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This pencil portrait of JFK in the White House dates from those heady first weeks in office following his inaugural ceremony. I was struggling with it for a while, until I realised I wasn’t emphasising the facial effects of the cortisone he took every day for addison’s desease. Medical practitioners never get the dosage right and the patient is invariably given too much. The “beneficial side effects” include an insatiable sex drive, the permanent avoidance of depression and bountiful energy.

This image of a robust leader we all associate him with is very much attributable to his medication. Once I got that fact firmly in my mind, the drawing came together.

I watched the entire JFK funeral on November 25 1963. I have no idea why I should have been so transfixed by the event since I was still several weeks shy of my fifth birthday, and yet in some way I was seemingly aware of an event so momentous as to have brought an entire nation, if not much of the world, to a complete standstill. My mother periodically kept coming into the lounge in between preparing the day’s meal half expecting my interest to have waned, maybe to find me playing with my toys, yet there I was still mesmerised by the whole event. Of course, I have no recollection of the actual proceedings but the experience of that day is still vivid. My father, whose native tongue was Spanish, flew to Madrid the following month on business and was intrigued to compare the latin mentality with the English speaking people he now interacted with on a daily basis. Whilst work colleagues in England appeared more than prepared to accept the lone gunman theory, his Spanish compatriots were equally clear about where the blame truly lay; “So Bethlehem Steel got him in the end!”

Kennedy was an internationalist. He believed the future was in free trade and open markets. Where steelmakers were traditionally protectionist, calling for high tariffs to keep foreign steel out, Kennedy wanted to encourage global competition. The details of his ongoing war with the steel magnets and their flagrant attempts to derail his economic recovery programme are freely available for all to read. Less well known is the fact that Bethlehem steel had effectively peaked as a business in the 1950’s as a company manufacturing some 23 million tons per year while the steel industries in Japan and Germany were still devastated by the war. Business inevitably slowed after that, but the escalating conflict in Vietnam would have revived the company’s fortunes. Unfortunately, JFK would announce his intention to withdraw troops from South East Asia. Adding insult to injury was the fact that the Pr3esident’s father had held an assistant general manager post with the company during World War II. Any sentiment of “direct betrayal” was all too obvious.

I don’t know who killed JFK, the steel corporations, the mob, Cuban exiles, Castro, the Russians, the CIA, the chief US military staff – take your pick, but if you believe in the Warren Commission’s findings, then you’re happy in suspending logic. Just imagine what would have happened to the President’s future security arrangements had he survived the assassination attempt? Triangular crossfire in Dealey Plaza – that’s how I would have arranged it. I met an American at a Gibraltarrean Round Table meeting in 1992 who said he didn’t believe in the conspiracy theories. I pressed and pressed until he caved in, admitting that he was tired of sifting through the ever mounting evidence, that it was easier to toe the official line. It has become accepted in certain quarters that people like me have a very real need to believe in anything but the official line; that the notion of the most powerful man in the western world being blown away by a lone extremist is too simplistic by half. Yes, I’ll go along with that, not that I’m prepared to apologise for believing in a wider conspiracy. Many people profited from the events in Dallas, and that amount of ‘pools winners’ in a single day is beyond the law of probability.

JFK saved my life and millions others during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. He was able to see the ultimate futility of nuclear engagement probably because he was a father to two young children himself. For that reason alone I can forgive him his peccadilloes even though I don’t truly consider them to be small sins. Ultimately though, he was an extremely ill man for much of his life, initially averse to a career in politics preferring instead to have become a writer and entered the White House on the cusp of momentous changes in American history, most notably the vexed question of negro integration. Most of all, he inspired an interest in politics amongst young people with the launch of the ‘Peace Corps’ in a way that Muhammad Ali did likewise for boxing. People who can inspire involvement in subjects that ordinarily would bore others are unique. For sure, I have been seduced by the Kennedy PR machine, his was an unfinished life and I regret that fact. Millions of people living through the Cold War felt “safe” with him. The broadcaster Nicholas Parsons once elucidated that – speaking for many young fathers at the time – “JFK carried with him the hopes of an entire generation.”

We are spoon fed a constant diet of violence on film and television until we become almost desensitised to it all, but frame 313 of Abraham Zapruder’s home movie showing JFK’s head exploding as a direct result of that vital head shot still affects me badly.