JFK Assassination as Redemption

Today on the 50th anniversary of the JFK Assassination, everyone is naturally looking pact on the event and accessing its significance. Thanks to his popularity with the media and popular culture, all objective evaluation of Kennedy died when the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. They transferred what has been increasingly seen as an incredibly overrated president into an Icon.

The liberals almost immediately began working on the assassination. They had to explain away the fact Kennedy was not killed by "Right Wing Extremists" but by a self styled Communist. they hardly missed a beat. The mainline liberals immediately took the position that it was the right that created the "Climate of Hate" that made the assassination possible. That has continued to this day. The far left embraced a right wing conspiracy. Both began the Kennedy Canonization process. this represented a change. Establishment liberals had not always be so fawning to JFK. In his article
National Review Author, Michael Knox Beran quotes Edmund Wilson writing to Alfred Kazin in 1961 "His historical allusions are likely to be inaccurate in a way which suggests he cannot really have read much history. I suspect that his pretension to 'culture' are largely worked up by Arthur Schlesinger".Many lament that America "Lost its innocence" On Nov. 22. Nations are never innocent, and if America was that innocence was lost long before the limosine turned onto elm street.

Many wished as did Theodore Roosevelt daughter Alice that he would show "less profile and more courage". The Radical Left was even more caustic. Witness Peggy Seeger and Ewan McColl's song "The banks they are Rosy" In which Kennedy is portrayed as longing for war and allied with Nazis.
But all this changed with Dallas.

The Reality is that Kennedy provide Mediocre leadership at a time of great crisis. His habit of standing up to the Soviets, only to back down created dangerous confrontations like Berlin and Cuba, where he was hailed as courageous in spite of giving the Soviets everything they wanted. The Bay of Pigs, which he supported, only to lose his nerve at the last minute, not only condemned those Cubans who trusted him to death, but left the nation of Cuban under tyranny but left a destabilizing force in the Caribbean that has born fruit in Venezuela and the rest of Latin America.

In addition to all this we have Kennedy the man. Only the adulation of the liberal media protected him from himself. His Satyriasis, which included Marilyn Monroe, Sharing a Girlfriend with a mob boss, seducing one of his interns and even convincing her to be shared with a friend, hid liaison with
prostitutes , including one who was a probable East German Agent would surely have been fatal if Revealed.

His drug use, including Amphetamines from the famous "Dr. Feelgood", The Probability that he stole the '60 election, and the dirty tricks he and his father played in the 60s primary contest (read Victor Laskys (It did not Start with Watergate),  including the use of mob money.

Clearly Kennedy was no giant. He was handsome with a beautiful wife, he was photogenic, he was a great reciter of the words of his speech writers, He was everything that appealed to the desire of many to have an American Royal Family, (not how many times Costner, in his JFK, refers to Kennedy as a king,) the sort of people who have a portrait of Princess Di. in their living rooms and are obsessed with Charles, William, Kate,"Pippa" and the rest of the inbred royals.

If one weeps for Kennedy, weep for him as a man, not as an idol.