TODAY is 49 years since the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was and still is the only Roman Catholic to be the president of the United States of America. Kennedy was shot in a convertible car beside his wife Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (later Onassis) as they were driven through Dallas, Texas. In the campaign leading up to the election, his Catholic faith was a very big issue. Although the Roman Catholic Church is the largest single denomination in the USA, some 80 per cent of the population is not Roman Catholic.

The Republican campaign in 1960 was partly centred on the lie that if the Democrat John Kennedy won, he would be taking orders from the pope. Kennedy refuted that and quoted the church’s documents to prove that it was not so. But more important in the southern states where the Ku Klux Klan carried out killing raids on blacks, Jews and Roman Catholics with the full complicity of many in authority in those states, there was concern about a Roman Catholic running for that high office. The KKK’s “beef” with Roman Catholic priests, nuns and known Roman Catholics was that Catholic churches and institutions were not segregated. Anyone of any race could attend those schools.

In his book, The making of the president 1960, Theodore White argues that two things were responsible for Kennedy beating Richard Nixon in 1960. One was the arrest of Martin Luther King. Someone suggested to JFK’s brother Robert that JFK should ring Mrs Coretta King (Martin’s wife) and sympathise. JFK did that and as a result, the entire black population swung to the Democratic Party where they have stayed en bloc ever since. Formerly, American blacks were “Lincoln Republicans” because President Abraham Lincoln enacted laws to end slavery in the USA in 1863.

The other was the very first presidential debate on television. While it is commonplace for anyone going on TV in any studio today to have the face powdered to remove reflections of light on a sweaty or wet face, it was still a novelty in 1960. On the one hand, a smiling JFK went on air looking dapper and well dressed for his 43 years. In the opinion of many American women, he was handsome. Indeed, since the advent of the election debate in the USA, no man deemed to be ugly by American women has ever won the presidency.

On the other hand, Richard Nixon, the US vice president and the Republican nominee for president, went on the set without wearing any make-up. In addition, in political campaigning where speed is most essential to make as many stops as possible, he got into a car and before both feet were inside an aide accidentally shut the car door on his foot. So Nixon went into that very first presidential debate under obvious pain, making him appear miserable and grouchy.

In the presidential primaries, Lyndon Baines Johnson, governor of Texas, was one of Kennedy’s rivals. There was no love lost between Johnson and any member of the Kennedy clan. But as a strategy to win the electoral votes in Texas and other southern states, Johnson became Kennedy’s vice-presidential candidate. It was a close election and Kennedy went to bed not knowing whether he had won or lost. It was when he was awakened by a secret service agent the following morning and referred to as “Mr President” that he knew he had actually won.

How much did the assassination of JFK change the course of history? Would Nixon have won in 1968 if Kennedy had won two terms, or would Johnson be beginning his tenure as president then, instead of on November 22, 1963, immediately following JFK’s death? Would there ever have been a Vietnam War if JFK had lived? Had Johnson won in 1968, would another Democrat have won in 1972? Would that mean that Watergate would never have happened? Had Watergate not have happened, would Gerald Ford ever have been president? And the questions could go on and on.

But the “what if” questions can be reversed to what if some people died before they became great? National hero Norman Washington Manley was a decorated soldier from World War I and received the Military Medal for bravery. What if he had died at war as his brother Roy did? Would we have had Jamaica Welfare (now Social Development Commission) universal adult suffrage, selfgovernment and political independence? Certainly his sons, one of whom was former Prime Minister Michael Manley, would not have been born.

And we could go further. Up to January 1907 at Jamaica College, a very heavy metal bell was in the tower of the Simms building. At that time Norman Manley was a student at JC. During the great earthquake of January 14, 1907, the bell fell through two wooden floors to the ground floor. What if the 13-and-a-half-year-old Norman Manley happened to have been walking under the Simms Tower when the bell dropped? He would not have lived even to become an athlete or a Rhodes Scholar, let alone accomplish his other achievements.

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