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The Enduring Cult of Kennedy
Topic Started: Nov 27 2011, 11:59 AM (246 Views)
George K
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Finally
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/opinion/sunday/Douthat-The-Enduring-Cult-of-Kennedy.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper

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The Enduring Cult of Kennedy

THE cult of John F. Kennedy has the resilience of a horror-movie villain. No matter how many times the myths of Camelot are seemingly interred by history, they always come shambling back to life — in another television special, another Vanity Fair cover story, another hardcover hagiography.

It’s fitting, then, that the latest exhumation comes courtesy of Stephen King himself. King serves a dual role in our popular culture: He’s at once the master of horror and the bard of the baby boom, writing his way through the twilit borderlands where the experiences of the post-World War II generation are stalked by nightmares and shadowed by metaphysical dread.

In this landscape, the death of J.F.K. looms up like the Overlook Hotel. The gauzy fantasy of the Kennedy White House endures precisely because the reality of the assassination still feels like a primal catastrophe — an irruption of inexplicable evil as horrifying as any supernatural bogeyman.

At its best, King’s new Kennedy assassination novel, “11/22/63” — which sends its protagonist back in time to change that November day’s events — offers an implicit critique of this generational obsession. (I am not giving much away when I reveal that the time-traveling hero does not succeed in freeing ’60s America from the cruel snares of history.) But its narrative power still depends on accepting the false premises of the Kennedy cult — premises that will no doubt endure so long as the 1960s generation does, but still deserve to be challenged at every opportunity.

The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one if he’d lived. Few serious historians take this view: It belongs to Camelot’s surviving court stenographers, and to popularizers like Chris Matthews, whose new best seller “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” works hard to gloss over the thinness of the 35th president’s actual accomplishments. Yet there is no escaping the myth’s hold on the popular imagination. In Gallup’s “greatest president” polling, J.F.K. still regularly jostles with Lincoln and Reagan for the top spot.

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.)

The second false premise is that Kennedy would have kept us out of Vietnam. Or as a character puts it in “11/22/63,” making the case for killing Lee Harvey Oswald: “Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”

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.

The third myth is that Kennedy was a martyr to right-wing unreason. Writing on J.F.K. in the latest issue of New York magazine, Frank Rich half-acknowledges the mediocrity of Kennedy’s presidency. But he cannot resist joining a generation of liberals in drawing a connection between the right-wing “atmosphere of hate” in early-1960s Dallas and the assassination itself — and then linking both to today’s anti-Obama zeal. Neither can King, whose “11/22/63” explicitly compares right-wing Dallas to his own fictional territory of Derry, Me. — home of the murderous Pennywise the Clown from “It,” among other demons.

This connection is the purest fantasy, made particularly ridiculous by the fact that both Rich and King acknowledge that Oswald was a leftist — a pro-Castro agitator whose other assassination target was the far-right segregationist Edwin Walker. 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.

This last example suggests why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today. 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.
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Renauda
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HOLY CARP!!!
This appears to be a timely follow up to Chris Hitchen's 2006 article debunking JFK's legend, or if you like, cult status:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/09/feckless-youth/5095/2/
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George K
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Thanks, Renauda. Going into my "things to read between cases" bookmark.
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Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

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jon-nyc
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George K
Nov 27 2011, 11:59 AM
Yet there is no escaping the myth’s hold on the popular imagination. In Gallup’s “greatest president” polling, J.F.K. still regularly jostles with Lincoln and Reagan for the top spot.
That Reagan and Kennedy can even be in consideration shows both (1) recency bias, and (2) lack of historical perspective.
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George K
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It's almost half a century since Kennedy's death. Is that too soon to make an assessment? How much perspective does one need? At the time of Lincoln, they talked about Madison, Washington and Jefferson.
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- Klaus, 4/29/18
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jon-nyc
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I didn't say it was too soon. THe day after he died you could make the assessment that he wasn't in the running for greatest president ever. Same with RR. (day after he left, in his case)
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George K
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jon-nyc
Nov 27 2011, 01:25 PM
That Reagan and Kennedy can even be in consideration shows ... (2) lack of historical perspective.
'Splain, please?

I'm not disputing that he wasn't one of the greatest, I'm questioning what historical perspective one needs to make that judgment.
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Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

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- Klaus, 4/29/18
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jon-nyc
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Cheers
I understand how you interpreted my words, I was a bit ambiguous. I don't mean that one lacks temporal distance required for a proper perspective on JFK/RR (though that's also true), rather I mean one obviously lacks perspective on the overall course of US history to consider someone like JFK or RR to be in the running for the top.
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jon-nyc
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Renauda
Nov 27 2011, 12:56 PM
This appears to be a timely follow up to Chris Hitchen's 2006 article debunking JFK's legend, or if you like, cult status:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/09/feckless-youth/5095/2/
Excellent piece, I hadn't read that before.
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jon-nyc
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Cheers
(for those who read the Hitch piece, note that his link is to the second page)
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George K
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jon-nyc
Nov 27 2011, 01:49 PM
I understand how you interpreted my words, I was a bit ambiguous. I don't mean that one lacks temporal distance required for a proper perspective on JFK/RR (though that's also true), rather I mean one obviously lacks perspective on the overall course of US history to consider someone like JFK or RR to be in the running for the top.
Fair 'nuff.

I was making gravy. :hat:
A guide to GKSR: Click

"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... "
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Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles.
- Klaus, 4/29/18
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Aqua Letifer
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ZOOOOOM!
This is what happens when people don't know what the **** they're talking about.

First of all, can we assume the author isn't a Kennedy fan? Is that or is that not particularly evident? So my question is, is he or is he not just looking for support for his already formed opinions?

But let's disregard that for a minute.

Quote:
 
At its best, King’s new Kennedy assassination novel, “11/22/63” — which sends its protagonist back in time to change that November day’s events — offers an implicit critique of this generational obsession.


John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president, at a time when people affiliated themselves more with their religion than the present. It was a big deal for some Catholics at the time. If this guy can't understand that then he lacks the context necessary to finish this article.

Quote:
 
The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one if he’d lived. Few serious historians take this view: It belongs to Camelot’s surviving court stenographers, and to popularizers like Chris Matthews, whose new best seller “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” works hard to gloss over the thinness of the 35th president’s actual accomplishments. Yet there is no escaping the myth’s hold on the popular imagination.


He founded the Peace Corps and got us to the moon. And when I say "got us to the moon," I don't mean that in the same way Al Gore invented the internet. (Although Gore did more for the internet than anyone familiar with the misquote would ever know to give him credit for). He made the "end of the decade" Moon deadline before NASA had any working plan to do so. He made the call against some of his staffers suggestions, unknownmost to others and during a time when the technology which would get us there wasn't even invented yet. His involvement in the space race was a big ****ing deal.

And there aren't many who are willing to dismiss the Peace Corps as frivolous.

Quote:
 
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,


Okay this guy's just an asshole.

I cite irreconcilable differences.
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Copper
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Shortstop
Aqua Letifer
Nov 27 2011, 03:28 PM

Okay this guy's just an a**hole.


That's about right.
The Confederate soldier was peculiar in that he was ever ready to fight, but never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march. The soldiers were determined to be soldiers after their own notions, and do their duty, for the love of it, as they thought best. Carlton McCarthy
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