Let’s start by saying John F. Kennedy was wrong.
The 35th president once said that no political assassination had ever changed history.
Of course it’s ironic that JFK himself was assassinated in 1963, and we can certainly argue that the assassination of his brother Bobby in 1968 had a huge effect on history. President Kennedy can’t be called wrong for that one since it happened after he died, but it’s impossible to look at the last 158 years and say the assassination of Abraham Lincoln didn’t change America for the worse.
Just six weeks before he was murdered, Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address. If his brilliant Gettysburg Address in 1863 relegates all his other speeches to a battle for second place, the closing words of his inaugural address tell us how different a country we might have if he had lived.
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
It’s truly tragic that the man who was undoubtedly our greatest president never got the chance to rebuild our country after the war. Instead, he was replaced by the second-worst president ever (Trump still holds the top spot) and the radical Republicans in the Senate did everything they could to punish the South.
I was 13 years old when we moved below the Mason-Dixon Line, and while living in southwestern Ohio for 10 years before that had certainly left me exposed to racism, the whole Yankee-Rebel thing was new and unpleasant to me. It was early days for the civil rights movement, and I was 16 before my school had real integration in 1966.
At age 73, I have lived more than 40 percent of my life in four former Confederate states — Virginia, both Carolinas and Georgia — and one thing I have seen in all of them is angert toward the rest of the country. Sadly, some pretty horrible politicians have capitalized on it to take power.
Too many Lester Madduxes and too few Jimmy Carters.
Imagine if Lincoln had been president till 1869 and had allowed former members of the CSA to rejoin the country without jumping through all sorts of hoops.
Then imagine him as an elder statesman appealing to our better angels.
I honestly believe we would be a much better country today, just as I believe things would be very different if Bobby Kennedy had lived and Richard Nixon had never become president.
So with all due respect to JFK, he was wrong.