The writer is obviously young. If you were there then, you understand. I worked against Kennedy for Nixon while I was a senior in high school. But even I was poleaxed when he was assassinated. Obama was consequential for being the first black president. Kennedy was the first glamorous, handsome and young one for our generation. We skipped over the generation of our parents when our grandfather, Eisenhower, left office. Suddenly we, the young, were in power. And people who agonized and remembered the second world war, turned toward the future and space. People of that time wished they could travel in Europe, especially Paris. Suddenly the news was filled with beautiful people doing exactly that. The politics was almost irrelevant compared to the excitement.
And, yes, of course he was a minor president. But present mythology is based on the mythology that was real at the time Kennedy was president. It was all fake, but the population enjoyed the story that the papers presented of this young family dominating the globe. And part of the trauma of his death wasn't him, it was the recognition of the vulnerability of our system of government. Stories of other presidents being assassinated were just stories. For the first time, we lived with the reality. And it shook our foundations.
Whatever his personal faults, he was to the right of half the entrenched swamp dwellers that have an R next to their name in DC today.
And people who agonized and remembered the second world war, turned toward the future and space.
Good summation of the times. Kennedy’s “space race” to the landing on the Moon was inspirational to a lot of young kids growing up back then. It was partly a competition between the Soviets and the U.S., but a better kind of competition than war.
If you weren’t there you will never understand the spirit of Freedom, the energy, the unfettered optimism that existed in the Free World during the Eisenhower/Kennedy years.
Even the assassination didn’t dim that spirit all that much. It was LBJ and the Viet Nam War that began the slide -that eventually became an avalanche post Ronald Reagan.
The Bushes and Obama will go down in history as the worst Presidents in American History.
JFK was a complete loser PERIOD
And I swallowed all the BS about the remarkable Kennedys and voted for him in my first presidential election
A whole damn family of LOSERS
Excellent summary of the sociological contours of the historical moment.
I was a small child at the time of the assassination, but somehow I really remember how that episode shook my parents. Even as a child I could intuitively sense the deeply traumatic impact the event had on society. I think you make a very insightful summary of the psychology of that period.
I was not impressed with the distracting irrelevancies, e.g. Jackie-O's glamor, John John's darlingness, Jack Kennedy's sexy philandering. On the contrary, I found them irritating at best, dangerous at worst.
Of course the assassination was horrifying, but the glitz dazzled and blinded millions enough to allow some appalling things to occur, such as Teddy Kennedy's long stint in Congress despite the horrifying Mary Jo Kopechne incident, ignored successfully because of the glitz, and other things as well.
Kennedy was a mediocre President, certainly not as bad as the Democrat Presidents who came after him.
In the past few years I have read a number of books about the Kennedys. Generally, they had good points and bad. I do find things to admire about Joe the patriarch, Jackie, and Jack, along with things that are not admirable.
If they were the people living next door, I'm sure I would like them very well, recognizing their good and bad points.
But the glitz and "glamor" were an appalling and dangerous illusion and a glaring example of why we must never allow irrelevancies--or fantasies--or illusions--to distract us from the truth.
This is a big problem. Today, self-serving politicians et al. invent and encourage such illusions to serve their purposes, and many in the public accept and encourage them for various reasons, some because they don't want the bother of thinking.
For example, the fantasies about Obama have prevented an honest examination of his birth and background.
There are many other examples.
Glitz, fantasies, and this sort of "mythology" are illusions, and illusions are very dangerous, especially when they interfere with truth, and this is the real criticism of the illusion known as "Camelot."
He is definitely the most overrated President. He had some good speeches (thanks to his speechwriter) and had a good sense of humor ("Washington, DC, is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm"), but accomplished very little. He avoided WWIII at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, but perhaps greater vigilance would have kept the Russians from putting the missiles there to begin with.
William Doyle's An American Insurrection is worth reading--about the integration of Ole Miss. JFK may have had good intentions but was clueless on how to handle the situation.
The one really consequential assassination was that of Lincoln. The war was virtually over at the time of his death, but he certainly would have handled Reconstruction much more skillfully than Andrew Johnson did.
The President that has been deified beyond all rational explanation is Lincoln. No other President comes close.
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...
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.