Posted on 11/28/2011 8:14:31 PM PST by ventanax5
A nation that considers John F. Kennedy one of its greatest presidents is not a serious nation.
Clearly, Americas have been intoxicated by the Kennedy mix of celebrity and martyrdom. They have been fed Kennedy misinformation for decades. As a result, the Kennedy myth has worked as a cultural toxin.
For my part I have suggested that JFK is the presiding genie behind the Vietnam Era counterculture. He also influenced the growth of an American celebrity culture and of an ethic that values aristocratic decadence. No other president so clearly embodied a culture of permanent entitlement.
Yesterday Ross Douthut offered his own analysis of the Kennedy myth. Since his views correspond closely with mind, I find them estimable and quotable.
In his words: “In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as ‘incomplete.’ The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.)”
I and many others have tried to make clear that Kennedy’s legacy must include the Vietnam War.
Seeing the problem, the Kennedy propaganda machine has done everything in its power to absolve JFK of responsibility for the debacle. It has relied largely on a counterfactual: if JFK had not been killed, he would have withdrawn from Vietnam before it became a disaster.
(Excerpt) Read more at stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com ...
Clearly, Americas have been intoxicated by the Kennedy mix of celebrity and martyrdom. They have been fed Kennedy misinformation for decades. As a result, the Kennedy myth has worked as a cultural toxin.
For my part I have suggested that JFK is the presiding genie behind the Vietnam Era counterculture. He also influenced the growth of an American celebrity culture and of an ethic that values aristocratic decadence. No other president so clearly embodied a culture of permanent entitlement.
Yesterday Ross Douthut offered his own analysis of the Kennedy myth. Since his views correspond closely with mind, I find them estimable and quotable.
In his words: “In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as ‘incomplete.’ The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.)”
I and many others have tried to make clear that Kennedy’s legacy must include the Vietnam War.
Seeing the problem, the Kennedy propaganda machine has done everything in its power to absolve JFK of responsibility for the debacle. It has relied largely on a counterfactual: if JFK had not been killed, he would have withdrawn from Vietnam before it became a disaster.
It is usually not a very good sign when you have to defend your position with a fiction.
Douthut counters: “Actually, it would be more accurate to describe the Vietnam War as Kennedy’s darkest legacy. His Churchillian rhetoric (‘pay any price, bear any burden ...’) provided the war’s rhetorical frame as surely as George W. Bush’s post-9/11 speeches did for our intervention in Iraq. His slow-motion military escalation established the strategic template that Lyndon Johnson followed so disastrously. And the war’s architects were all Kennedy people: It was the Whiz Kids’ mix of messianism and technocratic confidence, not Oswald’s fatal bullet, that sent so many Americans to die in Indochina.”
And then there’s the idea, recently dusted off by Frank Rich, that Kennedy was killed by a toxic atmosphere of right-wing hatred. When Rich offered this opinion last week in New York Magazine I thought it was too ridiculous to critique. Atmospheres do not kill people.People kill people.
When I read Rich’s article, I felt that he was embarrassing himself. Sometimes he is so good at it that he does not really need too much help from me.
Douthut refutes Rich by pointing out that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a right-wing fanatic. He was a left-wing fanatic.
In his words: “The idea that an atmosphere of right-wing hate somehow inspired a Marxist radical to murder a famously hawkish cold war president is even more implausible than the widespread suggestion that the schizophrenic Jared Lee Loughner shot his congresswoman because Sarah Palin put some targets on an online political map.”
Clearly, Douthut is correct.
It is nonetheless fair to say that the mystery surrounding the circumstances of Kennedy’s assassination has contributed to the cultish aura that grew up around him.
Even people who agree that Oswald alone fired the bullet that killed John Kennedy still have doubts about whether or not he had planned, organized, and implemented the assassination all by himself. Even if Oswald fired the fatal shots, we do not know whether he had been recruited by some outside group.
It may be true that Jack Ruby was so overwhelmed with grief about the assassination of JFK that he decided that he had execute Oswald himself, but still, Ruby was more closely attached to organized crime than to political zealots.
Whatever Ruby’s intention, his action succeeded in silencing Lee Harvey Oswald. Whether or not this served the interests of a third party, we will likely never know.
Would a more plausible explanation make JFK less of a cult figure? Would he be less of a cult figure if Lee Harvey Oswald had gone on trial and explained what he meant when he said that he was a "patsy?" Would JFK have been less of a cult figure if he had died of heart disease? It is all worth pondering.
If some dark and evil mysterious force recruited Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate JFK, and if that force is so powerful that it has never been brought to justice, doesn’t that suggest that JFK was an ultimate force for good?
To some people, that is certainly the way it looks.
The truth lies elsewhere. Thanks to Kennedy, Douthut explains: “We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with genuine achievement. We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape the blame. And we imagine that the worst evils can be blamed exclusively on subterranean demons, rather than on the follies that often flow from fine words and high ideals.
from what I understand the “mystique” came after his death,
I think the “Bay of Pigs” was a dark legacy on his part too.
Ventanax, that is an excellent piece. Good job!
Oh sure...
How about that other Texas President, LBJ the Sultan of Socialism...
With his Great Society and War on Poverty programs, he ramrodded and socially engineered our country into a welfare state.
“Even people who agree that Oswald alone fired the bullet that killed John Kennedy still have doubts about whether or not he had planned, organized, and implemented the assassination all by himself.”
Not me.
““In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as ‘incomplete.’ The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.)” “
bump
Just another dead Democrat.
Which is why the Left had to invent the myth that Oswald had nothing to do with it, and was a stool pidgeon of the extreme right, as most infamously and artfully claimed in the detestable "JFK".
The first time I ever heard my Gramma use the term son of a bitch she was referring to jfk. She always was an astute judge of character.
William Doyle's book An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962, is pretty devastating on the Kennedy brothers' incompetence in handling the crisis at Ole Miss when James Meredith became the first black student there.
Terrific reading. I believe that Kennedy was elected due to voting fraud via Chicago, most notably. Joe Kennedy made sure that his son had the votes, by golly.
Nixon really won that election, and had he served, it is my opinion that the war in Vietnam would not have taken place. Nixon was a brilliant statesman and a strategist. He would have avoided such a conflict at all costs. Kennedy was in over his head. Nixon would not have been.
Along with that, Kennedy’s health issues, his sessions with Dr. Feelgood, his blatant philandering, his mafia links, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and God knows what all else, this country was not in good hands with John Kennedy. No amount of painting it with Camelot colors can really cover that up.
I do not generally have a high regard for JFK, and especially not for any of the other Kennedys. That said, I have a piece of history in my home...it is a homemade bar that was used in serving Jack and Jackie in the home of the late Dem Party Chairman in a town that helped propel JFK to the presidency. I call it my ‘Presidential Podium’. We do not use it for a bar, but we have used it as a podium.
The Dem Party Chairman in Cuyahoga County, Ohio was the first to support Kennedy in 1960. The Kennedy’s were guests in his home both before and after he became president.
1960 was the first time I was eligible to vote in a National Election. I voted...for Richard Milhouse...had Nixon won (he did but Cook County ‘cooked’ the votes) many things would likely have been different...and we would never have had a Watergate.
JFK was an economic conservative, and likely was killed because he sought to undermine the Fed by having the US Treasury print our money.
Had Kennedy survived, we likely would not have had a Johnson ‘Great Society’ to begin/further promote our destruction from within.
Hind sight speculation can be interesting, and of course that is all it is...hind sight speculation.
Like Mussolini and Kennedy, the cult of personality.
The Kennedy myth largely came from his assasination and was boosted by Bobby’s assasination. It’s pretty much dissipated by now, except for a few hangers-on like Crissie Matthews who can’t admit the RATS have gone totally commie.
JFK was the first president elected in an age where television dominated the political scene. He was an abject mediocrity and it’s pretty much been all downhill ever since.
Kennedy is an example of the power of propaganda.
Kennedy was the first Hollywood style president. To the nation he clearly looked like the lead actor in a Hollyweird flick while Nixon looked like the heavy. The nations even-then very lib media certainly liked to depict it that way.
But judging Kennedy's intent, set apart from his actual deeds, he was not a lib like today's libs are. Kennedy was anti-communist and hawkish on foreign policy, and he and his brother were not happy with a lot of what M.L. King did. He cut taxes in 1962 resulting in an economic upturn. But the lib press made sure to quote Kennedy as calling businessmen sons of b.....s. In short, while Kennedy was not a great president, he was also not the great lib they hoped for.
Sure. It's a movie star approach to politics. But sometimes politics is so depressing, you can understand why people pick out some politician to glamorize.
FWIW, it's pronounced "Douthut" but spelled "Douthat."
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