Next week Americans, if they can remember to stir themselves from the latest episode of “The Voice” or “Survivor,” will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, America’s first Catholic President and an icon of 20th-century world history. Steeped in conspiracy theory ever since that fateful day in Dallas in the fall of 1963, the assassination has since become something of a Rorschach test that, depending on how one interprets it, sheds light on the dark recesses of the American psyche.
First, a little about the assassination itself that is important to remark upon. According to all reputable historians, and despite the fevered, if inspired, conspiracy-mongering in Oliver Stone’s masterpiece JFK and rampant suspicion among the public, there is no indication that a larger conspiracy to kill President Kennedy ever existed. True, there are some curious aspects about the assassination – such as the rumored popping-up of Oswald doubles around the country, mysterious men sighted on the famed grassy knoll, and the so-called magic-bullet theory, but none have yet been proven strong enough reasons to disprove the standing hypothesis that Oswald acted alone on Nov. 22, 1963.
Second, that a mad gunman would slay a president is not so out of the American experience as might be assumed. Kennedy, for instance, was only the latest U.S. chief executive to be gunned down, and we forget that in addition to Lincoln, two other presidents – Garfield and McKinley – were also shot down during their presidential prime. Then, of course, there are the many failed assassination plots and attempts that came close to doing in, for instance, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Given we are a country that so easily shrugs off the massacre of school children in places like Columbine and Newtown, a few bullet-ridden Presidents barely warrant mention.
This being said, the American fascination with the murder of President Kennedy has remained compelling for far longer than might be expected given how frequently leaders are gunned down in this country. Indeed, it has become the ultimate ‘whodunit,’ and if one queries Amazon on the number of books available on the Kennedy assassination, you are presented with a deluge of items that explore every conceivable facet of this most famous of criminal cases. Clearly, despite official protestations to the contrary, Americans like the idea that one of their Presidents was taken out by a murderous cabal of shadowy, conspiratorial figures.
By the time you read all these books – as if such a feat were possible – it would become obvious that the CIA, in cooperation with alien mobsters, killed Kennedy at the bequest of the communist conspiracy being run from the headquarters of Big Oil, the Bohemian Grove, and the Bilderburg Group. And here you thought the BBB simply stood for the Better Business Bureau! Contrary to popular belief and as these book reveal, the Trilateral Commission, Elvis, and Vice-President Johnson had nothing to do with it, though the evidence is still out on whether the Illuminati and the Masons were involved.
Conspiracies aside, in many respects the fascination over Kennedy’s death stems in part from the way he lived so firmly in the eye of the public. He was, for instance, the first ‘television’ president, and his coiffed and cultured image was carefully presented to the people watching the boob-tube at home in a manner that any master media manipulator would recognize today. He so dominated the new medium, for instance, that Kennedy famously beat Richard Nixon – who sported a 12-o’clock-shadow and shed copious amounts of nervous, fever-ridden flop sweat – in a televised debate, even though those who listened on the radio thought his opponent had clearly won. Young Kennedy and his family were thus style personified, perfectly adapted to the new, gleaming jet age which he was elected to rule.
As it turns out, much of the Kennedy mythos – like the man himself – ultimately turns out to be more style than substance once the record is more closely examined. It was Lyndon Johnson, for instance, that truly ended Southern segregation and brought the cruel system of American Apartheid to an end. Kennedy, while seeming to be a leader on the issue, never seemed to really work up the courage needed to confront the southern racists who ran so much of his own party. Instead of confronting them directly, he seemed to always prefer to lead from behind by letting others do the hard work on the ground, only expending the political capital necessary to defeat legal racism when it was absolutely necessary. Johnson, in contrast, fought segregation directly and at great cost to both himself and the Democratic Party.
As with segregation, so, too, on poverty. Kennedy may have campaigned in Appalachian coal country and appealed to the downtrodden of the nation, but in hindsight the record shows he actually did little about either. It was once again Johnson who picked up the mantle of social reform by enacting his Great Society program into law – programs that had and continue to have an important legacy of significantly reducing poverty and want among America’s most needy. Johnson, not Kennedy, was also responsible for the creation of Medicare and Medicaid which, along with Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security, became the foundational bedrock of the American social-safety net. It was, it should be remembered, not Kennedy – with his boyish charm and ready smile – who did all this, but the hated Johnson and his backroom deals and Machiavellian politics.
Then, of course, there was foreign policy, where Kennedy has increasingly been seen by many as having been an agent of peace. JFK, for instance, called off the Bay of Pigs invasion, helped negotiate an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and is thought to have supported withdrawing from Vietnam. Indeed, right before he was assassinated President Kennedy gave his approval to an initial plan to reduce the U.S. military presence by about 1,000, with possibly many more to come. Johnson, famously, expanded the war through a campaign of what can only be called outright deception aimed at not only selling the war to the American people, but doing so in a way that made them think we were actually winning.
Even here, though, the line between the ‘good’ John F. Kennedy and the ‘bad’ Lyndon Johnson isn’t so clear cut. Johnson dramatically expanded the war, true, but it was his advisers – Kennedy people all – who advised him to do so. In Cuba, meanwhile, Kennedy and his brother, Robert Kennedy, were running so ruthless a covert war against the Castro regime after the public failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion that eventually the Soviets, fearful of losing the charismatic Castro as an ally, placed hundreds of nuclear weapons on the island to fend off any U.S. invasion of the island. Yes, your read that right, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a problem Kennedy himself largely helped create.
So, if Kennedy didn’t actually accomplish much in his brief three years in office, why is his memory so cherished? Why has his death become something of a watermark of sorts in the reading of American history? Why do people, long after his death, think a conspiracy did away with what any sound reading of history would have to determine was, at best, a rather mediocre President? Surely it isn’t all due the fact that he looked good on TV and had a family that everyone loved, was it?
Another possibility, one more likely to be seen as true as the baby boomers lessen their iron grip on our cultural discourse as time goes on, is that Kennedy represents a transition from a time when America was ‘good’ and worked and a time, continuing to today, when something is perceived to have gone wrong. Before Kennedy we had the ‘good’ Second World War and two decades of economic prosperity in which American supremacy and white cultural dominance was unchallenged. After Kennedy, we get Vietnam, economic stagnation, and a culture riven apart by difference and division.
As the final Administration to be in office before this great turn in post-war American history, Kennedy and his Camelot are not so much political and historical figures as mythological and Christ-like. He was the good king, whose death led to the terrible state of affairs we find ourselves in today. If only it was prevented, we collectively seem to be saying, then the good king could have continued to rule and our decline and division headed off by his wise leadership. Logically, then, if it was a conspiracy that killed our good king, then so too must the conspiracy – whoever or whatever it may be – that is also responsible for all the disaster and disappointment that came after.
Thus, the ultimate reason we cling so much to the myth of Kennedy is the reason all popular half-truths are held onto no matter how much they are debunked and discredited – it’s psychologically comfortable to do so, psychological hand-washing writ large. Admitting that, perhaps, Kennedy wasn’t all good, Johnson wasn’t all bad, and that a simple madman killed the former while incompetence and arrogance brought down the latter is to admit that the cause of our collective problems is not some conspiracy, but rooted deeply in ourselves and our society. Acknowledging the truth about Kennedy and his era is to admit that the country we remember – or, rather, the baby boomers and their children imagine they remember – was not so perfect or idyllic as they recall.
Once one admits that, and pulls away the screen of mythmaking behind which the real country can be found, what we see is a normal county pretty much like any other. Americans, rather than being a breed apart, turn out to be human after all, and even if we did once go to the Moon, we still can’t feed, house, educate, keep safe, or care for all our people. For many who grew up in the heyday of post-war American dominance, when anything seemed possible, admitting as much – even on the left – is difficult to do, which is why popular belief in a conspiracy that killed our last ‘good’ president is so much easier to believe in. Better that, our heart tells us, than admit that our problems are of our own making.
Children, after all, readily believe in monsters under the bed. In contrast, it takes an adult to realize that the only real monsters to be found are those you see sitting across from you in a board room, spouting off on TV, or staring back at you in the mirror. Adulthood is being able to accept that basic fact about human nature and in so doing to put away make-believe so as to live in the real world as best as one can. The last decade of military disaster and economic decline, like the period which followed Kennedy, has forced Americans to face up to this fact as never before. Whether we can grow past our own childish myths like our parents and grandparents were unable to as their country and the world changed around them, remains to be seen.