50 YEARS HAVE COME AND GONE...
SINCE THAT FATEFUL DAY IN DALLAS. Documentaries and docudramas have been made. We've watched the Zapruder film over and over again. We've read cheap fiction about the assassination of our President and boondoggle theories of conspiracy after conspiracy; until the consensus finally came to be that he was killed by a lone punk with a mail-order gun that sold for $12.78.
The punk was liquidated on TV two days later.
In the end, nothing was resolved.
If there was a conspiracy, the potters got away with it.
At the same time, other narratives have helped to debase the metal of the man: smarmy memoirs of women who said that they slept with him and others who said they did and did not. There was endless retailing of the gossip about his alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe, complete with half-baked theories about the origins Don Juan complex, saying that he was revolting against his mother's rigid Catholicism or imitating his dad's own philandering.
Two other events helped eclipse the memory of Jack Kennedy. One was the rise of Robert Kennedy. In his own brief time on the public stage, Robert understood that Jack's caution had prevented him from fully using the powers of the Presidency. If Jack was a man of the fifties, the later Robert Kennedy was a man of the sixties, that vehement and disturbed era that started with the assassination in Dallas and did not truly end until Richard Nixon's departure from the White House in 1974. The murder of Robert Kennedy in 1968 played a part in the revision of the Kennedy legend. In a quite different way, the process was completed by the incident in Chappaquiddick.
In the years that followed, the country grew tired and decided to be free of the endless tragedy of the Kennedy's.
And after Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, it was no accident that once we had been entranced by a president who looked like a movie star, then the next step would be to find a movie star that looked like a president, which we did, and he gave us us trickle-down economics, allowing the affluent to become filthy rich and the poor to go bankrupt. Then came "The Oreo Cookie Syndrome," where Bill Clinton found himself sandwiched between the George Herman Walker Bush and his boy, George W., who gave us an unnecessary war built upon fairy tale fibs, leaving 4 thousand of our military dead and thousands of innocent Iraqis slain. And now we have Obama, our first African-American President, who has given us The Affordable Care Act and a promise of hope, a commitment still on hold, due to Republican obstinacy and opposition.
Years later, long after the murder in Dallas and the Vietnam war, after Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had been killed, after Woodstock and Watergate - after all had changed from the world I knew in 1963, I still miss Jack Kennedy, in spite of his obvious flaws.
I can hear his voice still coming to me, insisting that the world must be challenged and life itself embraced.
He remains in memory as a man of wit, irony, courage: all combined with the way he honored artists and writers and musicians, inviting them to the White House for splendid dinners, insisting that Robert Frost read a poem at the inauguration. He enjoyed Ian Fleming's books about James Bond; and brought James Baldwin and Pablo Casals to the White House.
Not many writers have felt comfortable in the White House in all the years since...
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