MY FAVORITE U.S. PRESIDENT – Mike Awoyinfa Column

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Today, I bring you my “Press Clips” column published in the National Concord newspaper of December 1, 1988. How long has this piece been in existence? Thirty-six solid years. I was then the Features Editor of National Concord on the cusp of becoming the pioneer editor of Weekend Concord, a Saturday newspaper which we started and I edited from the scratch along with my team of young, excellent writers and reporters. Like them, I was young and vibrant. Reading this piece brings nostalgia. It makes me think I was a better writer compared to now. We thank God for having brought us thus far. The piece is on JFK, an American President whom I idolize. Across the world, Kennedy was a helper of the helpless and the hopeless. He was not Donald Trump. Ironically, Trump survived assassination. Kennedy did not. Yet, he was a good man:
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JOHN F. Kennedy. The name itself is magic. It is mythical, an evocation of a myth that goes back in time to the Arthurian legends. Kennedy as King Arthur’s reincarnate and America being his Camelot, an imaginary place Walter Cronkite describes as a “marvelous, mythical kingdom in the sky.”
Kennedy was the only king America ever had, in the country’s political fairytale. Others were mere presidents. Lincoln, Washington, Eisenhower, Nixon and Carter were all presidents like Reagan. So will George Bush. Kennedy was the only epitome of royalty, America’s closest answer to the British monarchy.
At 43, he was the youngest ever ruler of America. Young, rich, handsome, famous, glamorous, articulate, aristocratic. John Kennedy had everything. He was an inspiration to youths, a messiah to the poor, a beacon of hope for a better future.
Kennedy was like a sweet dream which suddenly turns into a nightmare and jolts you awake, causing you to scream in horror. He was the morning star that suddenly fizzles out at noon, plunging the world into total eclipse.
Dallas. November 22, 1963. A drifter with a gun in hand. Lee Harvey Oswald. A bolt from the blues. An eerie sound of gunshots. And the man of the future is blown apart. The young prince who ruled America for 1,000 days is killed in a regicidal riddle that has defied solution. Twenty-five good years, one conspiracy theory after another, and yet no one is actually sure who masterminded the killing of Kennedy, and for what motive?
The Kennedy story should have come up on this page last week, to coincide with the 25 years anniversary of his death. But when another young and gifted star dies at the home front, the unwritten rules of journalism dictate that the local story should be given precedence. That was why the column was devoted to the lamenting the death of sports journalist “Owo Blow” who like Kennedy died at the “noon” of his life.
Now, what’s there to write about Kennedy that has not been written? I’d rather tackle the Kennedy memorial story from a personalized angle. My nostalgia for Kennedy has little to do with the death of the American dream in Dallas. The name John F. Kennedy takes me back to my secondary school days, in my Sixth Form at Ijebu-Jesha Grammar School, November 1972, taking part in the “John Kennedy Memorial Essay Competition.”
I can vividly recall the oppressive heat of the exam room. The sweating. The marathon hours of writing on sheets of yellow papers. The topic was on how Nigeria could harness her agricultural resources to become a strong, self-reliant nation where hunger would be banished. We expressed our young minds on the issue. My agrarian vision of Nigeria was very bright. But like Kennedy, the dream died. I had given various suggestions on what could be done to uplift agriculture. The ghost of John Kennedy was impressed with my essay. And I was declared winner of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Essay Competition. The prize for winning was in the form of books—precious books.
The 25 years anniversary of Kennedy’s death sent me leafing through my collection of books in my library. And there it stood, one of the prizes for winning a Kennedy essay contest, a book by Ernest Hemmingway: “Fifth Column and 4 Unpublished Stories of the Spanish Civil War.”
John Kennedy opened my eyes to the world of Ernest Hemmingway. And Hemmingway inspired me into being a journalist. Hemmingway, the American journalist who turned a novelist and who went over to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Hemmingway, I learnt the virtue of writing in simplicity. There is elegance in simplicity. Ernest Hemmingway’s classic “The Old Man and the Sea” would bear this out.
My nostalgia for Kennedy also has something to do with the American Peace Corps teachers who taught me in my secondary school days in Ghana. While some American presidents would die with the bad record of sending soldiers to terrorize poor little countries and flexing America’s military muscles abroad, Kennedy, a man of vision would forever live in human memory for sending soldiers of peace to impart knowledge. In a way, the National Youth Service Corps scheme in Nigeria was influenced by Kennedy’s idea of the American Peace Corps.
MAN ON THE MOON
Kennedy was the first visionary leader to dream of putting man on the moon, although he didn’t live to see the dream come true. Kennedy loved the arts. Who but a president with a heart for poetry, would invite an ageing American poet, Robert Frost, to come and read a poem on his inauguration as the American President?
The poem was titled “The Gift Outright.” The old poet had brought out his glasses to read to out the poem, but the bright sunlight so dazzled his aged eyes that he couldn’t read. Robert Frost had to recite the poem word for word, extempore, from his ancient memory bank.
There are too many things to write about Kennedy, the man, the myth and the legacy than a column like this can contain. From a journalistic point of view, Kennedy would go into the record books as a president who loved pressmen. While other presidents before and after him saw the press as a necessary evil, something to distrust and keep away from, Kennedy was a friend of the Fourth Estate of the Realm.
He loved the bright lights of television and used it to his advantage through his exquisite showmanship and a gift of the gab. He turned presidential press conferences into a Kennedy show. And he was the star of his own show. If presidential aspirants like Dukakis and the president-elect George Bush are being described as dull and boring, it’s because of John Kennedy. As long as Kennedy is the yardstick, American election-year journalism would continue to