A day of tragedy and a timeless legacy.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran 11/25/03): Jim Klonoski was a professor at the University of Oregon in the mid-1960s, but never attended the UO as a student as a story on page A1 Saturday indicated.

John F. Kennedy was America's first cool president, and his assassination 40 years ago today - captured on film and televised relentlessly - etched this image permanently onto the national psyche.

That's the assessment of Dave Petersen, a 42-year-old Eugene resident and telephone company employee, and it's not far off the mark, say professional historians.

People saw Kennedy as a young, charismatic politician cut down prematurely in service to his country, said Oregon State University political science professor Bill Lunch.

"Part of the reason they love him so much is he didn't last long enough to get to be unpopular," Lunch said.

Those feelings linger for many area residents.

"He was a really good leader, and I feel like we'll never have another like him," said Helen Wertz, 76, of Creswell, who still remembers how she felt when the first shuddering images broadcast from Dallas, Texas, filled television screens across the country.

"It felt like the bottom dropped out of the world," she said.

Ken Schmitt, 57, of Springfield was sitting in English class at a Beaverton high school when he first heard the news. It was 11:55 a.m.

"I remember looking at the clock, thinking, 'I'm always going to remember.' It was very unsettling."

Kennedy and his young family brought a compelling liveliness to the White House that Schmitt still recalls.

"He was so different from Eisenhower. Eisenhower was always behind that desk, so boring to listen to," he recalled.

Petersen, the telephone company employee, was only 2 when Kennedy was shot, but the televised images replayed over the years are practically memories to him now.

"The images of casket on the caisson, the horses, they're part of my consciousness. What do I know about the McKinley assassination? Bupkis. There weren't live pictures," he said.

But Benjamin Hardt, 22, prefers not to focus on Kennedy's death.

"Space," he said. "That's the main thing that Kennedy did." How long would it have taken the country to put a man on the moon if Kennedy hadn't thrown the weight of his office behind the effort, Hardt wondered.

Hardt's glad to have missed the recent spate of TV documentaries and endless footage of the motorcade and funeral.

"Focusing on his death is a disrespect for his life," he said. "One of the greatest American minds was shot in the street in a parade. That's a horrific thing."

But the shadow of his death drapes all discussions of his life.

"At the moment that he was killed, you wondered to yourself, who is safe?" said Bill Dwyer, a Lane County commissioner who was 29 at the time. "It made you just feel so vulnerable, like you lost a family member."

Like Hardt, Dwyer valued Kennedy's determination to see the U.S. space program put the first man on the moon, a task he never lived to see.

But it was Kennedy's call to civic service that resonated with Jim Klonoski, 78, former state chairman of the Democratic party and a retired University of Oregon professor.

Klonoski called it the "Kennedy mystique," and it inspired him, then as a UO student, to work with the Congress of Racial Equality, a group that fought for justice and fairness for blacks in the 1960s.

"The whole Kennedy approach was so positive, you responded," Klonoski said. "It was a revitalization of civic participation at the local level as well as energizing government at the national level."

Kennedy's establishment in 1961 of the Peace Corps - one of his most successful programs - also makes today poignant for the more than 4,700 Oregonians who have served.

The Peace Corps may be his most notable legacy, said Daniel Pope, a University of Oregon associate professor of history.

Kennedy's not-so-inspiring record gets little play in the public perception, Pope said.

Despite his success at warding off the placement of nuclear weapons in Cuba, there was the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco and the fact that he floated the utterly false notion of a missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union, Pope said.

"As a professional historian one wants to hope there's a more balanced and accurate assessment of him, but I can understand fairly easily why some people may put him on a pedestal. ... I could think of worse people to deify," he said.

What might Kennedy have done if he hadn't died? There's no way to know. Therein lies the tragedy, and perhaps, the explanation of the mystique.

"There was something about the man," said Anna Dockery, a 59-year-old Cottage Grove resident. "His charisma was genuine. You knew that he really cared about the people."

Even recent revelations that he was promiscuous haven't altered her assessment. That matter lies between him and his God, she said.

"His personality left a great mark on us all," she said.

CAPTION(S):

Jacqueline and Sen. John F. Kennedy have breakfast at an Oregon diner during the presidential campaign in the fall of 1959. The photo is included in "Remembering Jack: Intimate and Unseen Photographs of the Kennedys," by Kennedy's personal photographer, Jacques Lowe. The Associated Press Images of the Kennedy assassination are burned into the psyche of the American consciousness, yet doubts about the assassin remain.