June 1, 2007
JFK, Myths and Countermyths Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:05 PM EST A shrewd and suggestive post by Alex Burns (“Kennedy at 90”) ponders the fate of a JFK who had not been assassinated at in 1963 and runs over a few published alternate histories in which the assassination did not happen, at least one of them very sunny. I fondly remember a darker counterfactual published in the sometimes nasty, often tasteless, and occasionally brilliantly funny National Lampoon. In it, unless my memory is off, JFK evades Oswald’s bullet, then withdraws the troops from Vietnam but sends them to Northern Ireland to expel the British, which prompts protests and civil disobedience from the graying parents of the now-indifferent children who protested the Vietnam War of actual history. JFK also gives away enough government money to every American teenager to fund a year of subsidized globetrotting, thus ensuring no youth revolt; repeals the Twenty-Second Amendment; and is still President in the late 1970s, at which time he makes a stoned pass at his own daughter. The 1960s upheavals have been averted, which in the late or mid ’70s, when the piece was published, was considered a nasty outcome by the sort of people who read the Lampoon. One point of that joke, I think, was to remind Kennedy-worshipping baby boomers that the President they mourned had been anything but a utopian radical and rather had sprung from a sometimes parochial American political subculture and had an imperfectly attractive libertine side. Another point of the joke was the simple pleasure of blasphemy. JFK was still worshipped by much of the culture. But blasphemy can have a point, and in this case, did. Mistaking a man for a god is an error, one the Lampoon’s joke sought to correct. Alex Burns writes that the historian Nigel Hamilton’s alternative history “usefully emphasizes the historical influence of chance events like the assassination.” Of course, that thought cuts many different ways. It is possible that JFK would never have had the vision and courage to ram through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As Mr. Burns notes, JFK certainly wasn’t very bold about civil rights in the years he did serve as President. It is possible that a Kennedy Presidency (Maybe JFK, maybe RFK) would have fought the Vietnam War more vigorously, and for that matter, won it (no bombing pauses, which on one theory lost us the war, by allowing North Vietnam to learn to cope with us, and maybe much more). Fear of a Chinese reaction restrained LBJ and possibly Richard Nixon from certain escalatory possibilities in Vietnam, but that might not have restrained JFK, who was willing to risk nuclear war—after all, he did it in Cuba. He was a Cold Warrior, and at times a reckless one. One oddity of the myth of JFK, and specifically of the myth that all our ills sprang from his premature death, is that it created a counter-myth, in which only his vices were on view. I remember reviewing in the early 1990s a venomous and I thought madly one-sided biography of Kennedy by a formerly-besotted historian at the University of Wisconsin. Kennedy was the last President to cast a durable glamour over a large portion of the press and the academy, and the reaction, when it came, was a little ugly. Now, I think, the reaction is over, at least in the case of Kennedy, but it may have had a long half-life encompassing new objects. The reaction to the unmasking of JFK may included the fact that American journalists and academics are nowadays far more likely to take a mechanically antiheroic view of public men than succumb to the blind worship of any political hero. This is sometimes seen as a great improvement, but my hunch is that stupidity inverted is still a kind of stupidity.
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