The fiftieth anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination is, of course, an occasion for a fresh outbreak of the virulent hagiography that has corrupted the memory of his actual record. The New York Times, a paper that should know better by now, published an article this week that repeated the old lie that somehow right-wing hysterics in Texas were the people really responsible for Kennedy’s murder. A theory inconvenienced only by the fact Lee Harvey Oswald was a pro-Castro leftist. But never mind that. Better to reframe the assassination as a part of America’s culture wars. And we know who the guilty men are in those, don’t we?
American history is a quilt of many myths but few are so exasperating, perhaps even so pernicious, as the myth of Camelot. American innocence did not perish with Kennedy and nor did his death rob the United States of a glorious, peaceful, happy future. The tumults and traumas of the 1960s were not the result of Kennedy’s murder (though his death was part of it and a contributing factor).
Nevertheless, never in the long history of the republic has so much been credited to one man on the basis of so little.
Anyway, I wrote about the lies of Camelot for The Scotsman today. It begins:
Last year, Mimi Alford, who was once a junior staffer in John F Kennedy’s White House, released a slim memoir recalling her affair with the president. Few people paid it much attention, perhaps because Kennedy’s priapic philandering long ago ceased to be “news”.
Even so, Alford’s little book was a useful addition to the Kennedy catalogue. She recalled, for instance, how once while she was swimming with the president in the White House pool, Kennedy told his 19-year old intern that Dave Powers, his special assistant, “looks a little tense” and asked Alford to “take care of it”. By “take care of it” Kennedy meant Alford should perform a sex act on Powers.
“Dave was jolly and obedient as I stood in the shallow end of the pool and performed my duties,” Alford wrote. “The president silently watched.” Perhaps this was meant to reward Powers for his willingness to procure women for the president. Even so, there are shades of Caligula’s court here.
This was the private squalor behind the public glamour of Camelot – a president whose low view of women was matched by the relish with which he was prepared to humiliate his own staff. For kicks, you know. If Jack Kennedy was not a worse person than Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, he wasn’t a better man either. And that’s setting a pretty low bar for decency.
I actually wrote “perform oral sex” and a “president whose view of women as whores” but this, it seems, was a little too indecorous for the paper. Which is fine. The point still stands: Kennedy was one of the nastiest presidents in American history. And few, even all these years later, owe so much to the pernicious Cult of the Presidency.
Anyway, the whole column is here.
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