Posted on 11/22/2002 7:52:30 AM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
It's 39 years today since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in a motorcade in Dallas when a rifle bullet shattered his skull.
His promise was unfulfilled, his administration unfinished. The pervasive sense of sudden loss was devastating to millions.
But the gauzy legend that sprang up around him after his death is now the dusty stuff of history, its magic overcome by the clarity of hindsight. The Kennedy name is now as much a curse as a blessing.
Roughly 102 million Americans alive today were not born when Kennedy moved into the White House in 1961. They know him only from the vast distance of time, his image distorted by slanderous movies, wild-eyed conspiracy theories and other mindless claptrap peddled by hucksters out to make money or earn notoriety.
Many of us who actually knew him and were with him in Dallas that fateful Nov. 22 -- first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, officials, staffers, Secret Service agents, reporters -- are gone now, too. Kennedy was 46 years old when he was shot. We who were adults in his era are all older now than he was then.
Time has taken its toll on the once-presumed inevitability of another Kennedy presidency. Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the midst of his own 1968 presidential campaign. Sen. Edward Kennedy's White House prospects died in 1969 when an aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned in the car he accidentally drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass. John F. Kennedy Jr., heir to the most famous political name of our era, died childless at the age of 38 in a plane crash off Martha's Vineyard in July 1999.
Robert Kennedy's children, who comprise the bulk of the family's second generation, have not been good dynasty material. A longtime family associate says sadly, "They were so spoiled."
Joe Kennedy served six undistinguished terms in Congress but dropped out of a 1997 race for governor of Massachusetts amid scandals about himself, his ex-wife and his brother Michael. Another brother, Max, declined to run for Congress. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Joe's older sister, was beaten this month when she ran for governor of Maryland. Mark Shriver, the son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, lost a Democratic primary for a Maryland congressional seat this spring.
Camelot, the mythical embodiment of Kennedy glamour, was never real. Jackie made it up. A pleasant but transitory illusion, it could not be sustained in the face of several accounts written since John Kennedy's death exposing his relentless philandering.
The recent release of detailed records showing how expertly Kennedy handled the Cuban missile crisis restored his reputation somewhat. But now comes the discovery by the noted historian, Robert Dallek, that Kennedy suffered from undisclosed maladies that required him to constantly take a shocking array of powerful drugs. Dallek and a physician, Dr. Jeffery A. Kelman, examined previously sealed medical records of the last eight years of Kennedy's life stored in the Kennedy Library. The pair found that Kennedy had been taking antispasmodics, antibiotics, hydrocortisone, testosterone, salt tablets, antihistamines, an antianxiety drug, antidiarrhea drugs, codeine, Demerol, methadone, Ritalin, meprobamate, librium, barbiturates for sleep, thyroid hormone and injections of gamma globulin, apparently to combat infection, and procaine, to kill back pain before public events. He was a walking medicine cabinet.
Throughout his earlier career and during the White House years, Kennedy and his advisers heatedly denied that he had serious health problems. Understandably, he wished to project the illusion of youthful vigor, and he did. But it was a frightening deception. The public had a right to know of the frailties that could have interfered with his ability to function at any moment.
The last man standing in the Kennedy family saga is Ted. The senator from Massachusetts has survived more personal and professional crises than the biblical Job -- sex scandals, a divorce and gross weight fluctuations. Kennedy ran for president in the 1980 Democratic primaries but could not overcome the Chappaquiddick tragedy. Furthermore, in a serious lapse of judgment, he ran against the incumbent president of his own party, Jimmy Carter.
Since then, however, Kennedy has worked hard to become a serious legislator, and with Sen. Strom Thurmond's retirement, he is now the third-longest serving senator. A recent biography by Adam Clymer concludes that his influence on the nation after more than a third of a century in the Senate is far greater than that of his brothers John and Robert, whose lives were cut short. His son Patrick, 35, is a four-term congressman from Rhode Island, doing a sound if unspectacular job and apparently content to stay where he is.
For Ted Kennedy at 70, there are still things to be done. He successfully spearheaded a recent campaign to bring the 2004 Democratic National Convention to his native Boston. Ironically, the nominee crowned there just could be a Massachusetts senator. But it would be John Kerry, not another Kennedy.
I may be suffering from Alzheimer's, but I remember that Kennedy brought us to the brink of war over this and left the missiles in place. Kennedy did a deal with Kruschev to save face and gave up concessions. Maybe someone else remembers for sure.
It's natural inheritor was William Jefferson Clinton. BTW, I will personally NEVER forgive Dwight Eisenhower and Tricky Dick Nixon for not contesting that election. I don't give a damn if it meant Civil War. (And I am still waiting for a word from GWB on the MASSIVE vote fraud that gave Al Gore 7 big states.)
To this day, these guys are represented, for example, as civil rights heroes. They never got on that bandwagon until it was inevitable. I wish some bright young African-American Democrat would take a look at Jack's lackluster congressional career before getting all choked up over Camelot.
Actually, the term is shtupping.
Comparing Kennedy to Job? Guess the author has never read the book of Job in the bible. Job was a righeous man. Kennedy is. . .well, not righteous to say the least.
The statement is merely composed of two separate and unrelated items, but I deliberately placed them side by side to provoke an emotional response from emotional lefty democrats.
Okay, now wait a minute. Reagan didn't get his brains blown out by that bullet. You may not have liked Kennedy, but good grief. No reason to get ugly.
He found that it wasn't cool flying upsidedown over water at night.
I'll leave that judgement to the "Almighty". It might have been "fake", but, then again a lot of athletes, for as long as there has been pharmaceuticals, have used medication to overcome real pain to play.
Interesting. I wonder if he received his anger of Israel while sitting on a parents knee, or was Sirhan simply born a murdering psychotic? Probably both.
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