Not only was I alive; I lived in DC and saw their decadence at close hand. Simply cannot join in the pity party.
I don’t have anything in particular against either of them, but I DO dislike the adulation heaped on them. The Kennedy years were not “one brief shining moment” of glory.
JFK sucked at foreign policy, used incredible amounts of drugs and would screw anything that moved...or didn’t. Jackie was not some pure, ideal woman either. They both got by on the strength of an incredibly dishonest press corps.
Ben Bradlee was Washington Bureau chief for Newsweek during the 1960 WV primary, when he and JFK went to see a porno flick together:
“This wasn’t the hard-core porn of the seventies, just a nasty little thing called Private Property, starring one Katie Manx as a horny housewife who kept getting raped and seduced by hoodlums. We wondered aloud if the movie was on the Catholic index of forbidden films (it was) and whether or not there were any votes in it either way for Kennedy in allegedly anti-Catholic West Virginia if it were known that he was in attendance.”
https://stevehely.com/2014/11/21/conversations-with-kennedy/
But of course, the press was as biased then as now. A reporter who hated Nixon was a good, impartial reporter - just as “good” reporters hate Trump and adore Hillary. It is that sort of dishonesty that sickens me.