According to Schlesinger, Mrs. Kennedy later thought she may have overdone this theme.
(Ya think?)
Posted on 11/18/2013 10:40:37 AM PST by mojito
Later this week, the where-were-you-when-you-first-heard crowd will be putting on a full court press for the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy. As the years go by I grow less and less interested in grassy knolls and all the rest, but I am struck by one genuine, non-conspiracy-theorist feature of the event: It's the only assassination with a musical score. Garfield doesn't have one, nor does Lincoln, although he was shot at a theatre. I twice had the misfortune of sitting through tryouts for something called JFK The Musical. Aside from any other problems, the concept suffered from the fact that JFK had already been given the Broadway treatment, by his own widow, in the days after his death. The source material was a chap called T H White, a British novelist born in Bombay in 1906. His name has faded a little since his death in 1964, but his Arthurian series The Once And Future King was for many years the most accessible telling of the Camelot story for children and grown-ups alike. And the Broadway musical Lerner & Loewe made from Terence White's work was responsible for one of the most unlikely yet enduring intersections of life and art.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Read it and learn something.
“Camelot”?! Pfffttt.....
“Obamajesus Christ Superstar” had been playing for the past 5 - 6 years.
Ouch! That's gonna leave a mark....
JFK and Alan Jay Lerner were Harvard classmates.
Liberal politics always contains an over-generous portion of make-believe. There have already been a couple of abortive attempts to cast the 0bama administration in Camelotian terms. The human imagination only goes so far.
Poor Jackie, sitting in an open limo beside a husband whose brains had been blown out by a sniper's bullet.
I suspect a distraught widow was open to almost any suggestion by the power mad LBJ, including this one, as the Camelot legend helped him ride to easy election the following year.
Even as a young boy, LBJ made my skin crawl for reasons I cannot explain. And in subsequent years, I still cannot explain how LBJ was suddenly prepared to choreograph the whole tragedy, from positioning Jackie at his side during the swearing in ceremony aboard Air Force One, to ordering the Secret Service to clean up the limo (and thus destroy the crime scene) while JFK was being pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital, to giving orders that the body be immediately flown back to Washington (and thus avoid the autopsy required by Texas state law), to suggesting to Jackie that the autopsy there be performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital ("because Jack was in the Navy") which had no forensic program rather than Walter Reed, which has the best forensic program in the country, and finally rushing out the Warren Commission Report just in time for the 1964 election, which most Americans now rightly see as a work of fiction with some truth mixed in.
After the unconscionable way Bobby and JFK treated Johnson, I am sure he was glad to see the last of them.
What about "Bridge Over Troubled Water"?
I look at the Obama Administration as the Dawn of the Dead terms. =)
OMG ROFL ROFL GOOD ONE JEFF!
Not that good and certainly not original but what the hey.
I'm sure he was. But don't forget that one reason the enmity between RFK and LBJ ran so deep was Johnson's ties to Billie Sol Estes and RFK's prosecution of a close LBJ friend.
BSE outlived LBJ by 40 years and became convinced that LBJ arranged for the assassination. That doesn't prove he did, of course, but it is probably one of the few plausible theories out there.
I always thought "Camelot" was the work of kept Kennedy family historian Arthur Schlesinger, also a co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA).
I always thought that little turd Bobby, was behind all the animosity.
He thought of LBJ as a rustic clod and not good enough to be on the ticket with a Kennedy back bay, blue-blood.
Bobby was a regular creep.
Jim Piereson argues that Mrs Kennedy's decision - conscious or unwitting - to frame her husband's Presidency in terms of utopian liberalism played a central role in unhinging the Democratic Party and severing it from the FDR-Truman-JFK legacy, especially on foreign policy. In other words, yoking Kennedy to Camelot played a large part in what Lerner called the "chamber of horrors" of the Sixties. That's a mighty big burden to place on one showtune. But, whatever calculations lay behind the creation and promotion of the myth and whatever the subsequent tarnishing of it, it's hard to deny that for millions of Americans a grieving Presidential widow's quotation of a Broadway cast album created a synthesis of politics and music that they understood instantly and responded to sincerely.Camelot lives onAlas, for the author and old classmate of the murdered leader, it freighted the show with far too much pain. "For myself," said Alan Jay Lerner, "I have never been able to see a performance of Camelot again."
Of all the Kennedy men, I think he was also the best one about keeping his pants zipped.
Wasn’t HE sent to Hollywood to tell MM to back off and then, began an affair with her himself?
But it was JFK himself who cut off relations with MM after a warning from Bobbie that she could be a potential political embarrassment.
While the Kennedy men loved satisfying their overly active libidos, they loved the perks of political power even more.
I'm not saying that RFK was a saint or even close, just that he seemed to be the one more focused on politics than the other playboys in the clan.
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