The Kennedy myth
Bookworm on Nov 19 2008 at 7:12 pm | Filed under: Barack Obama
I was not a rebellious youngster. I accepted my parents’ values and their rules, and pretty much toed the line. My one area of rebellion was, looking back, a rather bizarre one: I refused to buy into the Kennedy mythology. Perhaps because I was a child of the Watergate era, I simply refused to accept that Kennedy was the epic hero the intelligentsia of my youth claimed. By the late 70s, I already knew about the Bay of Pigs debacle, the pathetic face-offs with Kruschev, the mafia involvement and mistresses. There wasn’t anything I knew about him that sounded good other than those East Coast accented speeches, and I, despite being a word person, was unimpressed.
I was therefore pleased to read Jason Maoz’s neat summary of the myriad failures of the Kennedy administration, some so bad that even its staunchest admirers, when forced to be honest, had to conceded that their idol had feet of clay:
John F. Kennedy was a president of questionable character and relatively meager accomplishments, but his untimely and violent death, followed by decades of unceasing image control by the Kennedys and their media groupies, has helped sustain the popular standing of a president who almost certainly would have been impeached or forced to resign the presidency had even a fraction of what we now know been made public while he was still alive and in office.
The left-wing journalist Seymour Hersh, after spending years wading through the muck of pumped-up war stories, doctored medical records (contrary to the image of “vigor” he liked to project, Kennedy suffered from a variety of ailments and consumed a prodigious daily cocktail of pharmaceuticals), compulsive extramarital activity, Mafia ties and electoral shenanigans, was forced to reevaluate the man he once admired.
“Kennedy,” he said in an Atlantic Monthly web interview shortly after the publication of his 1997 expose The Dark Side of Camelot, “was much more corrupt than other postwar presidents, by a major factor. Much more manipulative, though Nixon was a close second. There’s nothing wonderful about Nixon — Watergate proved that — but I think that Nixon was an amateur compared to Kennedy….”
You can read the rest here.
The Kennedy myth is especially instructive in the Obama era. His admirers are claiming him as the second coming of Kennedy, right down to the pretty young wife and cute (and they are cute) children. What they’ll refuse to admit is that Obama is probably Kennedy’s equal too in corruption, manipulation and dishonesty. And those of us who are conservatives will have to face the fact that, just as Kennedy’s image has been hagiographied to the point that even his followers’ disillusionment cannot destroy the myth, so too will the Obama myth almost certainly become impregnable to time and truth.
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(Groan……..)
Have to laugh…
I was listening to a Starbucks conversation the other day about how Hillary might become the next Secretary of State. One of the participants said somehting along the lines of: “nah, she sees herself as the next Ted Kennedy in the senate.”
A one or two beat moment of silence followed, broken by one of the others saying: “Oh? She sees herself as a fat drunk nuisance, does she?”
Badda-bang – rim-shot, please…
It is to laugh.
I was 13 in the summer of 1960, and I spent every day for five days glued to the TV watching JFK and LBJ duke it out for the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles.
(The only thing I ever saw on TV that was better was the old Steve Allen show, the one where Louie Nye, Gypsy Boots, Lionel Hampton and Tom Poston dropped by regularly. What a party!)
I was in love with Kennedy. He was handsome, glib and Catholic (I so wanted to see an RC in the White House).
By November 22, 1963, I had long since passed out of my infatuation with the man. I realized that he was, at best, a so-so president. Even the shock of Dallas did not last too long. If the hagiographers and the conspiracy buffs had not set to work on him like a platoon of manic undertakers in the mid-60s, I doubt that JFK would have been anything more to me today than a dim, sad memory.
So we’re stuck for now with the sainted John, forever young and forever promising.
But truth wills out, inevitably. Giant lies like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany are finally brought down by rot or force of arms. “Progressivism” eventually will die from its lack of common sense, as well as its descent into the idiocies of envy and child killing. (That’s not to say that it won’t destroy millions of lives along the way, or even lead to the downfall of the United States.)
Just as the first big cracks are beginning to appear in St. Franklin’s facade, cracks will appear in Blessed John’s. The Kennedy heirs are either too drunk or too incoherent to keep the machinery going, and the young ‘uns who voted for Obama know that history began at least a generation after Camelot.
Jack who?
PS: For Hersch, who is one of the most mendacious leftist hacks in American life today, to shudder at what he learned about JFK, you know it’s gotta be bad.
Reputations get outsized when a good looking person dies young. Look at the icons: JFK, Marilyn, James Dean, Che, Joan of Arc.
If Obama dies in office, he will become a saint. If he survives, some of his glow will tarnish. Not of course for the true believers but it may for some of the reasonable people who voted for him.
Hi, Lulu:
God forbid that Obama die in office. I wish the man the longest possible life, most of it spent contemplating the price that the judgment of history will extract for him being an empty suit.
I agree with you, Charles. About the only thing more dangerous than a full Obama term, would be his coming to an untimely end. Even if this should be the result of a meteorite direct hit, or a new volcano erupting in the Rose Garden in front of thousands of people in person, ad millions on live TV, many will, nevertheless, see it as a deliberate act by Republicans. Violence unlike anything since the Civil War will likely ensue, because irrationality and hatred fueled by already bizarre beliefs will be fueled by long unemployment, a debased currency, and class envy fostered by Obama, his nomenklatura in government, and the media.
I pray that he lives to a ripe old age, and his dog never gets hit by a car a la the Clinton pooch. It should have its own Secret Service detail.
Tiresias (#2)
>> A one or two beat moment of silence followed, broken by one of the others saying: “Oh? She sees herself as a fat drunk nuisance, does she?” >>
First she has to leave Bill trapped in a car submerged at the bottom of a river.
It’s interesting to me that the two Lions Of Liberalism of the 20th Century both died in office. Perhaps that is a key to long-standing sainthood and unending popularity?
FDR inherited a three-year depression in 1932. Nine years later, at the start of our involvement in WWII in 1941, we were *still* mired in the depression. Why, then, is he considered to be an economic savior? Hard to figure. As usual, the mind boggles.
And the Kennedy record truly is a sorry one.
The trouble is half of the voters don’t know any of this, and wouldn’t care if they did. They only truly live in the moment.
I was once having a nice scotch in a nice country inn, and got talking to another guy. This was back when personal computers had just started into the mainstream, and I had one.
This guy made his living as a tout. He made predictions on who would win various sporting events, and by how much. He sold his predictions to a flock of loyal customers.
Well, I launched into an impassioned description of how he could use a computer to compile records of his predictions, and produce charts, and graphs, and whatnot to rope in new bettors.
He listened politely — he was a very personable guy — and then said, “No, you don’t understand. I convince them that I know who is going to win.”
I then told him how he could use his computer stats to convince them he knew who was going to win. And MAN, was he patient. He let me run down, and then said, “No. You don’t understand. These people don’t CARE about my record from last week, or yesterday.”
He could see I was utterly mystified. “They believe ME. **I** convince them that **I** KNOW who’s going to win, and they BELIEVE me.” And then the light went on, and I believed him, because I believed him — finally.
That is what half of our voters are like. They want only to BELIEVE. They want not to have to think, or learn, or know, they just want to BELIEVE in someone.
Have you ever tried to convince a teen — or anyone — that his/her true love is a lying, conniving, manipulative, dirt bag with a list of incontrovertible, concrete evidence?
Well, liberals live in a perpetual state of first-love euphoria with their beloved, which is frequently expressed as hatred for anyone telling them the truth. They cannot be convinced. Rather, they must simply be defeated.
Not to be overly crude, but now that you mention it, there is a certain similarity between a Liberal outlook on JFK and FDR and what I have sadly observed before as (let’s call it) “Beaten Woman Syndrome. The more he beats her while telling her he loves her, the more she believes that she is being beaten because she doesn’t love him enough.
An alternate definition of Camelot is a peddler of wares, often with questionable provenance. (Okay, I got that from reading Karen Maitland’s novel Company of Liars, but further research tells me the word still has that meaning in French.) Adds an interesting subtext, I think.
James Piereson recently wrote a perspicacious book called “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution”. It is, I submit, a brilliant and sympathetic piece of cultural analysis. His main thesis is that the cognitive dissonance and grief created by Kennedy’s assassination warped liberalism into a bitter, blame America first attitude.
Cognitive dissonance? From the book jacket: “Some of the confusion was the fault of national leaders and family memebers who insisted on viewing Kennedy as a martyr to civil rights and an heir to Abraham Lincoln, when in fact he was shot by a communist and thus a casualty of the Cold War.”
(I find it supremely ironic that this event, along with Vietnam, spawned an oppositional culture and distrust of government, yet modern liberalism’s reflexive answer for every problem is yet more government.)
I think you can find video interviews of Piereson discussing his book in the 2007 or 2008 archives of the “Uncommon Knowledge” at the national review website.
P.S. to Charles Martel — you have a great name, namesake, or pseudonym, whatever the case may be.
I am going to take the liberty of suggesting that you might enjoy a great book by a Regine Pernoud, a distinguished French medievalist, entitled “Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths”.
Whoa, some terrific new people (to me, at least) on the board.
Bill, great anecdote and insight. You have a wry and wonderful way with words. Here we are scratching our heads wondering why leftists aren’t practical or logical, and your story about the tout shows why.
gpc31, you’re right: You can hear the needle scratch its way across the entire record whenever you casually mention to a leftist that Oswald was a communist. Also, thanks for your book recommendation, which I will take you up on. As you can tell from my screen name, I think the Middle Ages have gotten a bad shake.
Anyway, you two, added to Mike and Danny (and several others) here, are going to help this place keep rocking.
Well, thank you, Charles You aren’t so bad making Cognac yourself!
Miike (#8) -
See, that doesn’t get taught in school, though!
Nobody knows – because they aren’t taught – that the whole alphabet soup of can’t-ever-kill-’em-and-get-rid-of-’em federal agencies created by FDR to combat the depression did NOTHING! The fact of the matter is that by interfering everywhere FDR prevented the market from working, and thereby managed to deepen and prolong the depression. He was an economic idiot who has somehow managed to go down in history as a genius.
Though not among people who have even a basic understanding of economics and how markets work. I’m noticing a lot of very good economists and bright folks altogether appearing on TV these days (not on the 3 networks) reminding us NOT to do what FDR did,because it was exactly wrong then, and would be a disaster now.
It took WW II to end the depression; nothing FDR did made any impression – but he did leave us stuck with the legacy of it all forever.
The only way that FDR went down in history as a hero is because of a fawning, compliant media. The only way JFK went down as a hero in history is because of a fawning, compliant media. The only way Obama….
If I was Obama I would be deeply insulted by being likened to Kennedy.
Re the Kennedy assassination, Lee Oswald was never convicted so he can`t be called `the person who assassinated JFK`
What happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Until Obama authorised invasion of a Sovereign nation (Pakistan) to assassinate Osama Bin Laden I had respect for him. This was a political move to improve his ratings in the 2012 election.
As far as I know Osama Bin Laden hadn`t been convicted of any crime, although he liked to claim responsibility for terrorism. We only have George W Bush`s word for it that he was responible. He is not a man that I have ever respected. Osama Bin Laden could well have been a fantisist.
Evidence gained under torture is notoriously inaccurate. If someone tortured me I`d confess to anything just to make it stop.
Gitmo is an abomination as are sites used by the CIA in other countries where thay can get away with torture.
USA hang your head in shame.