Tropes of a Texan trauma: monumental Dallas after John F. Kennedy

Dealey Plaza in central Dallas serves both as a ‘cradle’ and a ‘grave’; at this historic site Dallas was born and an American president died. The assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 changed Dealey Plaza, the site where the first citizen of Dallas settled in 1841, from a symbol of civic pride into a place of guilt and shame. After the events of 1963, the Dallas community voiced a wish to forget and hence, the exact location where Kennedy was murdered was initially remembered by neither monument nor plaque. At the same time, America grieved and from all over the country US citizens started to visit the assassination site. Dealey Plaza became a place of pilgrimage, which caused a change in the monumental landscape and eventually transformed civic guilt into civic pride. This article offers an analysis of the responses to this Texan trauma in terms of commemorative heritage and describes Dallas’ shift from ‘amnesia’ to ‘identification’, two contrary responses to traumatic, or mourning, heritage.     

C. Douglas Dillon,President Kennedy's Economic Envoy*

This article focuses on President John F. Kennedy's Secretary of the Treasury, C. Douglas Dillon and contends that he played an important part in sustaining the political cooperation that underpinned the Bretton-Woods system during one of its first crisis points. Rather than focusing solely on structural, economic trends, the article suggests that individual actors mattered as well. As a bipartisan figure that was well regarded in Europe, Dillon was able to act effectively as an envoy to the private sector, principally Wall Street, and to France, which both threatened the stability of the dollar. The article explores Dillon's role in shaping Kennedy's economic policies in a more conservative direction than his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and in his external efforts to garner support for the Democratic administration.     

Problem Definitions and Policy Contradictions: John F. Kennedy and the "Space Race"

Usually, when governments appear to be pursuing contradictory or mutually exclusive goals, the response of the scholarly community has been to look for evidence of bureaucratic error, a lack of leadership, or some other type of administrative malfunction. This essay argues that the concept of problem (or issue) definition, which has been widely applied in the study of public policy, may in some cases also help explain the occurrence of this phenomenon as well. Using as an example a major (and, at the time, quite startling) policy "reversal" in President Kennedy's approach to the U.S. space program, the essay shows how the appearance of a "contradiction" within the administration may well have been the result of a disagreement over how U.S. space policy was to be defined.