EDITOR’S NOTE: Analysis by Leah M. Wright, a CNN political historian and an associate professor of history at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. “American Prince: JFK Jr.” is airing now on CNN.
It’s been 65 years since John F. Kennedy first spoke of America’s “New Frontier.” This was his rallying cry for the nation, urging citizens to be bold and courageous in their vision for solutions for not just the US but also the world’s most pressing problems. “It would be easier to shrink from that New Frontier, to look to the safe mediocrity of the past, to be lulled by good intentions and high rhetoric,” Kennedy declared in July of 1960.
The New Frontier, what would become the centerpiece of John F. Kennedy’s all-too-brief presidential administration, was a call to a higher purpose: an idealistic demand that the nation and its citizens use their creativity, courage and imagination to foster widespread domestic and global progress and uplift. Kennedy’s administrative vision promised a government that would aggressively work to address economic inequality, expand opportunity, explore new questions of “science and space,” offer peace while preventing war and address “unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice.”
Though Kennedy’s lofty agenda imagined America at the global forefront of progress in the 1960s, these ideas so changed the national landscape and imagination that they also continued to shape American social and political attitudes for generations. In December 1963, when an inconsolable Jackie Kennedy Onassis described her late husband’s presidential era as an “American Camelot,” she succinctly characterized a mood and a mythos that would come to define John F. Kennedy’s legacy.
Kennedy’s vision and agenda were not without flaws. The era was far from the utopian Camelot suggested by uncritical romanticized mythology. But that mythology has both resonated and persisted for so long because of the actual enduring accomplishments of President Kennedy’s administration. Kennedy made good on his audacious executive promise of collective effort and progress. He proposed and sometimes successfully instituted a flurry of transformative executive orders, programs and bills. In 1961, he established both the Peace Corps, a tangible embodiment of American service abroad, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as an institutionalized form of advancing diplomatic “soft power” in developing nations.
As president, Kennedy championed the “moonshot,” a daring scientific feat that captured the imagination of a nation and demonstrated the boundless potential of cooperative American innovation.
He argued that government should spend money on people, and advocated for the expansion of the federal social safety net, including an increase in the federal minimum wage, new federal subsidies in impoverished rural and urban areas, federal assistance in education, healthcare protections for the elderly and expanded federal funding for mental health initiatives.
The ambition and idealism of the New Frontier even compelled Kennedy to evolve in some of his more troubling views. His early reluctance to address matters of racial equality and civil rights eventually gave way to a series of equality-based executive orders, including one that laid the groundwork for modern-day affirmative action. In June 1963, during a televised speech, President Kennedy argued that racial equality was a moral imperative for the nation and promised to implement the most comprehensive civil rights bill that the country had ever seen. After his death, Congress eventually made good on that promise, passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The legacy of the “American Camelot” wasn’t simply in these policies passed but also in the idealism that it encouraged. Those moral imperatives of progress and belief in the ability of government to do good and urgent work resonated deeply in many ways, including sending Kennedy’s son John Jr. to a life of purpose and service before his life was cut short.
The ethos of Camelot persisted for more than six decades. Now, as we approach the end of President Trump’s first year of his second term in office, this lens that defined American public priorities has been dismantled.
The promise of sacrifice, service and the power of government to do this type of good work has come undone, replaced by a self-serving transactionalism. Instead of “ask what you can do for your country,” Trump, who recently reported $600 million in revenue for 2024, seems to be asking how best he can profit.
He has explicitly described Kennedy’s promises of American Camelot as corrupt, inefficient and un-American. Much of Kennedy’s work and legacy have been rolled back and erased. Even the symbols of the Kennedy era are changing, with the literal paving over of the White House Rose Garden and Trump’s takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The contrast between that world and this one is stark. The current administration’s “America First” agenda is an inversion of Kennedy’s attempts at international cooperation, most notably with the defunding and dismantling of USAID. The current administration described those programs as “wasteful spending that does not align with the America First agenda,” an agenda that included halting the resettling of refugees in America. Kennedy’s final book, meanwhile, was titled “A Nation of Immigrants.”
Where President Kennedy argued vigorously for the government to expand programs to aid citizens, the current president has advocated for a dismantling of the administrative state and the social safety net, including planning to add rigid work requirements to Medicaid and food assistance programs and stripping health insurance from millions. Where Kennedy saw a dynamic future in science and exploration, the current presidential administration is laser-focused on deregulation, anti-intellectualism, privatization and a retreat from global cooperative economic and foreign policy agreements.
Where John F. Kennedy necessarily evolved on civil rights and racial equality and implored Americans to have the moral fortitude to do the same, Donald Trump believes the struggle for equality can go too far, overturning decades-old civil rights law, banning, censoring and defunding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and even calling for the sweeping erasure of actual American history.
What’s most different in this moment, though, is how this change looks and sounds. The rhetoric of this era is radically different from the era of Camelot. Kennedy’s speeches, for all their youthful hopefulness and vigor, were appeals to our moral core, our shared commitment to community and country, and to America’s “better angels.”
The rhetoric of 2025 is confrontational, transactional, divisive and grim. It prioritizes personal gain and the individual over collective betterment. President Trump, seated in a heavily gilded Oval Office, surrounded by gold-plated Trump-branded merchandise and trinkets, brings a blunt clarity to the current moment. His promise is that “American Camelot” is dead.
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