The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
November 1988
When Jack Kennedy won the Presidential election in November 1960, he barely scraped home – less than 50% of Americans supported him. But three years later, in the traumatic days after his assassination, a strange and rather moving thing happened: millions of Americans who had not voted for him started to claim that they had. The figures spiralled upwards in opinion polls as a bereaved people constructed a posthumous landslide for their dead leader.
And this was only the beginning. For with his very public death, Jack Kennedy sealed an extraordinary relationship with his country. A myth was made – one which has changed its shape in fascinating ways but which, twenty five years later, is still gathering strength.
Its root is sheer affection. Last week, CBS replayed the flickering black and white film of their coverage of the killing. There was Walter Cronkite in the news room, cool and reassuring in his spectacles and his shirtsleeves. He told us there was a report that the President was dead, but he stayed calm and told us it was totally unofficial and unconfirmed. His voice so deep and strong.
Then an unseen hand slipped him a piece of paper and Cronkite began to tell us what it said. It took him only one sentence to say that the President of the United States had been pronounced dead, but it seemed to take him an age. By the end of it, he was no longer the legendary newscaster, just a sad old man who wanted to take off his spectacles and cry his eyes out but couldn’t because the whole country was watching him.
Then the cameras went to Dallas, to the dining hall where Kennedy had been due for lunch. There was a black waiter, dressed in his best, with tears rolling down his cheeks; there were numerous anonymous men in suits wiping their eyes and leaning on each others’ shoulders. It was the same in the streets of Dallas, outside Parkland Hospital where he died, on Capitol Hill in Washington. It made people weep.
At that stage, they were still crying for the man. Not for his politics or his party, but for him, because unlike any other former President, Americans felt that they really knew the man. He was the first President of the television age and that alone gave his relationship with the country a special intimacy: unlike any of his predecessors, he had been in their living rooms with them, exhorting them, pleading with them, flirting with them, and showing off his wife and children who were almost equally familiar.
He also happened to be very likable – good-looking, easy-going, funny, passionate. He appeared honest. During the election campaign, polls had shown that those who listened to Presidential debates on the radio believed Richard Nixon had performed best, whereas those who saw them on television overwhelmingly put Kennedy ahead.
But his death rapidly projected him from man to myth. And in the last 25 years, it is his death itself which most vividly illustrates the way in which he has become an emotional magnet for the American people.
Conspiracy theories about the assassination have rolled from one phase to another, changing their target roughly every five years, and each time reflecting a changing mood in the country. The assassination has become a screen on which Americans can project their worst fears and hatreds.
In the beginning it was a Commie plot. Lee Harvey Oswald was identified by police not only as the assassin but as a former defector to the Soviet Union and a supporter of Fidel Castro. These were the days of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis and no true American could be surprised if it turned out that the Reds killed their leader.
By the late 1960s, the national mood had been riddled with uncertainty and cynicism largely as a result of American involvement in Vietnam. Sure enough, the Kennedy theories changed shape. There was no clear culprit now, only the deep suspicion that things were not the way they seemed and, in particular, that the easy assurance of the Warren Commission that Oswald acted alone, was hopelessly flawed. If you couldn’t believe what Presidents Johnson and Nixon told you about Vietnam, how could you believe what they said about the lost leader? It was all lies.
By the mid 1970s, the Watergate scandal had broken, unravelling the sordid world of the secret state – lies, illegality, coups, assassination plots. The state itself became the enemy, a symbol of duplicity, and the CIA became its most fearsome weapon and, thus, the main suspect in the death of the mythical leader. Who killed Kennedy? The CIA did it, supposedly in revenge for Kennedy’s bungling of the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
Now, in the 1980s, when Americans are asked to identify their greatest fear, they no longer point to the Russians, or the bomb or the secret state. Their greatest fear, they say, is drugs – poisoning their children and spreading violence through cities. So, who killed JFK? It must have been organised crime – the same people who brought you the heroin epidemic.
Of course, there have been other theories. Lots of them. Right-wing racists did it; a cabal of stock brokers did it; Oswald did it, only he wasn’t Oswald, he was a Russian who happened to be his double; Oswald did it and the Warren Commission were right – he did it alone. But other theories never matched the mood of the moment.
The shifting consensus over Kennedy’s death is part of a still larger symbolism, which is the hard core of the myth, the idea that a Golden Age died with Kennedy, that if only the Reds or the CIA or the bogeyman of the moment had not had his day in Dallas then everything - the ghettoes, Watergate, Vietnam, the drug crisis, hostages, terrorism – it would all have been all right.
The truth, in all probability, is that Kennedy’s reputation was saved by his death and that if he had stayed in office for a second term, his Presidency would have run into the sands and his personal standing in the eyes of Americans would have crumbled.
Assassination left Jack Kennedy forever young. If he were alive today, he would be 71 years old, and the image of the handsome charmer would be eroded. He would also have been here to respond to the seamy revelations about his private life – the affairs with Marilyn Monroe and with the gangster’s moll Judith Exner, and his willingness to let the FBI bug Martin Luther King. As it is, they have only the status of rumours. He never admitted a thing.
Politically, he was already rushing at full steam into Vietnam. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, simply carried on where Kennedy left off and, by 1968, Johnson was ruined by it, unable to contemplate seeking another term in the White House. But Kennedy’s premature death left his reputation blessed by the rhetoric of anti-communism and unscathed by its results.
On the domestic front, in the same way, Kennedy stands as a dazzling symbol of the fight against racism and poverty. But Lyndon Johnson’s drive to create The Great Society went further than anything Kennedy could have done, largely because Johnson could use his southern power base to neutralise the main source of opposition. Yet, today, The Great Society is seen, at best, as an escapist fantasy, at worst, as the creation of a new form of `welfare slavery’ chaining the poor to the state. But it is Johnson who is left in the shadows and Kennedy, whose words were barely tested by events, who stands proud.
In reality, the problems of the United States have deep roots in the country’s perceived role in the world and in its economy. In reality, no President could have stopped the drift from the peak of the post-war boom in the early 1960s to all the anxieties of the 1980s. But from the moment the young President died, reality was the last thing the American people wanted.
