Here is a recent NY Times column bashing John F. Kennedy’s legacy, replete with errors, and an interesting response follows from JFK’s grandson about his real accomplishments. It is clear from the real historical evidence that Kennedy was indeed pulling out of Vietnam as soon as his new term began, and that those orders were reversed on November 25, 1963 by a new president more compliant to the Military Industrial Complex that put him in power.
The Enduring Cult of Kennedy
By ROSS DOUTHAT
November 26, 2011
New York Times
THE cult of John F. Kennedy has the resilience of a horror-movie villain. No matter how many times the myths of Camelot are seemingly interred by history, they always come shambling back to life — in another television special, another Vanity Fair cover story, another hardcover hagiography.
It’s fitting, then, that the latest exhumation comes courtesy of Stephen King himself. King serves a dual role in our popular culture: He’s at once the master of horror and the bard of the baby boom, writing his way through the twilit borderlands where the experiences of the post-World War II generation are stalked by nightmares and shadowed by metaphysical dread.
In this landscape, the death of J.F.K. looms up like the Overlook Hotel. The gauzy fantasy of the Kennedy White House endures precisely because the reality of the assassination still feels like a primal catastrophe — an irruption of inexplicable evil as horrifying as any supernatural bogeyman.
At its best, King’s new Kennedy assassination novel, “11/22/63” — which sends its protagonist back in time to change that November day’s events — offers an implicit critique of this generational obsession. (I am not giving much away when I reveal that the time-traveling hero does not succeed in freeing ’60s America from the cruel snares of history.) But its narrative power still depends on accepting the false premises of the Kennedy cult — premises that will no doubt endure so long as the 1960s generation does, but still deserve to be challenged at every opportunity.
The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one if he’d lived. Few serious historians take this view: It belongs to Camelot’s surviving court stenographers, and to popularizers like Chris Matthews, whose new best seller “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” works hard to gloss over the thinness of the 35th president’s actual accomplishments. Yet there is no escaping the myth’s hold on the popular imagination. In Gallup’s “greatest president” polling, J.F.K. still regularly jostles with Lincoln and Reagan for the top spot.
In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as “incomplete.” The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.)
The second false premise is that Kennedy would have kept us out of Vietnam. Or as a character puts it in “11/22/63,” making the case for killing Lee Harvey Oswald: “Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”
Actually, it would be more accurate to describe the Vietnam War as Kennedy’s darkest legacy. His Churchillian rhetoric (“pay any price, bear any burden …”) provided the war’s rhetorical frame as surely as George W. Bush’s post-9/11 speeches did for our intervention in Iraq. His slow-motion military escalation established the strategic template that Lyndon Johnson followed so disastrously. And the war’s architects were all Kennedy people: It was the Whiz Kids’ mix of messianism and technocratic confidence, not Oswald’s fatal bullet, that sent so many Americans to die in Indochina.
The third myth is that Kennedy was a martyr to right-wing unreason. Writing on J.F.K. in the latest issue of New York magazine, Frank Rich half-acknowledges the mediocrity of Kennedy’s presidency. But he cannot resist joining a generation of liberals in drawing a connection between the right-wing “atmosphere of hate” in early-1960s Dallas and the assassination itself — and then linking both to today’s anti-Obama zeal. Neither can King, whose “11/22/63” explicitly compares right-wing Dallas to his own fictional territory of Derry, Me. — home of the murderous Pennywise the Clown from “It,” among other demons.
This connection is the purest fantasy, made particularly ridiculous by the fact that both Rich and King acknowledge that Oswald was a leftist — a pro-Castro agitator whose other assassination target was the far-right segregationist Edwin Walker. The idea that an atmosphere of right-wing hate somehow inspired a Marxist radical to murder a famously hawkish cold war president is even more implausible than the widespread suggestion that the schizophrenic Jared Lee Loughner shot his congresswoman because Sarah Palin put some targets on an online political map.
This last example suggests why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today. We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with genuine achievement. We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape the blame. And we imagine that the worst evils can be blamed exclusively on subterranean demons, rather than on the follies that often flow from fine words and high ideals.
To the Editor:
As a young man inspired by politics and history who has spent time studying the Kennedy administration, I take issue with Ross Douthat’s Nov. 27 column, “The Enduring Cult of Kennedy ,” about President John F. Kennedy, my grandfather.
Mr. Douthat suggests that President Kennedy was a “near disaster.” He criticizes Kennedy on civil rights; Kennedy was the first president to deem civil rights “a moral issue,” and applied federal authority to force desegregation.
The president described as “famously hawkish” resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis peacefully. Mr. Douthat does not mention what President Kennedy called his proudest accomplishment: the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Contrary to what Mr. Douthat asserts about the Vietnam War, in 1963, at American University, Kennedy stated that America would never start a war. Many who served in his administration, including Ted Sorensen and McGeorge Bundy, long argued that my grandfather would have never invaded Vietnam as Lyndon B. Johnson did.
Finally, I take issue with Mr. Douthat’s condescending view of the American people. He suggests that Americans who admire President Kennedy — and as Mr. Douthat points out, the majority of Americans rank him among our best presidents — do not understand their own history.
Instead, I suggest that President Kennedy’s legacy remains relevant today not because of Camelot or conspiracy, but because Americans find inspiration and meaning there.
JOHN KENNEDY SCHLOSSBERG
New Haven, Nov. 30, 2011
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