A memorial holds meaning beyond its concrete, marble, steel and glass. Its name tells future generations whom a nation chose to remember. Its halls preserve music, theater, ceremony and shared experience.
By Benjamin Groff II GroffMedia© | benandsteve.com | ©2026
October 10, 2026
In my 63 years, America has traveled an extraordinary distance. Yet some shadows seem to follow us from one generation into another.
I was born in 1963, during the Kennedy presidency. His assassination belongs to the beginning of my life, even though it lies beyond my earliest memories. For Americans old enough to remember November 22 of that year, the news from Dallas became a dividing line: before, and after.
The Kennedy years had already brought their share of danger. In April 1961, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion—developed under the Eisenhower administration and authorized by Kennedy—became one of his earliest foreign-policy crises.
Then came Dallas.
Questions involving the Soviet Union quickly became part of the national conversation. Lee Harvey Oswald had lived there, married a Russian woman and visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City shortly before the assassination.
Those circumstances fed suspicion. Official investigations, however, did not establish Soviet involvement. The Warren Commission found no evidence that a foreign government had employed or encouraged Oswald to assassinate Kennedy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations later concluded, on the evidence available to it, that the Soviet government was not involved.
Still, the suspicion never entirely disappeared from the American imagination.
And America continued through a succession of moments that once seemed unimaginable.
On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced that he would neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination for another term. The Vietnam War consumed the nation, and political divisions continued to deepen.
That June, Robert Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Vietnam stretched across presidencies, taking American lives and leaving divisions that remained long after the troops came home.
Then came Watergate.
Richard Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, as impeachment proceedings advanced against him. On September 8, President Gerald Ford granted him a pardon for federal offenses committed or potentially committed during his presidency.
The country moved forward, carrying another argument about power and accountability.
Then came the Iran hostage crisis.
Fifty-two Americans endured 444 days of captivity following the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Negotiations during the Carter administration produced the agreement securing their freedom. They were released on January 20, 1981, as Carter left office and Ronald Reagan became president.
During Reagan’s presidency came Iran-Contra: secret weapons sales to Iran and the diversion of proceeds to support the Contras in Nicaragua. Reagan initially denied trading arms for hostages, but later acknowledged that the initiative had deteriorated into precisely that.
Under George H. W. Bush, America went to war in the Persian Gulf after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
During the Clinton years, we witnessed the deadly conclusion of the Branch Davidian standoff near Waco, Texas.
Two years later, Timothy McVeigh, aided by Terry Nichols, carried out the Oklahoma City bombing. The attack killed 168 people, including 19 children. It remains the deadliest act of homegrown terrorism in American history.
Then came September 11, 2001.
During George W. Bush’s presidency, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in attacks that changed the country and the world.
A decade later, during the Obama administration, U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden.
And still America continued.
Donald Trump became the 45th president. Joe Biden followed as the 46th. Trump returned as the 47th.
Russia again became entangled in an American presidency, under circumstances very different from the suspicions surrounding Kennedy’s assassination.
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, an assessment upheld by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee. The Mueller investigation documented numerous campaign contacts involving Russia, but did not establish that Trump campaign members conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.
These episodes do not establish a common conspiracy. They show how questions of foreign influence, presidential power and public trust can echo across generations.
Then, on July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents have absolute criminal immunity for conduct within their exclusive constitutional authority and at least presumptive immunity for other official acts. Unofficial acts receive no presidential immunity. The decision reshaped the legal boundaries of presidential accountability.
Now we find ourselves back at the Kennedy name.
Congress designated the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as a living memorial in 1964. In September 2026, a federal judge again blocked efforts to add Trump’s name without congressional authorization. The board then voted for an extended renovation closure. Trump said repairs would depend on approval of the naming proposal.
Management separately cited structural safety concerns for a temporary closure, while the board’s renovation decision remained under court scrutiny.
The dispute widened further when a judge required advance notice before demolition and bipartisan lawmakers proposed legislation requiring congressional approval before a presidential memorial could be demolished. As of October 2, that proposal had not become law. These developments do not establish that demolition has begun, but they give the question of preservation immediate importance.
For me, that brings these years into an unsettling circle.
A presidency ended in Dallas. A cultural institution was later dedicated to keeping that president’s memory alive.
Nearly 63 years after his death, Americans are arguing over what can be done to that memorial, whose name it may carry and who has the authority to decide.
A memorial holds meaning beyond its concrete, marble, steel and glass. Its name tells future generations whom a nation chose to remember. Its halls preserve music, theater, ceremony and shared experience.
Repairs deserve careful attention. So do the laws and public responsibilities attached to the place being repaired.
Who decides what name a national memorial carries?
How much authority should a sitting president have to reshape an institution dedicated by Congress to another?
And when does renovation become reinvention?
Those questions reach beyond the Kennedy Center.
Across my lifetime, I have watched presidents come and go, wars begin and end, and scandals shake institutions that once seemed beyond question. The country has endured pressures that appeared capable of breaking it.
Survival, however, does not settle every question. We must still decide what we carry forward.
Some things belong to the American people across generations. Each administration inherits responsibility for them. Each generation receives something it did not build alone.
That inheritance asks something of us.
What parts are ours to change—and what parts have we been entrusted to preserve for those who come after us?
Kennedy’s presidency ended in Dallas.
His name survived on schools, highways, airports, a space center and one of America’s most important cultural institutions.
That is why the argument over the Kennedy Center reaches beyond performance halls and construction plans. It concerns the care we give to a memory entrusted to us.
Kennedy’s coffin was closed nearly 63 years ago.
The more unsettling question is what we will preserve of the legacy that remained above ground.
What you leave today becomes someone’s answer tomorrow.