Like many Americans who were alive on Nov. 22, 1963, noted historian Michael J. Hogan remembers vividly the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“Even though I was too young to vote for Kennedy at the time, I was not too young to remember the personal impact of the assassination and the incredible drama of the funeral, which captured American attention minute by minute for the better part of four days,” Hogan said in a recent phone interview.
Emeritus professor of history and former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the Ohio State University, Hogan is now a distinguished professor of history at the University of Illinois Springfield. When he began researching what he thought would become a book about Kennedy’s funeral, he discovered what he called Kennedy’s “astonishingly high” three-year average popularity rating, based on Gallup Poll data.
“It just got me thinking about Kennedy’s memory over time, because even now he’s often rated in public opinion polls, one after the other, as the most popular and the most highly regarded president in the whole of the 20th century and certainly since the end of the Second World War. So here he is, gone 50 years and yet still very, very highly regarded. And I wanted to know why that was – after 50 years his memory seems to be so strongly sustained in the popular imagination,” Hogan said.
Hogan was featured by WOSU Public Media on May 24, 2017.
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