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After Camelot

How history has treated JFK
By Chris Tucker |

The evil men do lives after them, but the good is oft interred with their bones. Shakespeare-Julius Caesar



Twenty years after his death, John Fitzgerald Kennedy still looms large in our public life. Politicians of opposing parties and philosophies quote from his speeches; candidates for office are routinely damned or praised as “Kennedyesque” and are measured for their charisma, a word that became synonymous with the political style of John F. Kennedy. Indeed, Kennedy’s sternest critics suggest that he was all style, no substance.

And yet, JFK holds the imagination. Two decades after that grim afternoon in Dallas, the questions are as valid as ever: What if Kennedy had lived, served out his term, perhaps been elected to another in 1964? How might the Sixties have gone, and what impact would Kennedy have had on the presidential election of 1968, which Richard Nixon won by a tiny margin?

We will never know. What is certain is that John F. Kennedy remains a hero to millions, and this despite the slight accomplishments of his thousand days in office. To perhaps as many others, however, Kennedy seems all too human. Inevitably, the Kennedy image has been tarnished over the years; a politician who enjoys such wild adulation must suffer the revisions of history.

There is a school of thought which says that the human spirit dries up without heroes and another one which says that great men bring with them crisis and pain. Perhaps both theories are correct and help to explain our continuing fascination with the 35th president.

Richard Rovere.

The essence of his political attractiveness is his extraordinary political intelligence. He has a mind quite unlike that of any other Democrat in this century. The New Yorker; I960

Norman Mailer:

Kennedy’s most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others. Esquire; I960

Theodore White.

He had always acted as if men were masters of forces, as if all things were possible for men determined in purpose and clear in thought-even the Presidency. This perhaps is what he best learned in 1960-even though he called his own victory a “miracle.” This was what he would have to cherish alone in the White House, on which an impatient world waited for miracles. The Making of the President, I960; 1961

Theodore Sorenson:

Few will forget the striking contrast presented by the outgoing and incoming Presidents. One [Eisenhower] was the likeable, dedicated product of the rural Midwest and the Military Academy. The other [Kennedy] was the urbane product of the urban East, watched them take their places, the oldest man ever to serve in the office of the 1 and the youngest man ever elected to it… Their contrast lent added meaning to the phrase: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” Kennedy; 1965

Ernest Hemingwav:

Watching the inauguration… there was the happiness and the hope and He pffife and how beautiful we thought Mrs. Kennedy was and then how deeply moving the inaugural address was… I was sure our President would stand any of the heat to come as he had taken the cold of that day. Each day since I have renewed my faith and trled to under-stand the practical dlfficulties of governing he must face as they arise and the true courage he brings to them. It is a good thing to have a brave man as our President in times as tough as these are for our country and the world, Selected Letters,1917-1961; 1961

Herbert Parmet:

All of life was a test, each new obstacle a trial. His escapades, his sexual were respites film constant crisis, and were moreover as much a privilege of aristocaracy as any other symbol of rank. Yet there was a great dichotomy between the playboy the somber, quiet desperation that characterized his discipline and determination challenges. JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy: 1983

Benjamin Bradlee.

The key was style. His style captured the nation’s imagination.. .With his gifts of intellect, purpose, and charm, and his high hopes of winning a second term, what great and lasting accomplishments might he have forged? Newsweek; 1963

William F. Buckley:

What happened, two and one-half weeks ago, was the morte d’Arthur. The grief was that of a nation that had lost a young king, a young king whose own fairyland rise to power recapitulated the national experience, whose personal radiance warmed the whole nation-and whose great fiascoes were charitably disregarded, for were we not, really, forgiving ourselves? National Review; 1963 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr:

This sense of a personality under control, this insistence on distancing himself from displays of emotion led some to think him indifferent or unfeeling. But only the unwary could really suppose that his “coolness” was because he felt too little. It was because he felt too much and had to compose himself for an existence filled with disorder and despair. During his Presidency, asked about the demobilization of the reserves after the Berlin crisis, he said, “There is always an inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country. . . .Life is unfair.” He said this, not with bitterness, but with the delicate knowledge of one who lives in a bitter time-a knowledge which stamped him as a son of that time. His charm and grace were not an uncovenanted gift. The Kennedy style was the triumph, hard-bought and well-earned, of a gallant and collected human being over the anguish of life. A Thousand Days; 1965

Gore Vidal:

It is a most terrible thing to live out a legend, and one wonders to what extent the Kennedys themselves understand just what was set in motion for them by their father’s will that they be great. They are unique in our history, and the day they depart the public scene will be a sad one; for not only will we have lost a family as much our own as it is theirs, we shall also have lost one of the first shy hints since Christianity’s decline that there may indeed be such a thing as fate, and that tragedy is not merely literary form… Book Week; 1967

Garry Wills:

Kennedy, without being radical himself, seemed to inspire a wave of radical action, from the freedom rides to the Free Speech movement. He sent out young people in the Peace Corps to be missionaries for American values; but many seemed to catch the values of the countries they went to. This was not his intent; but the very act of sending them out was radicalizing-it was adventurous and it reflected the contemptuous attitude Kennedy’s people had for the older means of diplomatic suasion and propaganda. The Kennedy Imprisonment; 1981

Garry Wills:

Charisma… is not transferrable-even to members of the “graced” leader’s own family. But later Presidents would be measured by the expectations Kennedy raised. He did not so much elevate the office as cripple those who held it after him. His legend has haunted them; his light has cast them in shadow. The Kennedy Imprisonment; 1981

Tom Wicker:

Had he not picked up the torch, this young liberal who was prepared to press relentlessly what he liked to call “the cause of freedom” in the world? And was it not he who gave the nation its emotional charge to “support any friend, oppose any foe” in the name of liberty?… In that sense, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the last president the American people looked up to, in the old, unquestioning way. He was our young emperor, before the throne became bloodied and the cause tarnished by its own excesses. After his years, the Imperial Presidency may have gathered power-mostly by illicit means-but it could no longer inspire the people or symbolize their spirit. Kennedy was the last leader in a time when Americans were eager to follow. On Press; 1978

Henry Fairlie:

John Kennedy proclaimed in manners and in measures that he wished to do so much; but he in fact achieved so little that the people could hardly be blamed if they concluded that their political processes were inadequate to their tasks. The Kennedy Promise: The Politics of Expectation; 1973

Christopher Lasch:

Too many Americans still cling to the legend of Kennedy’s unfulfilled promise. What we now know about his life and death suggests that the promise was misconceived to begin with. It was the promise of imperial grandeur and cosmopolitan “style,” rooted in a sociopolitical myth that identifies national greatness with the political ascendancy of educated elites… .The Kennedy cult was promoted by those who had lost faith in the real promise of American life: the hope that a self-governing republic can serve as a source of moral and political inspiration to the rest of the world, not as the center of a new world empire.

John F. Kennedy was killed, in all likelihood, not by a sick society or by some supposedly archetypal, resentful common man but bya political conspiracy his own actions may havehelped set in motion…. The mythology of hisdeath can no longer prop up the mythology of his life. Harper’s; 1983

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