nomination i met with ted kennedy twice privately you know to see what he wanted what i could do to assuage him how i could get him to support me and he was very cool with me personally he was determined after he lost the nomination that i would not be an elected [Music] when kennedy came over for the last night of the convention and everybody came on stage after president carter had given his acceptance address ted kennedy moved around that stage without once holding jimmy carter's hand up because he was determined not to give jimmy carter the photo he wanted and asked if he could win the general election next november without senator kennedy's help the president said i can win much better with it [Music] i think that ted kennedy it was a pain in my ass the last two years i was in office the worst problem i had i just felt that he should have been a president i didn't think kennedy was very happy when reagan was elected [Music] kennedy was really i mean he was a glamorous figure poised and handsome and tanned and all of a sudden the impact of the visual became very apparent this was obviously the way of the future if you're going to be elected president from now on you're going to have to be good on television along comes ronald reagan who's even more handsome than kennedy and he's even better on tv because he really understands this this is his job this is his gig and he had an interest in politics too i mean it wasn't just let's go pick an actor that doesn't always work so well a man's talents may be used for good or evil exceptional talents only widen the possibilities for both reagan started out as an opponent of john f kennedy he had converted to the republican party during the 1950s and he backed nixon to the hilt in 1960 he did like a lot of things about john f kennedy and thought he was much too liberal and was very critical of the bay of pigs and there were conflicts between reagan and the kennedys in the 1960s the kennedys recognized ronald reagan as a potential threat before he had even been elected governor of california good evening there is a belief in the reagan family that bobby kennedy interceded with general electorate to get ronald reagan fired as the host of ge theater which was his big platform in the 1950s and early 1960s where progress in products goes hand in hand with providing progress in the human values that enrich the lives of us all whether it's true or not it's impossible to say but the reagan family believed ronald reagan do solemnly swear i ronald reagan do solemnly swear that i will faithfully execute the office of president of the united states that i will faithfully execute the office of president of the united states by the time he was elected president in 1980 he saw an opportunity to make common cause with the kennedys he knew that ted kennedy was delighted that he had defeated jimmy carter it was an open secret in washington that that was the case so he very quickly invited ted kennedy and the entire kennedy family over to the white house mrs kennedy the congress has authorized the presentation of a medal for you in recognition of the distinguished and dedicated service which your husband robert kennedy gave to the government and to the people of the united states when president reagan won he was we may disagree on issues but come to the table and we'll strike a a medal in robert kennedy's honor this medal [Music] has been waiting patiently to be presented on behalf of ethel and her children and all the members of our family let me thank you mr president for this great honor that you have given to robert kennedy by the time he became president and certainly as he moved through his presidency he warmed to the kennedys perceptively his relationship with ted kennedy who he had i think therefore dismissed as you know just another liberal immigrant [Music] he felt much better about him having met him [Music] he had two basic planks that he cared about more than anything else his tax cut program and his strong anti-communism gee what were the two things he had in common with president kennedy's program our pledge is for tax simplification to make the system more fair and easier to understand well on tax cuts reagan simply cited the record of the 1960s kennedy achieved a major across-the-board tax cut shortly after his death but it was well on its way to passage before his death many americans remembered the prosperity of the 1960s they remembered the terrible economic times of the 1970s they wanted to go back to the 60s reagan was saying here's how we do it and here's the surprise we can follow a democratic president's example it worked like a charm most of what president kennedy said about the soviet union up to the cuban missile crisis was pretty harsh that's what americans expected during the cold war the world is not deceived by the communist attempt to label berlin as a hotbed of war there is peace in berlin today the source of world trouble and tension is moscow not berlin and if war begins it will have begun in moscow and not berlin so reagan made common cause with john f kennedy on the soviet union kennedy never called them an evil empire but he came awfully close reagan closed the deal and most americans could see the comparison [Applause] john f kennedy embodied the resolute determination of the united states to preserve the way of freedom all three men wherever they may live are citizens of berlin and therefore as a free man i take pride in the words ich bin eine the berlin speeches also linked kennedy and reagan [Applause] president reagan and his very media adept staff knew that they wanted to get president reagan into berlin and they did so twice there were two well-known speeches there the best known of course mr gorbachev tear down this wall it reminded so many people of what president kennedy had said about the wall to begin with when it was constructed during the kennedy administration [Music] no republican president since john f kennedy has ever cited john f kennedy nearly as often as ronald reagan did [Music] reagan cited and invoked the kennedy name and record more often than most democratic presidents [Music] reagan had to work with the democratic house of representatives the senate was republican but he needed to get his programs passed by the democratic house it was an example of reagan's flexibility his cleverness and shrewdness in politics that he was able to make common cause with a family that one would have thought a conservative president would have nothing in common with [Music] i have as much experience in the congress as jack kennedy did when he sought the presidency senator i served with jack kennedy i knew jack kennedy jack kennedy was a friend of mine senator you're no jack kennedy [Applause] one reason why president bush 41 may not have mentioned president kennedy very much was because of what happened in the campaign of 1988 [Music] any mention of president kennedy by president bush might have generated some negative columns or some news reports it might have embarrassed vice president quayle [Music] probably the most important thing with respect to president kennedy that happened during the bush administration was oliver stone's movie jfk oliver stone's movie jfk actually put a lot of pressure on president george h.w bush the problem for bush was it was an election year he was running behind and popular opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of conspiracy theories even if he had wanted to veto the open records act finally establishing a procedure for making public all of the government records regarding the kennedy assassination he could not have done so he signed the bill just a couple of weeks before the election it didn't help him he lost anyway [Music] if there was any president who consciously tried to revive the kennedy legacy it was bill clinton [Music] he visited the white house in the summer of 1963 with the boys nation group and he was able to work his way to the front of the line in the rose garden and shake president kennedy's hand the president is roughly the same age in roughly the same area of the country 1960 everything was world war ii eisenhower roosevelt truman and all older guys all of a sudden this guy comes up young and he's got this like glamorous life and talking kind of different i mean you can't imagine the cultural shock to somebody that was a young boy in hot springs arkansas clinton had a trust problem in 1992. he was trying to remake his image the star of the democratic convention was obviously bill clinton because he was being nominated for president but the co-starring roles were all held by the kennedys it was one of the factors in the remaking of his image that enabled him to become a better candidate for the general election campaign and he had cultivated the kennedys he vacationed with the kennedys he did all kinds of events with them he always included them i think he was well aware of what had happened to jimmy carter and he was determined not to become another democratic president torpedoed by an unhappy kennedy clan let us begin anew the enduring legacy and the continued vitality of john kennedy's peace corps the new frontier of which i speak is not a set of promises it is a set of challenges not a series of promises but a series of challenges we have the smallest federal government since john county was president the federal workforce is the smallest it's been since john kennedy president clinton used president kennedy's rhetoric and record more frequently than any other president even exceeding lyndon johnson's mountainous total he clearly tried to revive the kennedy image and wrap himself in that image if you're looking for major differences between the clinton administration and the kennedy administration it would be in the behavior of the press [Music] it is impossible to defend what president kennedy did he had many mistresses during his administration the difference is that president kennedy knew the rules in those days and the rules were that the press didn't report on the private lives of public people [Music] by the time bill clinton got into office they were 180 degrees different than they were under the kennedy administration and clinton knew it himself they were determined to be aggressive with him and not make the mistakes that the press had made during john kennedy's administration even though bill clinton certainly got away with some private life relationships during his white house years he couldn't get away with monica lewinsky [Music] three decades to the day have passed since my group and i were here in the rose garden to meet president kennedy it was a very different time for america there was virtually no cynicism none of us had any doubt that our country could solve its problems meet its challenges nor did we have any doubt that our president our congress people whom we elected could faithfully and fully represent us in meeting the great challenges of that day if there is anyone here who has in the back of his mind any notion at all of going into a public service or politics i only have one word of advice if you can manage somehow to get a picture of you shaking hands with president clinton here today it might come in handy later on [Music] [Music] one of the most interesting first things that george w bush did was he screened a movie in the white house theater the private theater it was about the cuban missile crisis and what president john f kennedy was going through and the guests that george bush had sat in the front row of that movie and the opening night of it was ted kennedy in the immediacy of bush winning and the recount and the controversial election bush wanted to deliberately send a signal of reaching across to the other side and he did a lot of that with senator ted kennedy but what struck me was the first moment he brought him together revolved around ted kennedy's brother's presidency [Music] the policy at the time that was being pursued was education reform and the no child left behind act where senator ted kennedy was the leading senate proponent he and george w bush really became zapatico in terms of the need to pass that legislation which is where george w bush and senator ted kennedy really hit it off you know i can't say that president bush would speak often about jfk and an example that jfk had done this or had done that i do know when it came to the tax cuts that george bush was promoting he would cite president kennedy and president kennedy haven't lowered the marginal income tax rate [Music] on september the 11th enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country when you compare george bush's september 20th speech to congress where he said every nation in every region now has a decision to make either you are with us or you are with the terrorists and if you look at jfk's inaugural address we said we will pair any burden and fight any foe and go anywhere to defend freedom there's a similar ring to both those statements [Applause] both were born out of the crises that each was governing through jfk and the height of the cold war and george w bush in the immediate aftermath of september 11th and i think here what unites a president kennedy and president bush is that when you are the commander-in-chief and your nation is vulnerable it immediately rallies you to act to be strong to protect and defend president kennedy did that and then president bush after september 11th that's that moral clarity there were the strains that did grow to emerge and frankly no child left behind became very controversial throughout much of the democratic party and i think senator kennedy had to do a little shifting not to be seen too far out of line with the democrats on that issue of the remaining differences were over iraq where senator kennedy was a fierce foe of president bush [Music] if you look at modern american politics there are really two dynasties that stand out for the democrats it's the kennedys for the republicans it's the bushes now which dynasty has been more successful the kennedys had tragically a piece of one presidential term the bushes have had 12 years in office [Music] but i don't think that rhetorically you could say that any of them have inspired americans or that the inspiration has lasted to the extent that president kennedy and robert kennedy and ted kennedy were able to achieve as the triumvirate that we associate with the kennedys [Music] one of the first people on the public record suggesting that we would have an african-american president in the not-too-distant future was none other than bobby kennedy in 1961. this was before the civil rights bill had passed it was before you had more than a handful of african americans and even lower level political offices and he was only off by a few years if you look at john kennedy as a presidential candidate and barack obama's a presidential candidate they did have a lot of similarities [Music] certainly the barrier breaking aspect of both catholic and african-american is the obvious one both of them had been stars at the prior democratic convention the audacity of hope in the end that is god's greatest gift to us they both were known as much or more for rhetoric than for substance certainly in the senate they had very meager senate records [Music] both kennedy and obama were press favorites there's no question about it [Music] when hillary clinton ran for president i think the clintons assumed that the kennedys would be with her [Music] over the years i've been deeply moved by the people who've told me that they wish they could feel inspired and hopeful about america the way they did when my father was president this longing is even more profound today fortunately there is one candidate who offers that same sense of hope it was the endorsement of ted kennedy and caroline kennedy in 2008 that made all the difference for barack obama at a critical moment in that campaign tonight i can report to the american people and to the world that the united states has conducted an operation that killed osama bin laden the leader of al qaeda president obama achieved that goal with the expertise of the navy seals in may 1961 when president kennedy outlined his goal of landing a man on the moon in that same speech he also laid the groundwork for establishing the navy seals the following year one of president obama's most vivid references to president kennedy came in 2013 when he delivered a speech at the brandenburg gate in berlin to mark the 50th anniversary of kennedy's address there back in 1963. and if we lift our eyes as president kennedy called us to do then we'll recognize that our work is not yet done as with many people of my generation president kennedy was an inspiration not necessarily to run ourselves but to pay attention to public policy to recognize it as a noble calling to have those who govern work for the people for them to succeed rather than have power for the sake of power to exploit [Music] and he was clearly a visionary clearly consistent with the vows of our founders of equality and said it so beautifully i think his legacy in the larger public mind is a beneficial one and one that's kind to him probably kinder than he deserves [Music] because he's given credit for things that he did not do or would not have done because of the aura surrounding him today there's a clear ribbon of kennedy influence sometimes it's positive sometimes it isn't [Music] but it's interwoven through 10 presidencies and really at least 50 years of american history no other recent u.s president has achieved such a legacy [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] jack kennedy had an enormous sense of history [Music] he was always asking what will history say to what i'm about to do presidents who don't think about future judgments fail presidents who give it a thought tend to be successful and he was successful in that begun the cost of freedom is always high but americans have always paid it ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country everybody knows the ask not part but their very next sentence in that speech i think has inspired me so much the very next sentence is the citizens of the world ask not what america can do for you but what we can do working together for the freedom of men what a beautiful sentiment and at that time and what a beautiful sentiment 50 years later [Music] but his legacy will always be fairly remarkable for americans because he gave his life [Music] that's more than can be asked of any man for that job [Music] and so we'll always have a place in our heart for him oh [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 819,952

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, lee harvey oswald, john f kennedy, jfk assassination, jackie kennedy, john f. kennedy, john f. kennedy biography, timeline, timeline world history, timeline channel, timeline world history documentaries

Id: 41CYcn2Z2CE

Length: 57min 6sec (3426 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2022