Kennedys discuss JFK’s legacy 100 years after his birth
BOSTON — John F. Kennedy didn’t make it even halfway to 100 — a milestone he might have celebrated next week — but the slain U.S. president’s legacy is being lived out by members of his family.
The nation’s 35th president was born on May 29, 1917, in the leafy Boston suburb of Brookline. Before he was felled at age 46 by an assassin’s bullets in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, the charismatic Kennedy cast a broad vision of America as a global force for peace — and challenged citizens to play active roles in making it the kind of democracy they wanted it to be.
That rallying cry from his inaugural address — “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” — is etched both in stone and in the minds of generations of Americans.
Like the Kennedys no longer with us — U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Jr. — many members of the political dynasty living today say their public service is inspired by JFK.