I was 14 yrs old when John F. Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic elected as President of the United States. I was 17 and a junior in high school when he was assassinated. My father, a WWII veteran, was enthusiastic about Kennedy's candidacy although he kept on telling me that he wasn't going to win. Everyone I knew pretty much was enthusiastic about Kennedy.

Of course I lived in something of a bubble: a working class row house neighborhood in Northeast Philly where you were, for the most part, either Catholic or Jewish. Most of the kids I knew went to our local Catholic school. It was expected that we would go on to the local Catholic high school.

Chris Matthews is a few years younger than I and comes from a more affluent background. His father was a Republican and white collar worker. Mine was a Democrat through and through and blue collar all of the way.Chris Matthews came from a more affluent neighborhood - Somerton - which seemed so very far away.

I lived in a slightly grittier neighborhood called Mayfair. Not that it was very gritty actually. Keep in mind that this was a different time. There were no gangs roaming the streets in my neighborhood. It wasn't until I was an adult that there was much of anything but Whites in our neighborhood. Philly was a highly segregated city like so many other cities. Matthews was a little boy when Kennedy was running so he was for Nixon.

My family was never for Nixon. My father and mother despised him. What Jack Kennedy was to my parents was a fresh face, their own age, a Democrat, not as liberal as Roosevelt, but certainly more acceptable to them than Eisenhower. My father had no respect for Eisenhower partly because he was in the Pacific Theatre during WWII and was a fan of Douglas McArthur and partly because he didn't like Republicans at all.

I grew up in that kind of home. I still don't much like Republicans at all. So I admit to some bias here! I watch Chris Matthews on Hardball pretty regularly. I like his style, and I enjoy the fact that he doesn't pussyfoot around with some of the conservative crazies out there. At the same time, though, he is still respectful - something that is lacking in a lot of the conservative commentators right now. He is a practicing Catholic. I am not. However, he is not afraid to go after the pedophiles either.

Having said all this, I have to tell you that I have some bias here when it comes to JFK. He is my hero - a flawed hero, but still a hero. He wasn't perfect. I wouldn't have agreed with everything he said or did or believed. He was friends with Richard Nixon for one thing!

Matthews makes the case for JFK and why he ranks as one of the important presidents despite his short tenure. I have read that he didn't accomplish anything. That's simply not true. His signature achievement was a nuclear test ban. He took us from the brink of war with the then Soviet Union without firing a shot - with the hard work of diplomacy and statesmanship.

He got the space program moving although he didn't get to see us land on the moon. He loved technology. He would have been right at home with today's technology. I believe he would have embraced it. The Peace Corps was his idea and it endures today.

As I finished the book last night, I thought about those tumultuous years that followed his death. Vietnam, Nixon, Carter, Reagan. I believe things would have been VERY different if he had lived to fulfill two terms. The book brought back a lot of memories and also taught me a lot about those times when I was a little girl and not aware of the world outside my own neighborhood and family.

This book is a fascinating look at an interesting and complex man - one who could love his wife and still have a multitude of affairs, who could leave her behind when she was suffering a miscarriage. Then he stays by her bedside and talks about the baby who died after only a few days of life and weeps in private. When Kennedy died, I was a junior in high school attending a large Catholic girls' high school in Northeast Philadelphia. As we left for the day, there was total silence. I still remember seeing the wet eyes of my classmates. He meant a lot to us. For me he still resonates.