Kennedy critique

Everybody always asks ‘where were you when Kennedy got shot?’  And being 13, all absorbed in the angst of teenagism, I dunno.  Maybe I was in school and maybe on the bus.  I came home and my mother announced that the President had been shot. 

            In the aftermath of JFK’s death, there evolved quite a cult worship.  The Kennedys were young and beautiful.  Jack had that big perfect, wide smile and the mop of hair. The people who weren’t interested in politics and issues loved them via celebrity worship. The liberals took a giant turn with the Great Society and quotas and wished to bask in the hero worship of JFK, so they made a lot of noise about how Kennedy would have done things exactly as they continued. ("Why, he surely would have retreated from Vietnam, despite having started there.") Nobody dared voice critique over this cultism lest they be branded a heretic and an outcast with no respect for the dead.  The media loved JFK and were liberal as well.  Historians, always a liberal gang, consistently voted him one of the top 3 Presidents. Only many decades later, did we learn the truth about so many of his policies and acts.

            Perhaps the main aura of majesty of JFK for the libs was his soaring rhetoric.  He had been a Richie Rich, dominated by his mother and molded by the ego of his father. But his ability to speak made him inspirer-in-chief.  For it is the ability to incite a mob like Robespierre or Mussolini that really is at heart of leftist politics.

            His presidency was, for the most part, a non-starter. The Bay of Pigs was a fiasco; the Cuban Missile Crisis brought us to the brink of nuclear war, cost us missiles in Turkey and doomed Cuba to Castro’s tyranny to this day. On civil rights, something for which President Kennedy receives much credit and praise, he did little more than pay lip service to the concept, while Republicans, the traditional allies of “colored people” provided the votes.  But his ability to ascend to lofty talk is nowhere better displayed than his support of the space program.  We have recently learned that while he spoke in exalted rhetoric about space flight, behind the scenes, communications signify that he was interested in little more than ‘showing up the Russians’.  It was mostly a political game.  And his ‘brain trust’ of advisors had so many failed ideas, it was illustrates that the citizenry should not follow academics who never had to run an organization.

He had so many women on the side.  One was an East German spy, and when a Congressional investigation threatened to make public the story (the reason we frown on top military officers having affairs is the potential to divulge important secrets), Hoover worked out a deal with RFK for blank check support of the FBI if Hoover would deny the story.  His popularity waned and his approval ratings were in the low 40s prompting a trip to Dallas to shore up southern support.  JFK had a particularly wild tryst with two women the night before and his ailing back paid for it.  The next day he wore his back brace.  When the first bullet struck him in the limousine, he was held erect by the brace, allowing Oswald to get off two more shots and kill him certainly.

            In a little known gaff, that polite Germans won’t make much of, his “Ich bin ein Berliner” mispronounced Berliner making it the name for a jelly donut.  Yet Kennedy should be given credit for being staunchly anti-communist (both in Europe and Vietnam) and a tax cutter to stimulate the economy.

            And as these issues have been argued by historians, his worship has declined.  He is now considered somewhere between 10^th and 15^th best President as rated by historians.  Ike, Reagan, TR and Jackson often outrank him even among the progressive historians.

            But I do think that the Kennedy worship syndrome proves something.  First, he was the first President to use television well as a medium for communication—just as FDR was first with radio. Good looks, short quotable sound-bites and casual self-assuredness count for much on the tube.  This is why Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin do well while Bob Dole and Walter Mondale didn’t.  Secondly, his trysts came to public knowledge just as Bill Clinton was also philandering his way through the White House, and it made part of the public jaded, and another part sympathetic and admiring.

            For years I scratched my head over how adored Kennedy was while others like Coolidge and Arthur were hardly given a second thought.  Indeed, McKinley was (martyred!) shot by a radical leftist and where is the worship? History is a weird PR game which doesn’t mature until a century or two later when a lot of questions will be asked but by then, cannot be answered except in speculation.  And we absolutely, positively need to protect Obama with all means available.  I don’t want him going down as a martyr.