This January reminds me of another one, 55 years ago. Jack Kennedy’s centenary is coming up next year, but for me he will always be the young man from my state, taking the oath of office on the capital steps.

It felt as if all that I stood for was finding national vindication and enthronement.  As Catholics being so long excluded from the presidency, we had arrived in the person of JFK and could take pride in our ascension.

By reason of shared background and his familiar accent I felt identified with him as he took his place at the head of our nation.

Like him I was a Bostonian, a student of the same college, and of Irish descent. My father had known his father quite well and both my parents had attended Jack’s much ballyhooed 1953 wedding in Newport. This married him to the charming and multi-talented Jacqueline Bouvier.

Most important of all to me, Jack was a Catholic, not a very good one (as Jackie once observed), but nonetheless representative of much that I considered dear.

At this stage in my life, I believed in America, a belief that Kennedy made not only justifiable but exciting. Suddenly politics seemed to me deserving of the highest commitment, the way religion had all along.

Like many others among my Jesuit colleagues who crowded around the black and white television set that inauguration day, I used to hang on every word and gesture of the new president. After all, he had brought such style to American public life and, I felt, substance as well.

He showed himself the kind of president that I would like to have been  myself had I followed the political vocation.

For Catholics like me, JFK’s election meant arrival.  After generations of struggle, we, the Catholic community, had achieved full Americanization. Symbolically, at least, there was no longer any contradiction between being American and Catholic at the same time.

Al Smith, a Catholic who had run for president in 1928, the year of my birth, and had suffered electoral disaster, now had been avenged.

However, with the passage of years, my appraisal of Kennedy was to change radically.

Revelations about his obsession with sexual adventure were enough to undermine any high opinion of his moral character. The most serious side of this was the danger to national security that his irresponsible playing around seems to have posed.

Other revelations about his health cut both ways. Discovering that he seemed to have been in pain every day during his time in the White House made him look heroic. However it also raised the question whether these secret ailments should have barred him from election to the country’s highest office.

Further reflection on Kennedy’s Catholicism made my enthusiasm for him being the first member of my church elected president seem naïve. In his famous campaign speech before Protestant ministers in Houston, JFK had said in effect that he would never let his faith interfere with his actions as president.

How deep was that faith, I had to wonder later on. If it did not bear on his decisions to use certain kinds of weapons in time of war, or to sign legislation that might mount a barrier to economic justice?

My enthusiasm for Kennedy turns out to have been somewhat superficial, based to some extent on a cheerleading mentality. I also placed undue value on personal style and appreciation of the arts and cultural excellence shown by Jack and his wife Jacqueline.

No matter how I was eventually to rate Kennedy as president, however, his reaching the summit of American public life still had given me a feeling of  certain fulfillment.