Christopher Hitchens, who has made something of a fetish of knocking down iconic figures, believes that the “JFK cult” is finally dying of its own accord:
I may still be in a minority in this, and don’t care if I am, but I am glad to find that the Kennedy drama and the Kennedy cult is falling away into nothingness. The effort of keeping it up is too much trouble. It has been a long time since anyone rang me, or wrote to me, with hectic new information about the real scoop on the assassination. It has been a very long time since I heard anyone argue with conviction (let alone with evidence) that if the president had been spared that day we would not be referring to the Vietnam calamity as “Kennedy’s War.”
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Had Napoleon Bonaparte been fatally hit by a musket ball as he entered Moscow, it was once pointed out, he would have been remembered by history as one of the greatest generals who ever lived. It would be cruel and unfeeling to say that Kennedy’s luck and “charisma” did not desert him even in death, and in any case I prefer to blame this callous opinion on those who actually hold it–namely his hagiographers and mythologists. Who now seriously believes that Kennedy intended to undo his own rash commitment in South Vietnam? Can we not at least agree that his zeal for the assassination of President Diem–whom he had installed at some price in blood–was a somewhat contradictory indicator of any intention to disengage?
That would make a point, as it were, for the “left.” But what of the pugnacious anticommunism that Kennedy also maintained when he thought it suited him? Having tried assassination and “deniable” invasion in Cuba, and having helped provoke a missile crisis on which he gambled all of us, he meekly acceded to the removal of American missiles from Turkey and to a pledge that Fidel Castro’s regime would be considered permanent. He and his brother did not completely hold to the terms of the latter agreement, it is true, but as a result the United States became indelibly associated with mob tactics in the Caribbean, and Castro became in effect the president for life. In this sense, we may say that the legacy of JFK is with us still.
Another inheritance from that period, the Berlin Wall–which he did not oppose until well after it had been built (having again risked war on the proposition but not felt able to follow up on his punchy short-term rhetoric)–did not disappear from our lives until a quarter century later. His was the worst hard-cop/soft-cop routine ever to be attempted, and it suffered from the worst disadvantages of both styles. On the civil rights front at home, by contrast, even the most flattering historians have a hard time explaining how the Kennedy brothers preferred the millimetrical, snail’s-pace, grudging-and-trudging strategy. But at least this serves to demonstrate that they knew there was such a thing as prudence, or caution.
Every smart liberal of today knows just how to deplore “spin” and “image building” and media strategy in general. Quite right too, but does anyone ever pause to ask when this manner of politics became regnant? Which Kennedy fan wants to disown the idea that the smoothest guy wins? Yet this awkward thought is gone into the memory hole, along with the fictitious “missile gap” that the boy wonder employed to attack Eisenhower and Nixon from the right. As I said at the beginning, I am glad that this spell is fading at last. But I wish its departure would be less mourned. The Kennedy interlude was a flight from responsibility, and ought to be openly criticized and exorcised rather than be left to die the death that sentimentality brings upon itself.
Given that my parents were a few months from meeting when Kennedy was assassinated, I don’t have a dog in this fight. What has long struck me as odd, though, is the strange fascination we have with the anniversary of his murder. Lincoln–a far more significant president–was also felled by an assassin’s bullet. Yet we commemorate his birthday (sort of), not his death.
