he just didn't like being photographed in wearing one.
Posted on 11/21/2017 2:34:13 AM PST by mairdie
As the books' sales show, a large and receptive public likewise continues to worship at the shrine of JFK. Polls show that the U.S. public ranks Mr. Kennedy as among the greatest of American presidents, often in the same league as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Rarely is popular mythology so completely disengaged from historical reality.
To place Mr. Kennedy in the same pantheon as Lincoln and Roosevelt is absurd. Lincoln presided over the Civil War and freed the slaves, Roosevelt laid the foundations for the American welfare state and led a reluctant nation into the Second World War.
Mr. Kennedy had no comparable achievements. Save for the assassin's bullet that gave him a martyr's halo, he was a mediocre president, distinguished mainly by his combination of eloquent rhetoric and often-reckless foreign policy.
Curiously, the cult of Kennedy is particularly strong in liberal circles, even though he was among the most conservative Democrats ever to be president. One character in 11/22/63 says that stopping Lee Harvey Oswald's great crime is a chance to "save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe."
Not likely, actually: The son of an isolationist, Mr. Kennedy came of age politically in the late 1940s, when the tide of Cold War sentiment was at its highest. His father was close friends with Joseph McCarthy, and unlike other Democrats JFK never turned against the blacklisting senator. Indeed, like that famed demagogue, he consistently derided any attempts to negotiate with the Soviet Union or China as evidence of appeasement and unmanliness. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
The writer is obviously young. If you were there then, you understand. I worked against Kennedy for Nixon while I was a senior in high school. But even I was poleaxed when he was assassinated. Obama was consequential for being the first black president. Kennedy was the first glamorous, handsome and young one for our generation. We skipped over the generation of our parents when our grandfather, Eisenhower, left office. Suddenly we, the young, were in power. And people who agonized and remembered the second world war, turned toward the future and space. People of that time wished they could travel in Europe, especially Paris. Suddenly the news was filled with beautiful people doing exactly that. The politics was almost irrelevant compared to the excitement.
And, yes, of course he was a minor president. But present mythology is based on the mythology that was real at the time Kennedy was president. It was all fake, but the population enjoyed the story that the papers presented of this young family dominating the globe. And part of the trauma of his death wasn't him, it was the recognition of the vulnerability of our system of government. Stories of other presidents being assassinated were just stories. For the first time, we lived with the reality. And it shook our foundations.
He was also assassinated when the MSM’s grip on the public was on the rise thanks to television. I doubt that if Nixon had won and had been assassinated he would be held in the same high esteem.
The MSM and their liberal adoration of Kennedy was central. With his death, they had a hollywood type story to dominate the future. And don’t forget the historians who peppered his administration. The MSM would have turned Nixon’s death into a morality play showing why Nixon should never have been elected.
I can only speculate as I wasn’t around then. But, based on people I know who met him when he would campaign in Mass, he was a rich, good looking, charismatic guy with a gorgeous wife. After 8 years of Ike the US was ready to go younger.
Then he got shot. In our living room.
It had nothing to do with accomplishments, which we can all agree on as being mediocre.
“...freed the slaves,...”, is, considering the chain link strong death grip, that the propaganda machine has on many black people, still an open question.
He was nothing more than the first "TV character president" we ever had. If it weren't for television he would have been some nobody in Massachusetts politics.
Wow, how did the writer miss that Jackie Kennedy his wife created this myth .
?
There are books written about Jackie concerned about his legacy and her kids future cleverly using the current Broadway Musical Camelot to create this myth .
Yes, and I recall reading the story in which Don Hewitt, who produced the Nixon-Kennedy TV debate in 1960, got away with making Kennedy look poised and polished and Nixon look very much the opposite. And also the comment from a friend of Nixon’s who thought Dick sounded fine over the radio, but this friend apparently did not watch the spectacle on TV.
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November 18, 2011
Excellent observation! The myth endures and always shall.
JFK put a man on the moon. Yes, he didn’t live to see it happen, but his dream and his death made it happen. All empires and nations die. And when the American empire is dead, and all our buildings and monuments are gone from war or time, we will still have been the first people to take that first step beyond our planet. That will be remembered for all time and for that JFK should always be warmly remembered.
Like Obama was the first black president, JFK was the first Catholic president. There was a lot of “identity politics” surrounding JFK. How many people had a framed picture of any other president hanging in their home? They did with JFK (before the assassination) as I am sure many did during BHO.
he just didn't like being photographed in wearing one.
Some black co-workers put up Obama pictures after he was elected - and within a year they were all gone. They realized he wasn’t going to pay their rent or buy their gas, and were quite disillusioned. Obama was much more significant for white libs than blacks; that is why Black Lies Matter started during his presidency.
He was hittin’ Marilyn Monroe.
Today’s headlines prove that this is the biggest resume’ enhancer to Democrats. Sex and power.
He and his brother Robert were screwing anything female on two legs.
Kennedy was worse than mediocre.
Getting plugged was the best thing that ever happened to him as it allowed the myth of Camelot to be built around what quite likely would have been a one term wonder.
The MSM and their liberal adoration of Kennedy was central. With his death, they had a hollywood type story to dominate the future. And don’t forget the historians who peppered his administration. The MSM would have turned Nixon’s death into a morality play showing why Nixon should never have been elected.
We would never have had Lyndon Banes Johnson and all the failed “Great Society” programs without the assassination of John Kennedy. It was one of the biggest “Overton Windows” or “Crisis not gone to waste” of all time.
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