answer:
So you think you've seen and heard enough now about the 50th anniversary of the death of John F Kennedy? Enough of the Texas School Book Depository, the "fateful day", the "city of hate", and the only place on earth where a rise in a road embankment is referred to as a grassy knoll?
Sorry, but there is a little unfinished business.
Last Friday was not just the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. It was also the 50th anniversary of the swearing in of Lyndon B Johnson. This is always overlooked and, as result, so is the extraordinary domestic legacy of America's 36th President.
Perhaps it's because I'm a native son of Texas that I'm a little sensitive to this.
Or perhaps it's because on any objective measure of progressive politics, the presidency of LBJ far outstripped the presidency of the man whose legacy seems to be even more exaggerated with every passing year.
Perhaps also there is more at stake here than merely comparing the success of one dead president to another. For too long now we have held one up as a model president at the expense of the other, and in so doing have rewarded celebrity over substance, propaganda over reality, unfulfilled promise over pragmatic accomplishment.
These things matter. They go to what it is we value, what it is we expect a president (or indeed a prime minister) to do.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
For 50 years the Kennedy propaganda machine has been telling us what he was likely to have done had he lived, but rarely if ever facing up to how little he did while he was in office.
Part of the work of that machine has been to cast Kennedy favourably in contrast to his successor. For many in the American eastern establishment, LBJ was illegitimate - there only because the real president had died and who, according to some among the conspiracy set, might well even have been involved in the assassination.
In fact, you don't need to look to the tinfoil hat brigade to find a seething distrust of and in some cases disgust with Johnson. For a substantial number of Americans, LBJ has always been the crude, farting (yes, sadly, he was known to let one loose in the presence of his advisors), corrupt pretender to the throne whose presidency is synonymous with America's supposed end of innocence and lapse into the disgrace of Vietnam.
Part of this is Johnson's fault. He cast his own presidency as a caretaker of Kennedy's even as he substantially recast the agenda, moving civil rights and poverty programs to the fore.
Reflecting on his presidency in 1971, he said:
I considered myself the caretaker of both his people and his policies ... I did what I believed he would have wanted me to. I never wavered from that sense of responsibility, even after I was elected in my own right, up to my last day in office.
This might be false humility (and a sharing of the blame with Kennedy for Vietnam, a part of Kennedy's and Eisenhower's agenda even if he took it up with what can only be described as a fair amount of gusto).
But there should be no doubt Johnson wanted to be remembered as a great president. The alacrity with which he opened his first presidential library - just two and a bit years after his term came to a close, and nine years before JFK's - is perhaps one sign that he wanted historians wasting no time in getting to work on the building of his legacy.
The 1,000 days of the JFK presidency was enough time for him to have used the office to do what he'd set out to. He had already reached the point of least efficacy in a presidential first term - when presidents must build, not spend, political capital. Let's remember why Kennedy was in Dallas in the first place. He was in re-election mode, and by no means assured of victory. Texas had threatened to turn against him. The trip was meant to shore up support.
While Kennedy advocated action on civil rights and poverty, he was anaemic in delivering them. In slightly anachronistic American parlance, Kennedy talked the talk, but didn't come anywhere close to walking the walk.
Take civil rights. The popular wisdom is that Kennedy ran out of time and Johnson merely implemented his agenda (helped by the gift of national unity in the wake of the assassination).
The truth is more complicated. Both Kennedy and Johnson knew that civil rights legislation would have a devastating impact on the political fortunes of the Democratic Party in the south.
