Monday, January 28, 2008
News / Chicagoland The Kennedy fetish
Posted by Whet Moser on Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 7:03 PM
Sigh:
"At the site of one of John F. Kennedy’s most famous speeches, Sen. Edward Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama as a worthy heir to the martyred president and one who could restore the sense of national possibility of Camelot."
This is big news today. I'm too young to have been there, but apparently the sex-addicted son of a Neville Chamberlain sympathizer gave America the sense of national possibility it needed to get into the Vietnam War, leave a bunch of Cuban exiles for dead as part of the worst coup attempt ever, run to the brink of nuclear apocalypse, and help install the Baath party as the ruling party of Iraq. Oh, and we sent people to the moon, that was awesome.
The Kennedys certainly have some admirably progressive initiatives to their credit, particularly in the fields of social justice, immigration, and civil rights, but the continuing lionization of the family, particularly JFK, is unnerving. For a brutally honest take on the phenomenon by a progressive Catholic, I highly recommend Garry Wills's The Kennedy Imprisonment (not my favorite of his books, that would be a tie between Nixon Agonistes and What Jesus Meant, but still, a great book). You can get a taste of it here.
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Well said. You may be giving him too much credit on civil rights; in those days the main competing power, the Soviet Union, could and did gain credibility worldwide by pointing out gross racism in the US, so JFK eventually had to respond to the civil rights movement.
I'm sure you only left out P.J. O'Rourke's "Mordred Had a Point—Camelot Revisited," the one where he says: "We have no one to blame for the Kennedys but ourselves. We took the Kennedys to heart of our own accord. And it is my opinion that we did it not because we respected them or thought what they proposed was good, but because they were pretty. We, the electorate, were smitten by this handsome, vivacious family.... We wanted to hug their golden tousled heads to our dumpy breasts." ( http://orourkekennedyquote.notlong.com ) because Google Reader restricts those pages from the "Give War a Chance" preview. (They do kindly link to a few pages of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter book review: http://carterdrinkinggame.notlong.com ) I'd never heard the notion from Harold that the Soviets forced us into an Anti-racism Race, but I'm at least finding it more plausible than its lore cousin, that Gorby tore down the wall out of the freedom-loving goodness of his commie heart.
To be fair, the Cuban exiles thing was 1) not really his plan and 2) kind of hilarious.
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