06-12-2011, 03:26 PM
KENNEDY BASHING IS ALL THE RAGE !
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/Kennedy+bashing+rage/5813994/story.html
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/Kennedy+bashing+rage/5813994/story.html
half century after he became president, this autumn brings a trio of reverential books on the life and death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. With them, like a cranky footnote, follows a travelling carnival of harpies.
Neither the oral recollections of Jacqueline Kennedy, Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, nor the biography, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, pretend to be anything other than a veneration of the slain president.
His worshipful widow records seven anguished interviews after his murder in 1963; a generation later, broadcaster Chris Matthews presents a portrait of Kennedy so affectionate one critic says Matthews has "a man crush."
That the first is canonization and the second is hagiography doesn't make either false. They represent one truth about the man.
As a novelist, Stephen King need not consider the truth at all in 11/ 22/63, his time-travelling fantasy of a teacher returning to 1963 to prevent Kennedy's assassination. But King is not spared the scorn of the new revisionists who fancy themselves destroyers of myth.
Christopher Hitchens, for example, attacks Kennedy with the same relish with which he defends George W. Bush. Among his catalogue of grievances, he says Kennedy didn't write his books or his Inaugural Address. If it isn't "plagiarism," says the perfervid Hitchens, it's "kleptomania."
That journalist Arthur Krock was the "chief author" of Why England Slept, as Hitchens claims, is ridiculous. The book grew out of Kennedy's senior thesis at Harvard. Krock suggested the title and stylistic revisions, but insisted that he'd done nothing more "than polish it and amend it here and there, because it was very, very definitely his own product."
The newer, younger revisionists accuse Kennedy of rhetoric and then traffic in it themselves. Jeet Heer declares in The Globe and Mail that Kennedy gave "free rein to the military-industrial complex" and "consistently derided any attempts to negotiate with the Soviet Union." Heer loves the grand statement, which he consistently gets about half right.
Kennedy did increase military spending sharply after meeting a sabre-rattling Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. But he deeply distrusted his generals during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Had he agreed to invade Cuba - rather than showing enormous restraint - Soviet field commanders would have responded with nuclear weapons.
Kennedy made an impassioned appeal to the Russians on June 10, 1963, which The Manchester Guardian called "one of the great state papers of American history." It produced the historic Test Ban Treaty in August. The next day, Kennedy called civil rights "a moral issue" and introduced a civil rights bill, which Congress passed a year later.
Kennedy's bold strokes are ignored by Heer as well as Ross Douthat of The New York Times, bent on exploding the "myth" that "Kennedy was a very good president and might have been a great one." No serious historian believes that, he sniffs.
Actually, he's wrong. Michael Beschloss, Robert Dallek, Geoffrey Perret and James Giglio are sympathetic to Kennedy though not sentimental. Then again, they're historians, not drive-by smear artists.
Douthat argues Kennedy would have stayed in Vietnam because his advisers had urged Johnson to prosecute the war. Douthat forgets that Robert Kennedy, JFK's most trusted adviser, broke with them on the war and even so, JFK often overruled his advisers, as he did both on civil rights and on Cuba.
Predictably, the revisionists don't mention Kennedy's other achievements: the launch of the space program, the creation of the Peace Corps, and the celebration of public service which inspired a generation.
Nor, in their absolutist terms do they consider, 50 years later, the climate of opposition that Kennedy faced in his party in Congress, and in the extremist South.
To serious students of Kennedy - those who examine the papers and try to place him in the context of his tumultuous time - the story of Kennedy is neither sainthood nor folly. It is about mistakes, yes, but it is also about ambition, leadership and maturity.
In the last months of his life, he inhabits the office as he hasn't before. In a sense, he becomes president. He muses about ending the arms race and running on a peace platform in 1964. He is skeptical about Vietnam. And he embraces civil rights, knowing it may cost him the election.
How judicious would his rival in 1960, the psychotic Richard Nixon, have been in Cuba? Or, how progressive would the Republican nominee in 1964, the ultraconservative Barry Goldwater, have been on civil rights?
Funny thing about Hitchens, Heer and Douthat. They're as feverish in their antipathy toward Kennedy as his admirers are in their affection, and far more economical with the truth.
Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University. Email: andrewzcohen@yahoo.ca
© Copyright © The Ottawa Citizen
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Kennedy+bashing+rage/5815861/story.html#ixzz1flR6b7GP
Neither the oral recollections of Jacqueline Kennedy, Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, nor the biography, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, pretend to be anything other than a veneration of the slain president.
His worshipful widow records seven anguished interviews after his murder in 1963; a generation later, broadcaster Chris Matthews presents a portrait of Kennedy so affectionate one critic says Matthews has "a man crush."
That the first is canonization and the second is hagiography doesn't make either false. They represent one truth about the man.
As a novelist, Stephen King need not consider the truth at all in 11/ 22/63, his time-travelling fantasy of a teacher returning to 1963 to prevent Kennedy's assassination. But King is not spared the scorn of the new revisionists who fancy themselves destroyers of myth.
Christopher Hitchens, for example, attacks Kennedy with the same relish with which he defends George W. Bush. Among his catalogue of grievances, he says Kennedy didn't write his books or his Inaugural Address. If it isn't "plagiarism," says the perfervid Hitchens, it's "kleptomania."
That journalist Arthur Krock was the "chief author" of Why England Slept, as Hitchens claims, is ridiculous. The book grew out of Kennedy's senior thesis at Harvard. Krock suggested the title and stylistic revisions, but insisted that he'd done nothing more "than polish it and amend it here and there, because it was very, very definitely his own product."
The newer, younger revisionists accuse Kennedy of rhetoric and then traffic in it themselves. Jeet Heer declares in The Globe and Mail that Kennedy gave "free rein to the military-industrial complex" and "consistently derided any attempts to negotiate with the Soviet Union." Heer loves the grand statement, which he consistently gets about half right.
Kennedy did increase military spending sharply after meeting a sabre-rattling Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. But he deeply distrusted his generals during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Had he agreed to invade Cuba - rather than showing enormous restraint - Soviet field commanders would have responded with nuclear weapons.
Kennedy made an impassioned appeal to the Russians on June 10, 1963, which The Manchester Guardian called "one of the great state papers of American history." It produced the historic Test Ban Treaty in August. The next day, Kennedy called civil rights "a moral issue" and introduced a civil rights bill, which Congress passed a year later.
Kennedy's bold strokes are ignored by Heer as well as Ross Douthat of The New York Times, bent on exploding the "myth" that "Kennedy was a very good president and might have been a great one." No serious historian believes that, he sniffs.
Actually, he's wrong. Michael Beschloss, Robert Dallek, Geoffrey Perret and James Giglio are sympathetic to Kennedy though not sentimental. Then again, they're historians, not drive-by smear artists.
Douthat argues Kennedy would have stayed in Vietnam because his advisers had urged Johnson to prosecute the war. Douthat forgets that Robert Kennedy, JFK's most trusted adviser, broke with them on the war and even so, JFK often overruled his advisers, as he did both on civil rights and on Cuba.
Predictably, the revisionists don't mention Kennedy's other achievements: the launch of the space program, the creation of the Peace Corps, and the celebration of public service which inspired a generation.
Nor, in their absolutist terms do they consider, 50 years later, the climate of opposition that Kennedy faced in his party in Congress, and in the extremist South.
To serious students of Kennedy - those who examine the papers and try to place him in the context of his tumultuous time - the story of Kennedy is neither sainthood nor folly. It is about mistakes, yes, but it is also about ambition, leadership and maturity.
In the last months of his life, he inhabits the office as he hasn't before. In a sense, he becomes president. He muses about ending the arms race and running on a peace platform in 1964. He is skeptical about Vietnam. And he embraces civil rights, knowing it may cost him the election.
How judicious would his rival in 1960, the psychotic Richard Nixon, have been in Cuba? Or, how progressive would the Republican nominee in 1964, the ultraconservative Barry Goldwater, have been on civil rights?
Funny thing about Hitchens, Heer and Douthat. They're as feverish in their antipathy toward Kennedy as his admirers are in their affection, and far more economical with the truth.
Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University. Email: andrewzcohen@yahoo.ca
© Copyright © The Ottawa Citizen
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Kennedy+bashing+rage/5815861/story.html#ixzz1flR6b7GP