By Benjamin Groff II GroffMedia© | benandsteve.com | ©2026
September 18, 2026
When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, questions involving the Soviet Union quickly became part of the national conversation. Lee Harvey Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union, had a Russian wife, and had visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City shortly before the assassination. Those facts helped feed suspicions that have persisted for generations.
Official investigations, however, did not establish that the Soviet government ordered or participated in Kennedy’s murder. The Warren Commission found no evidence that Oswald had been employed or encouraged by a foreign government, and a later congressional investigation likewise concluded that the Soviet government was not involved.
Still, the suspicion never entirely disappeared from the American imagination.
More than half a century later, Russia would again become entangled in an American presidency—this time under very different circumstances. U.S. intelligence agencies and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Investigations also documented numerous contacts between people associated with Donald Trump’s campaign and individuals connected to Russia, although those investigations did not establish that the Trump family had joined a Russian conspiracy to control the election.
The circumstances were different.
The questions were different.
But Russia had once again become part of an American argument about a president, political power and public trust.
And somewhere between those two moments stands the name John F. Kennedy.
In 1963, that name became permanently attached to a national tragedy.
Sixty-three years later, it has again become part of a national political struggle.
In 63 years, we have watched America pass through moments that once seemed almost unimaginable.
Some of us were born into an America still carrying the optimism of the Kennedy years. Then came the Bay of Pigs, the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba authorized by President John F. Kennedy after the operation had originally been developed during the Eisenhower administration. It became one of Kennedy’s earliest foreign-policy crises.
Then, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
Five years later, his brother Robert Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
That same turbulent year, 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson surprised the nation by announcing that he would neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination for another term. His decision came while the Vietnam War consumed the nation and political divisions at home continued to deepen.
Vietnam itself stretched across presidencies, taking American lives and leaving divisions that remained long after the troops came home.
Then came Watergate.
President Richard Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, as impeachment proceedings advanced against him. One month later, President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a full presidential pardon for federal offenses he had committed or might have committed while in office.
America moved forward again.
Then came the Iran hostage crisis.
Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days after the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was seized in 1979. President Jimmy Carter paid an enormous political price for the crisis. Yet negotiations conducted by his administration produced the agreement that ultimately secured their freedom. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981—the day Carter left office and Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.
Then, during the Reagan administration, came Iran-Contra.
Weapons were secretly sold to Iran as administration officials sought assistance in securing the freedom of American hostages held in Lebanon, while money from the transactions was diverted to support the Contra forces in Nicaragua. Reagan initially rejected the characterization that weapons had been traded for hostages, but later acknowledged that the facts showed the initiative had deteriorated into exactly that.
Under President George H. W. Bush, America went to war in the Persian Gulf after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
During the Clinton years, turmoil came from both abroad and within our own borders. We witnessed the deadly conclusion of the Branch Davidian standoff near Waco, Texas, in 1993. Two years later, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. As of Sept 16, 2026 it remains the deadliest act of homegrown terrorism in American history.
Then came September 11, 2001.
During the presidency of George W. Bush, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes. Two struck the World Trade Center towers, another struck the Pentagon, and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back. Nearly 3,000 people were killed.
A decade later, during the Obama administration, U.S. forces located and killed Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who had directed the September 11 attacks.
And still America continued.
Donald Trump became the 45th president. Joe Biden followed as the 46th. Trump returned as the 47th.
During those years another consequential development occurred. In July 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. United States that former presidents possess absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions falling within their core constitutional powers and at least presumptive immunity for other official presidential acts. The decision significantly altered the legal framework surrounding presidential power and accountability.
Now another American institution has become part of that continuing argument over government, presidential power, history and national identity: the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The Kennedy Center was created as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. In 2026, efforts by its Trump-aligned leadership to place President Trump’s name on the building and grounds were blocked by a federal judge, who ruled that such changes require congressional authorization. Shortly afterward, the board voted to close most of the Kennedy Center for as long as two years for what it described as renovations and safety repairs. Fencing has since gone up around the complex.
And perhaps that is why the Kennedy Center has become symbolic of something larger.
Not because one building defines America.
It does not.
But because institutions accumulate meaning.
A memorial is not simply concrete, marble, steel and glass. Its name tells future generations whom a nation chose to remember. Its halls preserve music, theater, ceremony and history. Its identity becomes part of the historical record.
That is why changes to such places matter.
America rarely loses its identity in one dramatic moment. History suggests that change more often comes piece by piece—through elections, court decisions, wars, scandals, legislation, cultural struggles and arguments over institutions that once seemed permanent.
Sometimes those changes strengthen the country.
Sometimes Americans decide later that they went too far.
And sometimes a generation does not realize how much has changed until it turns around and looks at everything that disappeared along the way.
For those of us who have lived these 63 years, that may be the greater lesson.
We have watched presidents come and go. We have watched wars begin and end. We have watched assassinations, terrorist attacks, political scandals and constitutional crises. We have watched the country bend under pressures that, at the time, appeared capable of breaking it.
Yet the buildings themselves were never really the foundation.
The foundation was the agreement that some things belonged not to one president, one political party or one generation, but to the American people.
And perhaps that is the question confronting us again:
What parts of our national inheritance are merely ours to change—and what parts have we been entrusted to preserve for those who come after us?
And now we find ourselves back at the Kennedy name.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was designated by Congress as a living memorial to the slain president. In 2026, a political and legal struggle developed over efforts by the Kennedy Center’s Trump-aligned leadership to place President Donald Trump’s name on the institution and its grounds. A federal judge ruled that such changes require congressional authorization. Shortly afterward, the board voted to close most of the Center for extensive renovations, and fencing appeared around the complex. The administration says the closure is necessary for repairs; opponents have challenged the actions surrounding the Center and fear permanent changes to its identity.
That brings these 63 years into an almost haunting circle.
They began for many of us with the gunshots in Dallas and the destruction of a presidency.
They now bring us to a building created so that the name of that president—and what his generation represented—would remain alive long after those gunshots faded.
I hesitate to call what is happening at the Kennedy Center the destruction of the building itself, because that has not been established. But symbolically, something much larger is being argued over.
Who owns a national memorial?
Who decides what name it carries?
How much authority should any sitting president have to reshape an institution created by Congress to memorialize another?
And when does renovation become reinvention?
Perhaps that is where the Kennedy Center becomes more than another Washington building surrounded by fencing.
For those who remember November 1963, it can represent the closing of an extraordinary historical circle.
Kennedy was killed by an assassin’s bullet.
His presidency ended in Dallas.
But his name survived.
It survived on schools, highways, airports, a space center and one of America’s most important cultural institutions.
That is why what happens to the Kennedy Center matters beyond marble, concrete and performance halls.
A nation can bury a president.
It can survive his assassination.
But the more difficult question comes generations later:
Does it continue to protect the memory entrusted to it?
Perhaps the Kennedy Center should not be described as the final nail in President Kennedy’s coffin.
Kennedy’s coffin was closed 63 years ago.
The more unsettling possibility is that we are deciding, 63 years later, what becomes of the legacy that remained above ground.
By Benjamin Groff II GroffMedia© | benandsteve.com | ©2026
