JFK was the greatest president ever.
Speaking of psychodramas, there is a whole bundle of unresolved projection & fantasy & trauma wrapped up in the lefty boomer’s regard for JFK.
If you were a kid or youth growing up at that time, he must have been an “easy” guy to be enthusiastic about. About the age of your pop, good-looking, frequently funny, sophisticated, married to a glamorous wife, father of cute toddlers, adored by all the cool people.
As a symbolic act (and that’s about the only level on which a kid would understand it, being too young and inexperienced to absorb all the frustrating complexities of politics), his assassination must have been especially devastating for young people.
And he was followed by … his exact style opposite. LBJ was the Scar to JFK’s King Mufasa.
I think it was Oliver Stone who once said in an interview that it was JFK’s assassination, not VietNam, that soured him (and he was speaking for everyone in his generation who went left) on not just the American government but on America iteself. As in, something’s rotten in the heart of the USA.
The “unfulfilled promise” of Jack Kennedy, Jackie’s “Camelot” glitter-wrapping, became for Stone et al a psychological terrain into/onto which they could push all the lost what-ifs and dreamy dreams. “The blank screen onto which people of vastly different political strips project their own views,” if you will. Since JFK was not around to actually *do* X or Y, anyone could then try to claim that he *would* have done X or Y. (Ditto Bobby.)
LBJ, correspondingly, became the psychological landfill. All the ugliness & rage gets dumped there.
The Kennedy hagiography depends so heavily on this sense of shock and traumatic loss, that it can be viewed as quite repulsively manipulative and shameless for the extent to which it has been milked. Not least of all by the Kennedy family itself. (Looking at YOU, Teddy.)
In the grotesquely ironic sense it was only JFK’s and Bobby’s “martyrdom” which allowed their “magic” to continue. Forever young. The dead Hollywood starlet frozen in time, forever beautfiul.
That’s the thing about magic; it thrives only in its own little hothouse of tightly circumscribed conditions.
“Brief time period” appears to be condition #1. People are fickle and black swans have this tendency to appear and dispel the pixie dust. Therefore, the only time window is a very short one.
“Extreme exhuberance and self-satisfaction” appears to be condition #2. It’s not about the white rabbit coming out of the hat. It’s about how the audience FEELS about seeing the white rabbit coming out of the hat. Emotion. The more intense, the more childlike, the better.
“Tightly controlled narrative” appears to be condition #3. Magic wouldn’t be magic if you saw how it works. Controlling the narrative, allowing the audience to see only what the magician wants people to see, is what gives it that aura of specialness. It’s always a presentation; carefully selected and edited. The minute the backstage machinery fails or, heaven forbid, some rival magician leaks Mr. Mojo’s secrets, things start to fall apart.
Not being a boomer, and having Nixon & not JFK as my first president, has tended to cast me as some kind of skeptical outsider with regard to the JFK “thing.” I don’t understand the gut-pull of it because obviously I wasn’t there. I’ve never had a sense of magic about any president, ever. (Though RR looks better & better as time goes on; to some extent nostalgia, yes, but 20/20 hindsight also.) And I’ve thought for a long time that boomers, as a generation, were a generation badly in need of some competent psychoanalysis. Or just a plain old “grow up already” kick in the pants maybe. How much of lefty boomers’ dissociation from reality is due to the JFK “thing” I don’t know; but I don’t think they are entirely unrelated.
