Of all the U.S. presidents to mythologize, why pick JFK?

The Globe and Mail ^ | Jeet Heer

[mairdie]

As the books' sales show, a large and receptive public likewise continues to worship at the shrine of JFK. Polls show that the U.S. public ranks Mr. Kennedy as among the greatest of American presidents, often in the same league as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Rarely is popular mythology so completely disengaged from historical reality.

To place Mr. Kennedy in the same pantheon as Lincoln and Roosevelt is absurd. Lincoln presided over the Civil War and freed the slaves, Roosevelt laid the foundations for the American welfare state and led a reluctant nation into the Second World War.

Mr. Kennedy had no comparable achievements. Save for the assassin's bullet that gave him a martyr's halo, he was a mediocre president, distinguished mainly by his combination of eloquent rhetoric and often-reckless foreign policy.

Curiously, the cult of Kennedy is particularly strong in liberal circles, even though he was among the most conservative Democrats ever to be president. One character in 11/22/63 says that stopping Lee Harvey Oswald's great crime is a chance to "save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe."

Not likely, actually: The son of an isolationist, Mr. Kennedy came of age politically in the late 1940s, when the tide of Cold War sentiment was at its highest. His father was close friends with Joseph McCarthy, and unlike other Democrats JFK never turned against the blacklisting senator. Indeed, like that famed demagogue, he consistently derided any attempts to negotiate with the Soviet Union or China as evidence of appeasement and unmanliness. ...

[mairdie]

I’ll still thank Bush II for his comfort after 9/11.

[mairdie]

Thank you for your kind comment. I’m remembering again how events bond us all together. People who remember the assassination, regardless of the rest of their lives diverging, all come together in the memory.

[Mr Rogers]

Kennedy looked good and got a lot of sex. He was the guy the news media WANTED to be! So...they puffed him up. That is the reason for the myth.

“Let me be the thousandth person to say that Bradlee and Kennedy were, as types, much the same. If Bradlee had been President, he would have been much like Kennedy: without ideology, mindful of style, reliant on expert elders, intelligent but hardly intellectual, long on vision and wit, short on temper and attention span. And Kennedy, who followed the press and its actors obsessively, would have been Bradlee-esque in a newsroom: excited by stories that broke news and balls, bored by “process stories”—what Bradlee calls “room emptiers.”...

...On the night of the West Virginia primary, the Kennedys and the Bradlees went to see a porno movie—“a nasty thing” called “Private Property” and “starring one Katie Manx as a horny housewife.” Imagine the uproar today.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/09/18/last-of-the-red-hots

I was young enough when Kennedy died that I mostly remember being upset that the funeral interfered with the cartoons on Saturday morning.

But why was he mythologized? Because he was the guy the new media wanted to be...

[marktwain]

>>Kennedy was a media created president, maybe the first one

Doubt that. I spent a year, morning till night, reading NY newspapers from 1775 to 1830. They were dense with detailed articles but the candidates were totally familiar to the average citizen.

---

Yes, of course. But the media then was partisan, and everyone knew which media outlets were with which party.

By saying Kennedy was a media created president, maybe the first one, I was trying to make the point that a ideologically united media created a president that the media wanted, and got him elected, vs what an informed population might have elected.

The media pretty much loathed Nixon, and loved Kennedy.

Did you see anything like that from 1775 to 1830, where the vast majority of the media favored on candidate over the other? We did not even have parties, as such, much before 1800, as I recall.

[mairdie]

>>But why was he mythologized? Because he was the guy the new media wanted to be

Absolutely fascinating analysis.

[mairdie]

>>Did you see anything like that from 1775 to 1830, where the vast majority of the media favored on candidate over the other?

My reading was within the newspapers in which Henry Livingston might have published, so it wasn’t wide enough for me to make any generalized statement on that. All I would have seen is one paper for one person and another against. What I was most frequently fascinated by was the political infighting within the same extended family. For Henry to be working for his friend and cousin John Jay, he was working against his cousin Robert Livingston.

You make excellent points.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

JFK put a man on the moon.

No. Kennedy the empty suit, made a speech about putting a man on the moon. And to some just saying it made it so. Let us disregard the guy who actually did it, Richard M Nixon.

Kennedy got the Vietnam War started, Richard M Nixon had to end it.

In fact most of Richard M Nixon presidency was spend in the unglamorous task of cleaning up the whore-monger's mess or actually doing what the your dear "warmly remembered" drug addict promised. That is, when commie boy Kennedy was not busy destroying our national defense and the civil services.

I have the same respect for "glamorous inspiring" Kennedy as I do for the "glamorous inspiring" Obama. They are cut for EXACTLY the same cloth.

[nobamanomore]

Why FDR?

I never did think Jackie was anything special either,

[sparklite2]

1, Kennedy was young.
2. Kennedy was handsome.
3. Kennedy was a veteran.
4. Kennedy had a lovely family.
5. Kennedy was killed before he had been in office long enough to do things people would hate him for. Had he lived, Viet Nam would have been his downfall.