[Dilbert San Diego]

I often wonder who the hell decided that the Kennedy family was somehow like an American royal family.

[WayneS]

The Press.

[Red Badger]

ABCBSNBCNYTLATWAPO.....................

[SkyDancer]

Basically it was the lame-stream media plus Hollyweird folks.

[hanamizu]

I often wonder who the hell decided that the Kennedy family was somehow like an American royal family.

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Don’t know if you were around then or not, but I’ll try and set the stage for you. Kennedy was different from nearly a lifetime’s worth of previous presidents. He was young, attractive, witty, had an elegant wife, cute children and spoke with what most Americans thought of as an upper class accent. He seemed to be idealistic as well.

The press just ate it all up. Called it Camelot. (Remind you a bit of a more recent president?) And then he got assassinated. Three days of national mourning. Three days of nothing but Kennedy retrospectives on TV. Dumped Franklin on the half dollar and stuck his portrait on it—which caused half dollars to disappear from circulation since spending them almost seemed disrespectful. Schools, airports and space centers got his name.

People were a bit upset when his widow remarried. Then Robert was assassinated. Of course the last brother, the fat one, was politically bullet proof. How could someone vote against a Kennedy?

As JFK fades from living memory, he turns out to be nowhere near as big an historical figure as people who were alive at the time seemed to believe. The really historic thing he did, “we’ll put a man on the moon in this decade”, the nation has turned its back on.