http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=479E2F03-C95A-4A97-800B-4C293747199F President Obama: My safety is ‘not something I think about’
By: Jennifer Epstein
November 22, 2013 02:48 PM EST
President Barack Obama doesn’t spend much time worrying about his personal security, he said Friday, as he reflected on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy half a century ago.
“It’s not something I think about, mainly because we have a Secret Service that does an outstanding job every single day,” he said in an interview ABC News’s Barbara Walters, who was at the White House on Friday to tape her annual end-of-year special featuring the president and first lady.
The Secret Service responded to Kennedy’s death by tightening security, and has continued to do so as new threats have arisen. “Obviously, tragedy reshaped the Secret Service in many ways, but they do an outstanding job and it’s thankfully not something I spend a lot of time worrying about,” Obama added.
The president also spoke about Kennedy’s legacy, telling Walters that the late president “captured the idealism, the ability to imagine and remake America to meets its ideals, in a way we haven’t seen before or since.”
“I don’t know of anyone who has had that same impact on a generation and inspired so many people as JFK has,” he continued. “I think that partly because of his youth, partly, and his grace, partly because of his courage and his history in World War II, partly because of his eloquence and partly because of the time….because there was a shift from the post-World War II generation into the future. He really moved people in a way that still resonates with us today.”
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