JFK would go down in history as the most sun-kissed of all the presidents
Seated behind his anchor’s desk, Edward R Murrow lights up a cigarette while listening to John F Kennedy read a passage from American poet Alan Seeger.
Videos by VICE
It’s one of the coolest interview snippets in the history of American media. And that says a lot about what JFK has become: an icon who once happened to be president. My generation knows him as a really good-looking guy who married a really good-looking woman, with whom he had really good-looking children, before he was shot in the head while being driven through Dallas, Texas.
Details of his presidency are, at best, vaguely understood, and mostly we ignore his political legacy. Bay of Pigs? Don’t harsh the mellow, bro – just look at that hair.
The Murrow interview serves as excellent icon maintenance, and the exact kind of artefact that seems to have given America selective memory when it comes to Jack Kennedy.
I’m in a darkened theatre, watching the clip in the museum and library in Columbia Point, Boston that bears the 35th president’s name. The building is a gilded tribute to impossibilities of the Kennedy family: impossible amounts of power, handsomeness and charisma.
There’s JFK doing ridiculously JFK things wherever you look: JFK being smooth in Ireland; JFK playing football shirtless on Cape Cod; JFK being a war hero; JFK – seated next to his brother, Bobby – tangling with Jimmy Hoffa during a congressional hearing; JFK breaking ground on civil rights; JFK winning the biggest dick-swinging contest of the 1960s, also known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Most importantly, JFK being elegant and dignified while doing all of those things.
The problem? The reality of the Kennedy family has always been much more interesting than all the “Camelot” and “King Arthur” bullshit the family – as well as large sections of the American media – seems so keen to foist on a public still hungry for myth.
But walking around the museum, I get the impression that Kennedy was steered to the Oval Office by divine intervention, not by his ridiculously wealthy, connected and driven father. Here, the Kennedy mythos is still strong and pristine. I want to know how the political sausage was made. What about the allegations that his father used mob connections to get the vote out for his son? What about rumours that a Kennedy speechwriter was the one who actually wrote Profiles in Courage, the book that won Kennedy the Pulitzer? Did he drag his feet on civil rights, as some historians maintain? What of his misread of Vietnam? His rocky relationship with his successor, Lyndon B Johnson? His pedestrian record in Congress? Or the fact that he loved to sleep around so much?
Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress
Instead, displayed in the museum, there is Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress.
Before the museum, I went to JFK’s birthplace, a house on a quiet street in Brookline, Massachusetts that’s now a national landmark. It was another exercise in carefully cultivated Kennedy family lore. We look at the room he was born in. There is talk of the type of motifs the bed linens had. I had to suppress a groan when the tour guide told us one of JFK’s favourite books as a child was King Arthur. Because of course it was. I really just want to know if his father brought his mistresses back here.
Irish Catholic families from Massachusetts like mine are supposed to be ground zero for unabashed and steadfast Kennedy adulation. A framed photo of JFK is supposed to adorn all of our grandmothers’ wood-panelled walls, right next to the lace curtains and photo of the Pope. Growing up, I took my political cues from JFK’s younger brother, the late Senator Edward M Kennedy. If the senator was for it, I was for it. (Chappaquiddick and the senator’s propensity to act like a frat boy on Kentucky Derby Day for long stretches of his Capitol Hill career is a whole other discussion, but it’s fair to say that the Kennedy brand can take quite a battering.)
But listening to the tour guide drone on about the mothering techniques of Rose Kennedy (hugs were rationed out to the kids, we are told), I don’t know how to feel about my state’s most famous family.
Take the sole Kennedy left in Congress, 33-year-old US Rep Joseph P Kennedy III – Bobby’s grandson – who began his first term earlier this year. The former prosecutor appears to be a smart, hardworking politician. But there are plenty of young and capable assistant district attorneys in Boston. Only one, however, has the political juice to get elected to Congress.
The tragedies of JFK and his brother Bobby, as well as the significant political power the family still wields, has a lot to do with all of that. That’s to say nothing of JFK’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, briefly pursuing the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton back in late 2008 and early 2009. Call me naïve, but I find it slightly irritating when public office is treated as a birthright. The phrase: “Who the fuck do they think they are?” pops into my mind, followed immediately by the answer: They think they’re the Kennedy family.
Writing this today, on the 50th anniversary of his death, I’m still working out how I feel about all things Kennedy. But in the museum, there’s a moment when the man himself summarises my thoughts pretty succinctly. In a recorded speech looped over some Kennedy footage, JFK is talking about the perils of myth-making. Myths can often be more dangerous than bald-faced lies, apparently.
“Mythology distracts us everywhere,” he says. I believe him.
Follow Danny on Twitter: @DMacCash
More American politics:
Explaining American Politics to the British
A Tea Party Leader Discusses the US Government Shutdown
This Man Has Proof That Obama Is Gay
