CONGRATULATIONS are in order for the principal of my alma mater, Jamaica College, on having been elevated to the Senate. Ruel Reid’s appointment was made possible by the handing in by Opposition Leader Andrew Holness of a previously undated letter of resignation to the governor general. This is certainly reminiscent of the late prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago Dr Eric Williams as all ministers of government in Trinidad had to hand Williams, at least in 1976, an undated letter of resignation as a condition of appointment.

Education Minister Deacon Ronald Thwaites has asked if there is a precedent to Ruel Reid’s appointment to the Senate. Yes, there are quite a few precedents on both sides. I, however, will not enter the debate on whether practising teachers, especially principals, should be allowed to serve in the Senate.

In the history of Jamaica College, its sixth principal Vincent Harvey Ennever was also deputy chairman of the now defunct Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC). This led to a strike by sixth formers in 1964, with the complaint that he was spending too much time with JBC. In December 1964, Ennever resigned from JC to become general manager of JBC on January 1, 1965.

Taking a break from local happenings, tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States of America and the only Roman Catholic ever to hold that office.

When JFK ran for the US presidency in 1960, his opponents used his Roman Catholicism against him. While it is true that in the United States the Roman Catholic Church has more adherents than any other Christian Church, Roman Catholics only make up 20 per cent of the whole. This means that 80 per cent of the population does not subscribe to the Roman Catholic Church, which explains the initial hostility to Kennedy.

In the 1960 US presidential election, Kennedy received 303 electoral votes to Richard Nixon’s 219, while independent candidate Harry Byrd polled 15. But JFK barely won the election, getting 103,000 more votes than Richard Nixon, the pair netting more than 34 million votes. And Nixon got a majority of votes in 26 states to Kennedy’s 23. In his book, The making of the president 1960, Theodore White attributed the JFK victory to the following factors:

* Up to 1960, the African Americans in the United States were what were called Lincoln Republicans. This meant that most of them voted Republican because of the fact that Abraham Lincoln, who was a Republican president, enacted the Bill to end slavery in the United States, in 1863.

In 1960, however, when Martin Luther King Jr was arrested and JFK telephoned King’s wife Coretta Scott King to sympathise, that single act swung the majority of African Americans over to Kennedy and the Democrats.

* The first-ever US presidential debate on television showed that Kennedy was ‘with it’ at a time when facial make-up for television was a brand new concept. His face was done over with powder and whatever else on the one hand, and looked quite fresh and handsome to the women voters.

It has been written and said many times that since the women gained the right to vote in the US, no man deemed ugly by a majority of American women voters has ever won an election. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, did not use make-up and actually came to the debate in physical pain, which his face expressed vividly.

In a motorcade during the campaign, an aide slammed the door on Nixon’s foot but no matter what he said in the debate, his facial expressions, which were understandable due to the pain he was enduring, did not go over well with the viewers.

The third factor was the young family image of the Kennedys. A young president (the second youngest ever) and the first one born in the 20th century, with a young wife and infant children was an image with which the then younger generation in the US could identify.

The fourth factor was that Kennedy put aside any enmity between himself and Lyndon Baines Johnson and made Johnson his running mate to attract votes in Texas and elsewhere in the south.

It is believed that the omission of any of the four preceding factors could have meant that Richard Nixon would have won in 1960. Had JFK lost, would he have been alive today at the age of 96 since he might not have been assassinated had he not been president at that time?

Would JFK then have run in 1964? Would he have won then? Had he won then would he have served two terms until 1972? Would Nixon have run again? Would there have been any Watergate affair? Would there have been a Vietnam War?

JFK was the first president not to wear a hat in public and because of that, hat sales plummeted. Had Kennedy lost in 1960 would his campaign advisors when doing the post mortem have said that it was because he did not wear a hat?

ekrubm765@yahoo.com