35th president inspired a nation and the world

The United States on Friday will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a dark turning point in the nation's history and a day many still remember vividly.

Church bells will toll. Flags will be lowered. Wreaths will be laid. Children will sing.

And in cities and towns across the country, people will reflect on the words of the charismatic president whose soaring rhetoric continues to inspire.

In a proclamation ordering flags to be lowered to half-mast, US President Barack Obama on Thursday recalled Kennedy's leadership in the Cuban Missile Crisis, his Cold War "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in divided Berlin, and efforts to advance the rights of African-Americans and women in the US.

"Today and in the decades to come, let us carry his legacy forward," Obama wrote. "Let us face today's tests by beckoning the spirit he embodied - that fearless, resilient, uniquely American character that has always driven our nation to defy the odds, write our own destiny and make the world anew."

Kennedy's voice still echoes to millions of Americans.

"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," he urged at his inaugural address on Jan 20, 1961.

Cut down by a sniper's bullet in his first term at the age of 46 as he was driven through Dallas in an open-top limousine on Nov 22, 1963, Kennedy's unfulfilled promise has become a symbol of the lost nobility of politics.

He was a president who enlisted the nation in lofty goals - like putting a man on the moon - "not because they are easy, but because they are hard".

And he declared that we "will be remembered not for our victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit."

Obama hailed Kennedy's legacy at a ceremony on Wednesday for recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which the slain Democrat had established months before his death.

"Fifty years later, John F. Kennedy stands for posterity as he did in life - young, bold and daring," said Obama, who was 2 years old when Kennedy was killed.

The anniversary has sparked a prolonged period of national and media reflection on the unfinished tenure of the nation's 35th president, as well as his tragedy-stricken family and the evocative period in the early 1960s when his political star illuminated the world.

He was the fourth US president to be killed in office but the first whose death was caught on film.

The shocking crime - and the image of blood splattered on the pink Chanel suit of his glamorous wife, Jacqueline - stunned the world and traumatized the nation.

Many still refuse to believe that the assassination could have been the act of a single man: troubled Marine Corps veteran-turned-Soviet defector Lee Harvey Oswald, 26, who pointed a rifle out a sixth-floor window of the Texas Book Depository and fired on the presidential motorcade.

Conspiracy theories continue to captivate doubters and aid an allied industry of books, films and television specials.

On Friday, the most prominent ceremonies to commemorate Kennedy's passing will be held in places with the strongest claims on him: his home state of Massachusetts, the Washington of his White House victory and Dallas, where he died.

A moment of silence will fill Dealey Plaza as Dallas marks the moment that the shots rang out at 12:30 pm before the city honors Kennedy's legacy with music, prayer and speeches.

Elsewhere in Dallas, the Texas Theater will screen the film Oswald was watching when he was arrested - War is Hell - while the Frontiers of Flight museum will be displaying a replica of the airplane on which then-vice-president Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office to succeed Kennedy.

(China Daily 11/23/2013 page6)