The reality of JFK's Camelot

Somehow, six years ago, in blogging about the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination, I missed this excellent piece by Richard Woodward at Daily Beast. I was referenced to it by one quote from it on a book about visiting dead presidents' sites.

I'm going to start with another quote, though:

Be thankful you weren’t alive in the 60s.

Woodward says this by way of introduction to the Kennedy cult that sprang up shortly after his death.

He notes that the weekly photomagazines Life and Look were the first and foremost perpetuators of what became an "industry" surrounding the life and death of Jack in the first four years after Nov. 22, 1963. It was, of course, the dual 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Jack's brother Bobby that took the shine off this.

Woodward then asks, and answers, a rhetorical question:

Would Kennedy be so revered today had he not been shot and killed in Dallas? The question isn’t improper. The 100th anniversary of his birth in 2017 is unlikely to provoke this scale of outpourings. Of the estimated 40,000 volumes devoted to his life and presidency, more than 2,600 are concerned solely with the circumstances of his last day on earth.

And, indeed, he's right.

He then fingers the early culprits besides Life and Look.

Second were two other media outlets who dueled as much as Life and Look. These would be the news divisions of NBC and CBS. For the young'uns, ABC wasn't really a thing back then. This was Cronkite at CBS trying to catch up to Huntley and Brinkley at NBC. (Yes, Uncle Walter was not the top gun on TV news at this time.) It was the TV news folks who asked Dallas PD to make it that Oswald's jail transfer could be live TV and so exposed him to being shot by Jack Ruby.

No. 3? Though Woodward says it largely got things right, the Warren Commission — and reactions to it — kept Jack in the limelight. But he does agree with its findings:

Only in the last decade has the labor and judgment of the Warren Commission and the FBI been appreciated again. They interviewed hundreds of witnesses, analyzed hastily written by forensic documents, and put together a coherent report in only 10 months — record time for a Washington panel. The wheel has turned, and the Report’s endorsed view of Oswald’s acting alone has once more become the standard interpretation. 

There’s no denying, though, that it left a dividing line. Depending on where you stand on the issue of a possible conspiracy, the other side is bound to label you either a “government stooge” or a “grassy knoll nut.”

I'm comfortable with being called a "government stooge," because it is the truth that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Let's hope, as Woodward indicates, that the "young'uns" do continue to see the truth more and more.

Last? Jackie. And certainly not least. She fueled the Look vs Life battle in part herself, ultimately with the Camelot schtick. For people who know the best think JFK did for civil rights was getting himself killed so LBJ could make him into a martyr, it is schtick indeed. For people who know Jack had no formal plan to leave Vietnam, just an aspiration to do so once it was clear Saigon could stand on its own, it is schtick indeed.

Besides, Jackie misread Camelot! Not just the Broadway play itself, but its story line.

Here's the Woodward quote that lead me to Google:

Don’t let it be forgot that Camelot, despite what Jackie wanted us to think, was a story about infidelity by beautiful people who brought down a government. It does not end happily.

That said, it actually IS, if you think about it, the perfect parallelism.

Jack was good-looking, and also, of course driven by sexual infidelity. So, infidelity by beautiful people. Even more than Barack Obama, he also was unfaithful to the portion of the American public who actually expected him to do more than he did on those civil rights.

And, it did end unhappily, in part because of Jack's sexual escapades.

Beyond his limo, at his order, not having its bubble top up, one other thing helped kill Jack.

He was wearing a second, supplemental back brace Nov. 22, 1963. It was so rigid that his body couldn't do the natural reaction of slumping and/or pitching forward after Oswald's second shot, the first that hit him, the double-hit bullet. (That's the only name it gets here.)

A CNN story has part of the story. But not the directly relevant to the assassination.

But Newsweek does, referencing Sy Hersh's "The Dark Side of Camelot."

At one of Jack's sexcapades White House pool parties, in September 1963, he tore a groin muscle trying to grab some "prey." Because of this, he was wearing more rigid back bracing than he had before, when he was in Dallas.

And thus ...

Per Woodward, JFK's infidelity brought down his own government.

Per the dead presidents' book, presidents tend to start fading away from public memory after 50 years or so. Let's hope that starts happening more. Let's hope it's true in general and we can hold on and hold out against Grover Norquist on Ronald Reagan divinization.