American Tabula Rasa
Fifty years ago yesterday, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed, a brutal tragedy that threw the country into mourning and spawned a heap of conspiracy theories, along with speculation that continues to the present.
Predictably, there was live-tweeting of the events, memorials, appreciations and, of course, the procession of the devotees of the above conspiracies and the counter-demonstrations of the debunkers.
But what interests me, and what might be one of Kennedy's most enduring legacies is his role as American politics' tabula rasa; people see in him exactly what they want to see. Not just Americans, either. Kennedy had the charisma and luck to pull off some of that whole "leader of the free world" schtick at a time when people still believed it (the above picture is from Ireland). Even for detractors of the current American state, Kennedy's end makes for an appealing might-have-been; the point where America could have actually lived up to its ideals, tragically cut short.
The reality is, as always, more complicated. JFK was a relatively mainstream, even belligerent, Cold War politician. He was great on space, decent on labor, tepid on civil rights, ruthlessly ambitious, a hawk who talked pretty to doves, and "operating a damn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean."
Ironically LBJ, in many conspiracies the reactionary benefactor of a Dallas coup d'etat, was farther left than Kennedy domestically with the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society, and even took a warier approach in places like Cuba.
But the vicissitudes of the 60s and 70s make more sense to the national pysche with a slain golden boy. It fits some powerful myths about America: for once, we were on the right track, and a noble leader was going to lay bare the darkness at the heart of the republic.
Then he's slain by nefarious forces (a shabby maniac simply won't do). So people invent quotes or turn political dodges into evidence that a brighter day was snatched from us.
They're helped by the fact that most people don't understand the grab-bag nature of the Democratic Party of the time. During Kennedy's day the coalition ostensibly included everyone from social democrats to segregationists. By 1968 it would fall apart, but in the early '60s it still held in its rickety way; JFK was partly in Texas to mediate disputes between liberal and conservative Democratic factions.
Kennedy did what any politician does; he tried to give each faction what they wanted to hear, including the ones represented in his inner circle. That's made it easy even for people who actually knew the man to make sweeping predictions about what he might have done, many of them tied to avoiding mistakes like Vietnam. The natural appeal of the myth carries things the rest of the way. Believe in a political creed that got short shrift? On Nov. 21, 1963, JFK agreed with you and was about to do something about it. Really.
Which beliefs would he have actually followed? We don't know, because he died.
In 1963, Kennedy probably didn't know either. Our savior/villain b.s. with presidents runs deep, but they're plenty susceptible to pressure and circumstance. War or peace from JFK might have depended on something as banal as which Democratic faction fared best in the 1964 elections or how South Vietnamese intrigue shook out that week.
In another world, it's possible to imagine a graying Kennedy cracking down on protesters shouting about a Latin American quagmire or a Civil Rights Act he never gets around to.
But instead we're in this world, where it comforts the afflicted to think that at some point, we actually had the leader we deserved.
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