ANALYSIS (Dec. 29) -- Such is the nation's fascination with all things "Camelot" that someone could unearth a recording of President John F. Kennedy sneezing and the story would kick Tiger Woods out of the tabloids and make the cover of Vanity Fair.
Thus it wasn't surprising when the gossip Web site TMZ.com on Monday
went big with a purported exclusive picture of then-Sen. Kennedy sunbathing on a boat in the presence of naked women. Nor did it particularly matter when rival The Smoking Gun subsequently
exposed the picture as a fake. (Turns out it came from a 1967 Playboy shoot, and its JFK was actually a model.) But the brief episode did provide the latest reminder of America's continuing obsession with its 35th president -- and just how misplaced it can seem.
Why does it endure? Sure, Kennedy was assassinated. But how much do you think newly discovered pictures of
President William McKinley, gunned down by an anarchist in 1901, would fetch from the tabloids? Lincoln may be a different story -- but then Lincoln led the country ably through the Civil War and ended slavery before he was assassinated early into his second term. Kennedy served just a year less, but a clear-eyed review of the record shows that his accomplishments were far fewer.
AP
John F. Kennedy holds his daughter Caroline alongside his wife Jacqueline Kennedy in Hyannis Port, Mass., in Nov., 1960.
Indeed, for all the
hagiography spun by the likes of William Manchester, Theodore White, and Arthur Schlesinger has done to create the conventional wisdom on the Kennedy presidency, plenty of commentators disagree, and strongly so. British ex-pat cum American citizen Christopher Hitchens, for one, offered a
comprehensive indictment a few years ago in The Atlantic, which followed
another one he wrote earlier for the Wall Street Journal. Hitchens' take-down, in brief: Guided by his
loathsome anti-Semitic, Hitler-appeasing father, Joseph Kennedy, JFK's ascent began when a New York Times reporter
"polished" the Harvard senior's thesis for general publication ("Why England Slept") and culminated with his
fraud-stained election to the presidency in 1960. For Kennedy doubters, Americans have him to thank for the Bay of Pigs fiasco and starting the United States' costly intervention in Vietnam. The Cuban Missile Crisis revealed not so much a steely, principled leader but rather, in Hitchens' words, "
a president willing to risk nuclear war to save his own face." And on the home front, Kennedy's commitment to civil rights was
grudging at best.
TMZ.com
TMZ published a photo purporting to show John F. Kennedy frolicking on a yacht with a harem of naked women--except that the image actually appeared as part of a November 1967 Playboy photo spread.
And yet the Kennedy mystique lives on. Given the president's dubious policy resume, it's not unfair to assume the mass interest derives from his not-so-private life. The
pill-popping. The affairs -- with
Marylin Monroe, most notably. It may be an obvious point, but it's worth underscoring: The fascination comes not in spite of Kennedy's foibles, but because of them. His legacy grows in tandem with the unstoppable tabloidization of our news and entertainment.
Jon Gosselin for president!
