It’s a date that remains edged in black for me always. Oddly, as incompetent as his execution was in many respects, John F. Kennedy, if he had the same views today that he had then, would have been a member of the Republican Party – and a very conservative member at that – because no modern Democrat has views as stridently pro-market and as militantly anti-communist as he did. His only stimulus was to cut taxes, not to increase spending. His brother Robert, the attorney-general in the Kennedy administration, worked for Senator McCarthy in the search for communists in the State Department.

He was shot down by a communist, a defector to the Soviet Union, a militant member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. But he was shot in Dallas, in the South, and so the story remains as told by the usual suspect sources that he was killed by those crazy right wingers. He was killed by a madman on the left, and a thousand conspiracy theories later, it remains firm in my mind that it was Oswald acting alone.

Ronald Reagan said that he hadn’t left the Democrat Party; the party had left him. Who can know what Kennedy would have done had he lived. The world is only partly shaped by the “forces of history”. It is also shaped by its great leaders. I still think of Kennedy as one of the great might-have-beens. It remains a tragedy that he died so young and so early before his promise could be fulfilled. Fifty years ago today.