The Enduring Cult of Kennedy

First you assassinate the person, then you assassinate his character. Yet another contribution to the uninformed drivel that is fit to print in the “newspaper of record” about President Kennedy and his assassination. Only someone so out of touch with the facts of history and the murder of the president could write so arrogantly about what they do not comprehend. Who needs facts when opinion will do? It is on the Opinion Page after all. It is comments like these that “deserve to be challenged at every opportunity”. There was nothing “thin” about the sense of real hope and change that President Kennedy represented for this country, including our last best hope for world peace. He accomplished much because he inspired people to believe things could be done that were only dreamed. Peace Corps, Moon Mission, Satellites, Civil Rights, Nuclear Test Ban, and his efforts to stop organized crime, end the oil tax depletion allowance, support civil rights for African-Americans, and end the Cold War only head up the long list. His only argument seems to be that he comes in second or third behind Lincoln sometimes as the greatest president we have had in the polls. So yes, there was a reason to kill him.

Instead we get a rehashed version of the usual distortions and a focus on his medical problems or alleged adulteries, as if that would tell us anything. It was the Eisenhower administration that planned out the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, which Kennedy reluctantly allowed to happen without any direct American military air cover. Even CIA efforts to be sure it failed did not change his resolve. Unlike many presidents since, he took responsibility for the failure. It was the brinksmanship of the real Cold Warriors within the Joint Chiefs of Staff that led to the Cuban Missile crisis and “near brinksmanship” and only the firm rejection of their ideas by the Kennedy brothers that prevented a worldwide nuclear exchange and set the stage for peace. Kennedy moved to “scatter the CIA to the four winds” and fired two top directors when he realized they were lying to him about their covert operations. He stood up to big steel price fixing and big oil tax write offs and also to the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex President Eisenhower warned about. So yes, he had enemies.

Then he dismisses the idea that Kennedy was pulling out of Vietnam, when in fact the historical record clearly shows that he had planned to have all US troops out by the end of 1964, and began the withdrawal just before he was killed. The war began before his presidency, with Nixon pushing for nuclear weapons for the French colonialists facing defeat. He came to realize that his top advisers were misleading him about the war, and that it was not America’s fight. LBJ and the Joint Chiefs reversed all that immediately after the assassination and planned a massive increase in troops and a ten year war with tens of thousands of US casualties. That would never have been Kennedy’s “legacy”.

And finally, one more misinterpretation of Oswald, who was not even the gunman, despite what Frank Rich or Stephen King “acknowledge”, claiming the old canard that Oswald was a “leftist”. The facts show that Oswald was a Marine in Naval Intelligence with a Crypto clearance who was instrumental in the testing of the U-2 spy plane. Oswald was one of nine fake “defectors” sent in to the Soviet Union to gauge their responses, all of whom entered and came back in the same time period. Oswald was known to be working with the FBI, a fact that concerned the Warren Commission members early in the investigation, and then was ignored. Oswald was posing as both a pro- and anti-Castro activist in New Orleans at the same time. He has all the earmarks of a US covert operations spy. Finally, someone “doubled” Oswald in Mexico City just before the assassination to link his name to Fidel Castro. This “Red” cover was the rationale given by President Johnson that the conclusion of the Warren Commission must point to a lone gunman, lest the trail planted toward a communist conspiracy lead into WWIII. Both lone assassin and Castro avenger lies were distortions. Oswald was what he said he was, a patsy. And if the character in Stephen King’s time travel fantasy had actually gone to the Book Depository looking to kill Oswald before he could shoot JFK, he would have been surprised by two other well armed gunmen there, since Oswald was four floors below that, drinking a Coke.

The only enduring cult this article exposes is the constant media drumbeat against historical reality and any use of the word conspiracy to describe the death of John F. Kennedy. A cult of disinformation about Kennedy and who killed him which has been hard at work since 1963 to keep our own history from us and to convince us that it does not matter anyway. But despite all their efforts, the Gallup polls also show that the vast majority of us still believe that there was a conspiracy and also that we lost our faith in the government not after Watergate, but a decade earlier, with the release of the false conclusions of the Warren Report about the murder of our president.

The Enduring Cult of Kennedy
November 26, 2011
New York Times
By ROSS DOUTHAT

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.