25 years on, the U.S. is still searching for Kennedy

Press, 5 December 1988, Page 16

25 years on, the U.S. is still searching for Kennedy

Peter Pringle,

of the “Independent,” on the

effort to put J.F.K. into historical contex

ON NOVEMBER 22 for the past quarter century Americans have engaged in a national ritual of asking each other where they were that fateful moment in Dallas when President Kennedy was assassinated. The stories have been told slowly, respectfully, with heads bowed.

Over the years there have been embellishments, no doubt, about how many tears were shed and about the collective feeling of despair over the abrupt loss of such a young and vigorous presidency after only a thousand days. Inevitably, the passing of time has blurred the memory, making it hard to separate the nightmare from the reality.

so it has been with assessments of Kennedy himself. It has been hard for Americans to gauge, in the swirl of emotion over the killing, what kind of a leader Kennedy really was and what his presidency has meant to America; hard to separate the dream from the reality.

In the immediate aftermath of Dallas the Kennedy courtiers, the “keepers of the flame” as they became known, such as historians Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore White, produced their glowing accounts. And there was much to be proud of. In 10 days in Moscow Kennedy had taken the first step toward nuclear disarmament with the Partial Test Ban Treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere. He had faced down Khrushchev over Cuba and George Wallace over the admission of black students to Alabama university. He had lifted the spirits of the entire nation, especially blacks, and given them hope of conquering a new frontier. But he had also engaged in a reckless adventure at the Bay of Pigs, committed 16,000 troops to Vietnam with an uncertain mission and run an Administration soaked with the kind of risktaking and machismo, at both a national and a personal level, that appalled the followers of emerging political movements such as the anti-war groups, the New Left, feminism and neoconservatism. Even before the Vietnam War was over, the revisionists, notably David Halberstam in “The Best and the Brightest,” had begun to cast the Kennedy years in a different, less favourable light. Later, others such as Gary Wills, in “The Kennedy Imprisonment” and again in 1982 in his “A Meditation on Power,”

reinforced the misgivings many came to have about the rashness of the youthful President and the way in which his advisers had assiduously built the Kennedy myths.

Most recently there has been a direct challenge to one of those myths: Kennedy’s record of progressive civil rights. In his absorbing new book, “Parting of the Waters: America in the King Years,” the Southern journalist Taylor Branch explores Kennedy’s relationship with Martin Luther King. Branch concludes, “In death the late president gained credit for much of the purpose that King’s movement had forced upon him in life.”

Essentially a biography of King, the book, in the most comprehensive manner so far, attempts to put Kennedy’s civil rights record in a wide historical context. In that sense the work has broken new ground. Twenty-five years after Kennedy’s death Americans are beginning to filter out the imagemakers, weigh the positive and the negative together, and place the young Bostonian in his rightful place in the political history of the United States. The temptation is to recreate the positive side of the aura for personal use — as this year’s presidential race demonstrated. Michael Dukakis launched his national campaign with deliber-

ate echoes of the Boston-Austin axis that brought Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to power. Here was “another son of Massachusetts” joining a Texan, Lloyd Bentsen, to bring the nation together, to heal its regional wounds, to end diversity. Even the Republicans tried it on.

Dan Quayle attempted to translate his youthfulness and boyish good looks into a Kennedy image — until he was felled with a ferocious chop by Lloyd Bentsen in the most memorable line of the year: “Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” Others in the 1988 political arena ignored the lessons of the Kennedy era at their peril. Gary Hart lost his chance to be President when he thought that, like Kennedy, he could get away with having a mistress. The revisionists had dug around the rumours about Kennedy and women and come up with Judith Exner, the gangster's moll. They also found that when he was an intelligence officer in World War II he had been liaising with a suspected Nazi sympathiser. Hart ignored the message and went to Bimini with Donna Rice.

three, or 10 million, served in uniform during the Vietnam period, but only three million actually went to South-East Asia, the vast majority of them blacks, brown and working-class whites.

Then, always, there is Vietnam. All Presidents since Lyndon Johnson have been hobbled in the conduct of foreign policy by the legacy of Vietnam. So, too, presidential candidates.

Vietnam lives on: last summer a study of Vietnam veterans indicated that about 470,000 of the three million who served are current cases of what is known as P.T.S.D., or post traumatic stress disorder. To those who served and those who did not, Vietnam shaped, in one way or another, an entire generation’s view of duty and patriotism. Look again at what happened to Dan Quayle. The storm that engulfed the young senator when the media discovered he had joined the National Guard to avoid going to Vietnan was irrelevant — in the end. But the interrogation unleashed powerful, lingering resentments about the war and the failure of the Kennedy era to reform American society along more open and humane lines. The ugly statistics came pouring out: one eligible American in

The question is still: how much was Kennedy responsible for the war and would he have got out sooner? The revisionists say that if Kennedy had plans to extricate American troops or doubts over the aims of the war, he never showed them in public.

Kennedy’s defenders insist he would never have allowed the war to escalate as Johnson did; that he would have pulled the troops home well before it became such a disaster. The issue is unresolved.

Among the revisionists who came to criticise Kennedy over the war were the very liberals who had so loudly applauded his narrow White House victory. Encamped around the freshly lit fires of the New Left, they argued that slavish loyalty to capitalistic and militaristic endeavours had been always at the root of Kennedy’s agenda. Feminists who wrote about Kennedy's hypersexuality had taken an obvious and harmful toll on his presidency.

In his new book, Taylor Branch, himself a 1960 s liberal, notes that King criticised Kennedy’s “sluggishness on civil rights” and “complained privately that Kennedy had summoned the nation to nothing more positive than a grim obedience to the law.”

He relates how Kennedy had exaggerated his friendship with King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, to improve his chances of getting the black vote. He also describes how Kennedy succumbed to F. 8.1. director, J. Edgar Hoover's desire to tap King’s telephone after Hoover had made it very clear he knew about Kennedy’s peccadilloes.

On the other hand, some aspects of the Kennedy presidency grow in stature with time. Knowing what we know today about the difficulties of stitching together arms control agreements, the Partial Test Ban Treaty was a stunning achievement. And no other President, including Ronald Reagan, has been able to exhort the nation in the way Kennedy did. It remains for the chill of history to set the tumultuous Kennedy years against their correct backdrop.