Posted on 11/21/2020 12:05:41 PM PST by Rummyfan
Jack Kennedy, we hardly know ye—and to know ye is not to love ye
Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what the Kennedys ever did for your country. Bring the monkey’s paw of being telegenic into politics? Of all the things that the American political system needed, this was the last. And whatever it was that the Kennedys did, they did most of it a long time ago. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is almost as distant in time as the assassination of William McKinley was when Kennedy took office.
McKinley, by the way, also had great personal popularity. And greater political support, having won reelection in 1900 by a margin of almost a million votes out of some 14 million cast. McKinley’s murder by anarchist Leon Czolgosz grieved and shocked the nation (and gave rise to conspiracy theories) the same way Kennedy’s murder did.
And yet we didn’t endure six subsequent decades of public figures deemed “McKinleyesque.” Despite a late-1890s economic boom, fiscal and monetary policies more prudent than Kennedy’s, and a Spanish-American War conducted with a success very unlike the Vietnam conflict, the McKinley administration wasn’t mythologized in Broadway terms. No one called the McKinley years “The Mikado Era” (the hit musical of the day). The Kennedy tale ought to be finished. But JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century 1917–1956, by Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard history professor Fredrik Logevall, brings us no closure and implicitly threatens a second 1957–1963 volume and even—spare us—a Legacy third.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
Can’t fly. Can’t ski. Can’t Drive. Can’t Canoe.
Is there nothing a Kennedy can’t do.
Listen to anyone else?
If the story holds true, there would have been no “Camelot” had Joe Sr. not bought extra votes from Chicago to send his kid to the White House.
The thing about JFK I don’t get is the fact that this miserable failure gets so much love from the right. It’s obviously a bad thing for someone to get assassinated. But politically-speaking, the principal negative consequences weren’t what he did not get to do - it’s what the Democrats used his assassination to accomplish - the massive expansion of the welfare state. Note that it was JFK who first instituted racial quotas, by executive order.
Can’t be convicted.
Compared to today’s democrats??-he was a right wing hawk.
Slashed the Absurd 95 percent top rate.
He was a liberal.
But today these aren’t liberals...they are INSANE.
A democrat said clinton was “defining deviancy down”.
With clinton came a complete crash in any kind of ethics or morality.
Thank perot. Worthless POS
bush was a one world government guy and I really dislike that whole family, but anything was better than clinton.
the rest of the kennedys..i dont get.
Don’t forget about West Virginia (”Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary”).
” What explains the enduring live affair with Kennedy?!”
He was a democrat, so the press loved him and he ran against Nixon whom the press despised. But the election was close, close enough that it might well have been stolen.
And then he got assassinated. For four days all that was on TV and radio were retrospectives of what we had all lost. By the time he was in the ground he was a secular saint. Franklin was removed from the half dollar to be replaced by JFK. Idyllwild Airport in NYC was renamed JFK, Cape Canaveral in FL was renamed Cape Kennedy, dozens of schools were renamed in his honor. Even his official Presidential portrait portrays him almost in mourning, looking down.
Time has passed and those who remember those times are passing as well and people now look back and wonder what all the fuss over him was about. As I said earlier, you kinda had to have been there.
The article talks about how McKinley never got the treatment JFK got, but neglects that his VP, Teddy Roosevelt kind of did.
Maybe not the worst president we ever had (Obama? Carter? Buchanan?), but certainly the worst man we ever had as president. Totally amoral and driven simply by where he would get his next Bl*wj*b.
I was 12 yrs old at time of Kennedy’s assassination. ..I’ve never forgotten the scowl and muttering my father (who rarely said much) did when he saw rest of family watching all the funeral, etc. He fought in Battle of Leyte, I later learned...and I later deducted he thought very little of JFK. Wished I could have discussed with him as an adult. Kennedys have been a pox on America.
You're right, I was in 8th grade at the time and had even drawn a political cartoon of the Nixon Kennedy debate which was published in our local newspaper. I remember all of what you described quite well.
I was going to say that I was born when JFK was in office, but you don’t make me feel so old now. LOL I dabble in coin collecting (when the whim and wallet are both aligned), and have a Brilliant Uncirculated Franklin half from my birth year. There’s just something eye-catching about silver coins.
Remember when Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle that he was no John Kennedy (or did he say Jack Kennedy)?... Quayle should have responded, “You’re right... I am no John Kennedy... I am faithful to my wife.”
(S)houldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Underneath the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx, first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his “state socialism”, and way before him it was “benevolent monarchy”.Certainly Reagan did not think of JFK as any kind of “right-wing hawk”.
“close enough that it might well have been stolen.”
There is absolutely no question that Joe Kennedy bought the Chicago, Illinois vote. Years later Tip O’Neill was on national TV and ADMITTED that the vote had been bought.
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