Ich Bin Ein Berliner

Thom and I drove up to Boston to see Magda's and Joe's new condo in Dorchester Heights. They walk Moofy near a Revolutionary War monument.

After a quick, frigid tour of South Boston, we headed to the gorgeous John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, which is celebrating the centennial of his birth.

The library truly knows how to keep his flame burning.

Spend 20 minutes watching the introductory movie if you go. It ends with his Presidential nomination.  The exhibits begin with a recreation of the 1960 Democratic National Convention.  Love the delegate dresses and straw boaters.

Historians agree that the first televised Presidential debates tipped the tight election in Kennedy's favor. Those were the days! Voters didn't like seeing Nixon sweat under the hot lights and Kennedy more than overcame the C- he got in public speaking at prep school.

Election night coverage in the pre-digital age was primitive, to say the least.  Nowadays, grade schools have better audio visuals.

American men supposedly stopped wearing hats because our youngest President bared his unusually full head of hair on a bitterly cold Inauguration Day.

So it was odd to see his top hat and gloves on display.

Notwithstanding Judith Exner or Chappaquiddick, the Kennedy brothers did for touch football what our current President has done for p***y grabbing.

Camelot indeed!  Jack and Jackie projected hopefulness.  No American carnage for them. Yet.

Just look at their home movies.

Too bad the world still faces the same dangers.

Melania may dress like Jackie but that's about as far as it goes.  Can you imagine her charming Kim Jong-un like Jackie did Nikita Khrushchev?

Or hosting a White House State dinner honoring a French intellectual like Andre Malraux?

Or Trump helping rescue ancient Egyptian monuments even if he does share a Pharaoh's obsession with gold and disregard for human rights?  Thanks to the Kennedy's appreciation for world culture, I'll get to see the temples at Abu Simbel myself next month.  Rest assured Trump Tower won't still be standing in 5,000 years!

Not that JFK's presidency was exemplary in all respects.  The library barely addresses the stain left on his legacy by the escalation of the war in Viet Nam.

The Soviets also erected the Berlin Wall on his watch but at least the Cold War inspired some of his greatest rhetoric.

"Ich bin ein Berliner" reminded me that my parents had taken me to the divided city not long after JFK made his famous speech.

And some kitschy garden gnomes!

Museum visitors experience JFK's assassination the same way most Americans did at the time.  Walter Cronkite tearfully delivers the news in a bulletin that interrupted regular programming on CBS.  It still shocks more than half a century later.

I'm not a big flag waver but the enormous Stars and Stripes hanging from the building's atrium did stimulate some latent patriotism.