JFK speaking at Michigan State University, 1960.



REMEMBERING JFK &

THE NEW FRONTIER

JFK at the Michigan Union, Ann Arbor, 1960

JFK, our youngest elected president, was assassinated 50 years ago today in Dallas.  The only original thing I can add is how he indirectly touched my life.  

First, his death inspired my father to quite a secure teaching job and join the Peace Corps.  Candidate Kennedy is shown here at his famous speech announcing his idea for the Peace Corps at the Michigan Union on U of M's campus in 1960.

Second, the co-founder of Kelley Cawthorne (the lobbying firm I am a partner in), is Michigan's Eternal General Frank J. Kelley, an Irish Catholic who was himself inspired by JFK.  Pictured below is Mr. Kelley and JFK in 1962 on Kennedy's last visit to Michigan.



Kelley Cawthorne Co-Founder Frank J. Kelley
& JFK in Detroit, 1962.

Below is an article that appeared statewide today in Michigan.

When Frank Kelley Met JFK…

By Jack Lessenberry
From domemagazine.com 

November 22, 2013

LANSING — Fifty years ago today, Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley was taking his usual Friday afternoon swim in a YMCA pool in downtown Lansing. Suddenly, he looked up. Leon Cohan, his deputy, was walking towards him, wearing a winter coat and a stricken expression. “My first thought was that something had happened to one of my kids,” Mr. Kelley said. “Frank, the President has been shot. It’s on the radio,” his assistant said. The Attorney General was stunned. “I was numb.”
He dressed hurriedly, got back to the office, only to be met by his secretary [who still works for him in our office by the way!] tears  streaming down her face. The Department of Justice had just called. President Kennedy was dead. 

  “For the next few days, I was in a fog,” said Kelley, now 88 but still mentally sharp. “He was the most charismatic politician I had ever met, and have ever met, a true Irish prince.”

Half a century after the assassination, there are still many people who remember seeing or meeting John F. Kennedy. But unlike most, Frank Kelley once spent nearly an hour alone with him, in a hotel suite in Detroit. President Kennedy had come to Michigan in October, 1962, in an effort to boost the chances of then-Gov. John Swainson, who was running against George Romney.

Kelley, who had been appointed to his job less than a year before, was also trying to be elected attorney general in his own right. After a morning spent campaigning, the Governor, who had lost both legs in World War II, needed to take a nap. So the young Attorney General and the President were alone. Like JFK, Frank Kelley was Irish and a Roman Catholic. “But there was a big difference: I had managed to make it into the middle class. But the Kennedys were royalty, and I immediately saw that everything I had ever heard about JFK was true. He had all the graceful bearing you’d expect of a Prince, from his casual yet perfectly tailored Savile Row suit to his clearly custom-made shoes.

Not only that, he had the tanned face of a hero and a unique voice that was equal parts upper-class Harvard and New England.” Kelley was not a man easily wowed by celebrity, but he felt as if he was having a surreal experience. “Less than a year ago, I had been a country lawyer in Alpena. Now here I was, the Attorney General of a major industrial state, sitting with the most powerful man in the world. “I wonder if my late father would have believed it!”

In fact, the men talked about their fathers. The Attorney General said the President told him his father used to tell his sons, “You boys are privileged, and I want you to take that opportunity to serve the public. Now, I was in business and succeeded at it. But most of the people I met in business were bad, and I don’t want you boys mixed up in it.”

John F. Kennedy, who was less than eight years older than his young admirer, told him, “With that Irish name—Kelley—and your good looks, you are as good as elected.” But he said he was worried about the incumbent Democratic Governor, John Swainson. JFK’s political instincts were sound. A month later, Kelley would win his first of ten terms as the state’s attorney general. Swainson would lose by a narrow margin to the man whose own son, Mitt, would lose a presidential election half a century later.

Shortly before the end of the day, Kelley told the President that he thought Romney was putting on an act. “We’re all actors, Frank,” Kennedy said dryly. “The one who hides it the best wins.” \Frank Kelley would never see him again. Two weeks after he campaigned in Detroit, JFK was grappling with the Cuban Missile Crisis. A year later came that fateful day in Dallas.

Reflecting today, Frank Kelley said, “It may be impossible today for anyone young to understand how much we looked up to him – especially a guy from a middle-class, Irish Catholic family like me. When I was growing up, it was taken as a given that no Catholic could be elected President. He changed all that. He made us feel that we could do anything. When he said, “One man can make a difference, and every man should try,” he made us believe it.” Today, biographers and reporters have punched holes in the Kennedy legend. 

A few years ago, I showed some news footage of that era to some college students. Afterwards, one young man said of JFK: “It’s as if he was in color and the rest of them were black and white. It’s like he was still living today.” 

For some of us, there are times when it really does feel that way.