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.
They were both decadent narcissists. An Irish Catholic friend of our family was a supplier to the White House, and in spite of his inclination to admire them, was quite disillusioned by what he saw in the White House, with her in particular. He couldn’t help but conclude from his dealing with her, including measuring her personal bedroom (separate from Jack) for renovations, that she was more interested in herself than both her husband and her children. He was revolted by the friends she brought into the White House, such as the “poet” who made cuts in his forearms and dipped his pen into his blood to write his poems. In the White House.
People in the rest of the country didn’t find out Jack was a horndog, risking American security by inviting hookers into the White House regularly, but it was well known around DC, as was her payoff from the criminal Joe Kennedy to stay with Jack. At that time, DC was still a relatively small town, much smaller than today, and news got around. Almost everyone inside the yet-to-be-built Beltway, white or black, knew someone who dealt directly with whomever were in office, before the huge growth of government and the explosion of high-tech companies and lobbyists settling around DC from the late 70s onward. You used to be able to just zip downtown, park easily on streets around the Mall and go into the museums and Federal buildings for the day, paying about a nickel an hour for your parking meter.
Aside from the disgusting state of the Kennedy’s marriage, her slavishness to (and expenditures on) fashion were the worst since Dolly Madison (whose extravagant life devolved to bankruptcy after James Madison’s death) and possibly Mrs. Lincoln, who was mentally ill. Jack and Jackie were the Obamas of their day, and as freeper “Mr Rogers” noted above, the media worshipped them and hid their antics from the people at large. Althought they were the much-vaunted “first Catholic president” and his wife, they flouted morality with the enthusiastic help of the press. Such hypocrisy and phoniness changed the office from a respected, serious position to an idol-worshipped, celebrity style show trying to compete with the shallow European high societies our ancestors had left behind. Most unfortunate for our country.
freepertoo, sorry to keep piling on. It’s not personal to you. I’m trying to show how they earned my deep distaste and disrespect for them.