Posted on 01/07/2019 9:17:27 PM PST by SunkenCiv
On his last day, according to historian Alan Brinkley, he woke up as a president "with admirers and detractors, a man with a record -- some of it good, some of it not.
"By the evening of that day, he had become a legend, enshrouded in a fog of grief and posthumous adulation from which he has never fully emerged," Brinkley said.
...The number of books written about John F. Kennedy surpasses 40,000...
How JFK went from history to memory -- which is how we choose to remember history -- and how that memory was shaped, is the subject of Michael Hogan's new book, "The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy." ...Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is central to Hogan's biography. In Hogan's view, she became the memory maker and head guardian of the image that the first lady and her husband had cultivated in the White House.
"I call it the Kennedy brand, and they did very little to deviate from that image," he said...
...In "The Road to Camelot," by former longtime Boston Globe reporters Curtis Wilkie and Thomas Oliphant, the authors chronicle Sen. Kennedy's five-year campaign for the White House. "Much of modern politics owes its birth to his campaign."
...JFK was an upstart who turned to primaries, not party leaders -- and beat the bosses at the polls. His was the first winning grassroots campaign, and it would become the playbook... "There is a straight line that runs from JFK to Donald Trump, and it's the idea of coming from the outside, in," Oliphant said. "Kennedy wasn't the choice of his party. He wasn't beloved in the Democratic Party when he started running for president."
(Excerpt) Read more at wbur.org ...
‘Great men are not good men?’ Think Ronald Reagan. Just look at how screwed up his kids are.
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I think you responded to the wrong person.
Yeah right, the one that started all the free shit for the poor party?
That would be, arguably, FDR.
More like “Came a lot”.
One of the vintage journalists was talking about one of his experiences in the JFK White House -- he and other urinalists saw JFK grabbing at and chasing a woman (not his wife) into a room and close the door. But back then, he said, that wouldn't be considered proper news. We've now gone to the other extreme, where anything any touch-hole Partisan Media Shill can invent gets broadcast.
Were he still alive (which is a long shot), he'd have kept up with the DNC talking points, step by step. Truman, who gets admiration from me and other around here (he busted unions, for one thing), was absolutely poisonously partisan, as was Alice Roosevelt Longworth.
That's quite a stretch. Kennedy was a politician's politician from a political family and nothing like Donald Trump.
I see the JFK worshipping history revisionists are on this thread already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5eyI5r2j2c
Hey look, here's a random clip of Bill Clinton getting BIG applause for saying "The era of big government is over" in a speech. Guess that PROVES Slick Wilie was "more conservative than most of today's Republicans" and would be a proud Trump loving red-blooded free market anti-communist pro-life conservative patriot if he were president today!
Ain't it great taking random quotes from socialist RAT presidents out of context so we can retroactively pretend they were conservative?
Why would he tell me all this? Because I was going to an elite, all girl, Catholic High School and was being fed a bunch of lies.
Absolutely. In essence, he was a con.
That seems to be a fairly common outcome for children of highly successful parent(s).
The combination of time and energy required achieving success/greatness can result in family neglect. Couple that with children uncomfortable with being somehow different from other children and you have a recipe for messed up kids.
It was a vague statement open to many interpretations. "Asking what we can do for our country" can be interpreted as a call for people to become good socialist worker bees performing their unselfish duty to the collective.
Revisionism.....
Well, he did. A bullet made him famous, like Abe; especially when compared to the Johnson Veep that followed. But Abe was a great man, Jack was not; just a lack-luster head of state with a quaint Boston Back Bay accent, imitated in Bob Newhart's achingly hilarious soliloquy.
In the time range prior to the Dallas repository incident Kennedy, like Carter, arguably would not have been a shoo-in for a second term. At that time, his performance was quite unpopular, especially reversing Ike's stance on South Asia involvement. The results of his policies were not shocking like Reagan's or Trump's.
Watched it all, never ever got bit by the JFK Spanish-flu-like bug. I've always considered them fools who did.
Nonetheless, the Boston Globe, that bastion of liberalism, understands today’s Dem party would have nothing to do with JFK as a candidate.
“the whole Camelot thing was pushed by Jackie after the assassination”
She was good at pushing the “branding” the author mentions. Probably did it to help guarantee their kids’ legacies and help their future successes. Sadly, neither was particulary smart.
“who was constantly unfaithful to Jackie.”
Jackie had her own issues with perfidy. I met a woman in the ‘60s who was a maid for Kennedys’ friend/neighbors at the Palm Beach home. She was a member of my uncle’s church in WPB. Lots went on that never was reported.
“Ask not what your country can do for you...” is in direct opposition to the Great Society welfare state.
And JFK didn’t write that. Ted Sorensen did.
But JFK did write a Harvard thesis that was later published as a book and daddy Joe bought up as many copies as he possibly could so the claim could be made during JFK’s early Congressional run that he was a best-selling author... and that is just one tiny example of how daddy Joe worked it.
What ever he was, he was educated, articulate and well read.
To speak to present day Democrats, they’d have to have an interpreter.... present day Liberals are the product of an educational system JFK probably would not recognize
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