Posted on 01/07/2019 9:17:27 PM PST by SunkenCiv
On his last day, according to historian Alan Brinkley, he woke up as a president "with admirers and detractors, a man with a record -- some of it good, some of it not.
"By the evening of that day, he had become a legend, enshrouded in a fog of grief and posthumous adulation from which he has never fully emerged," Brinkley said.
...The number of books written about John F. Kennedy surpasses 40,000...
How JFK went from history to memory -- which is how we choose to remember history -- and how that memory was shaped, is the subject of Michael Hogan's new book, "The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy." ...Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is central to Hogan's biography. In Hogan's view, she became the memory maker and head guardian of the image that the first lady and her husband had cultivated in the White House.
"I call it the Kennedy brand, and they did very little to deviate from that image," he said...
...In "The Road to Camelot," by former longtime Boston Globe reporters Curtis Wilkie and Thomas Oliphant, the authors chronicle Sen. Kennedy's five-year campaign for the White House. "Much of modern politics owes its birth to his campaign."
...JFK was an upstart who turned to primaries, not party leaders -- and beat the bosses at the polls. His was the first winning grassroots campaign, and it would become the playbook... "There is a straight line that runs from JFK to Donald Trump, and it's the idea of coming from the outside, in," Oliphant said. "Kennedy wasn't the choice of his party. He wasn't beloved in the Democratic Party when he started running for president."
(Excerpt) Read more at wbur.org ...
We're knights of the Round Table, we dance when ere we're able...
I liked him. I was in High School. What can you expect?
Yep, I’ve heard the whole Camelot thing was pushed by Jackie after the assassination. Nobody had called the JFK era the Camelot era while he was alive. It was all in retrospect that they decided to create this image of Camelot.
I’d certainly rather have had someone like him than any of the democrat presidents who came after.
JFK benefitted from the same thing Obama did: an adulatory and completely uncritical press. In reality he was an incompetent drug addict (methamphetamine) who was constantly unfaithful to Jackie.
He was a likeable guy, but in reference to JFK, some apologist once said, great men are not always good men. :^)
For crying out bloody loud you’d think this womanizing , high born, low brow Boston Brahman was the only president this nation ever had. I’m sick of him and the rest of that wretched bunch.
She did, and I had to take it out while excerpting this one.
Today JFK would not be welcome in the Democrat Party.
‘Great men are not good men?’ Think Ronald Reagan. Just look at how screwed up his kids are.
Sure he would, it would just have taken a lot more of daddies mob money to buy the election.
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JFK died fighting the same cabal as President Trump is fighting today.
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No, he wouldn’t. “Ask not what your country can do for you...” is in direct opposition to the Great Society welfare state. If Trump said that, he’d be accused of dissing minorities, if not actually called a racist. The Democratic party is so for left of Kennedy, he comes off as conservative. He would never fit in today’s socialist-leaning Democratic party.
Today, JFK would parrot whatever line of bull the DNC put out.
Maybe and maybe not. We’ll never know. But the JFK of 1962 would not be welcome in the party today.
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