Political assassinations often turn complex and imperfect men into saints. Immediately after the killing, the assassin’s victim is purged of his sins and every form of controversy surrounding his foreign and domestic polices become misunderstood attempts at peace and prosperity. An assassination’s anniversary, then, plunges the public down a rabbit hole of memory that leads to a fantasy land where the victim’s lost vision of the future becomes reality. The nation’s current state of affairs is temporarily accepted as a consequence of the figure’s death, no other type of history weighing in on it. Of course it is all imagination, a wish things were the way the deceased leader wanted them to be: better. This is the case of John F. Kennedy, a man taken from the American public as perhaps the greatest president the country had ever seen.
As the anniversary of Kennedy’s death approaches, American television churns out its traditional barrage of documentaries that portray America as a fatherless nation come November 22nd, 1963. We are reminded that Kennedy was here to save the world and that he signified the last hope for peace to prosper, anywhere. Post-Kennedy America, so it seems, became a nightmare version of itself, nearly post-apocalyptic in scope. Vietnam, segregation, the counterculture, the sexual revolution, and hippies were all things that could have been avoided had Kennedy lived. And all throughout we are left without much space to question whether his presidency was really destined to become the epitome of democracy, the true example of freedom in the world. To this day, it is thought Kennedy left before he could fix everything. That his unfinished presidency meant the country’s destiny was severed from greatness. But history shows that the Kennedy administration, while fashionable and charismatic, meant business as usual.
Before that fateful November day, Kennedy had amassed a considerable amount of criticism that came from all sides of the political spectrum. The Civil Rights movement regarded Kennedy an opportunist keeping desegregation on the sidelines for his second term, when it couldn’t hurt his chances of securing another term. Washington hardliners considered Kennedy’s foreign policy as soft after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and weak when Cuba resurfaced as a potential military target come the missile crisis. The argument was Soviet Russia would never have made Cuba a nuclear site had Kennedy taken it during the invasion.
Others blamed Kennedy for Vietnam and warned that sending military advisors and economic aid to Southeast Asia would be interpreted as intervention and could land America in a war it could not easily win. Kennedy had agreed with Eisenhower’s labeling of Laos as “the cork in the bottle” in regards to it being the instigator of threat in the region. Kennedy partnered with Diem in South Vietnam and went ahead with a policy of limited military action. But all of that dissipated after Dallas, when either a lone gunman from the Dallas Book Depository or a team of assassins shooting from the Grassy Knoll made John F. Kennedy the fourth President to be assassinated while in office.
As the nation mourned it also began to forget. Kennedy became an idea that should live on as an example future presidents should aspire to, future generations even. His criticisms faded into visions of an incomplete experiment yielding results on American Freedom being the standard of living worldwide. Vietnam no longer became a war Kennedy began in the early years of his presidency. The fact he kept intervention limited meant Kennedy was really just laying the international framework for diplomacy to take over. Instead Vietnam became Lyndon Johnson’s fault, the Southern Vice President turned President after the assassination (maybe landing the role after he had conspired with the assassins to stage a coup d'état should conspiracy theorists have their way). Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) bases its main argument on this contention.
According to the film, the authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. Stone’s Kennedy, painted as a complete pacifist, wanted to end the war and bring the Cold War to its knees through diplomacy. Assuming war is the organizing principle of American society, a dark government wing set between the military and the White House began to form, to question Kennedy’s commitment to Southeast Asia. Of course, we have to accept war is also the backbone of the country’s economy, the Military-Industrial-Complex Eisenhower warned about. No war meant no economic prosperity and so Kennedy had to be replaced with someone committed to war. Vietnam became the force that pulled the rifle’s trigger. Blame the assassination on war and those who court it. Forget Kennedy escalated intervention in 1962 and approved the Strategic Hamlet Program which involved village internment and the forced relocation of Vietnamese peasantry so Communist insurgents could remain isolated from possible sympathizers. It was only after April 1963 that Kennedy started to voice a desire to extract American forces from Vietnam. He was quoted as saying: “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point.”
Meanwhile, race relations became another experiment left unfinished. We remember Kennedy signing Executive Order 10925, which required government contractors employ or treat employees equally without regard of race, creed, color or national origin. We forget Martin Luther King, Jr. and his associates (who accused the President of being slow paced with domestic reform) drafted a document that called on Kennedy to enact a sort of Second Emancipation Proclamation that would deal the final blow to segregation, nation-wide, in 1962. Kennedy did not execute that order. The path towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended up being a long and violent one and it was ultimately signed by Lyndon Johnson.
And yet, Kennedy has captured the hearts and minds of the American public, being that he became what hearts and minds ought to be. Annually, we go down the rabbit hole to a place called Camelot, where royalty is synonymous with the Kennedy name and peace is an idea original to it. Where the United States of America can revel in the make-believe that it was once close to reaching perfection, of being the moral weight on which the world could balance. But once down there, we should ask ourselves whether those visions of a near perfect America are given too freely to a man who was so far from it. John F. Kennedy has become a man out of time. Unstuck in it. He became universal, the light we still hope can shine on darker days.
Perhaps it is unfair to judge a man with the full weight of history. Kennedy’s legacy is no doubt unquestionable. He most publicly aided the fight for Civil Rights, prevented a nuclear confrontation with Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis, initially approved an overhaul of American immigration policy reuniting many foreign families and dismantling the selection of immigrants based on country of origin, and funded NASA’s space program with the intention of putting a man on the moon (in truth this last one came out of a sense of national prestige after the Soviets wounded it by being the first to fly in space, but still). His accomplishments are admirable and deserve remembrance, but they do not constitute an example of political flawlessness. John F. Kennedy is much more complex than he is permitted to be. A man that knew J. Edgar Hoover was wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr. based on rocky evidence some of his associates were communist sympathizers. A strategist that contemplated pulling out of Southeast Asia only after the Communists acquired the upper hand over the political fate of the region. A politician that can be accused of postponing Civil Rights reform for fear of losing a re-election. In a sense, Kennedy is the great enigma. A figure, a symbol, that guarded his secrets well by hiding them in plain sight. An American icon that should be remembered for every decision he took as Commander in Chief of the United States, so long as he is remembered as an imperfect man.
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