My American Spectator colleague Jeffrey Lord’s interesting article recalling his youthful experiences on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated brought back some of my own vague memories (I was only a few months past my fourth birthday on November 22, 1963) of the assassination’s aftermath. Lord accurately describes the immediate aftermath as “the birth of JFK as an American martyr, a legend in American history.” World War II “hero,” married to a sophisticated beauty, the president who had “faced down the Russians in the Cuban Missile Crisis and stood up for black Americans in the civil rights movement.” Lord reflects on the “many” JFK contributions to America and the world.

I vaguely recall seeing the president’s casket on television in black and white (we didn’t yet have a color TV), with a lot of people around it. Two years later, I entered Catholic grade school in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where each classroom had on the wall a crucifix and a picture of John F. Kennedy. Scranton was an Irish-Catholic dominated city at that time, and John F. Kennedy was viewed as political royalty. Even many years later, when I worked at the Lackawanna County Courthouse in Scranton as an Assistant District Attorney, the clerk’s office prominently displayed a photo of JFK on the wall above and behind the counter.

The legend, the myth, of “Camelot” lived on (and, to some extent, still lives on). It did so in large part due to Kennedy court historians like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (A Thousand Days), William Manchester (One Brief Shining Moment), Kenneth O’Donnell (Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye), Robert Kennedy (Thirteen Days), and a media that lionized JFK.

JFK Imperfect

But the myth has faded because some writers, some scholars, and some historians have demolished it with facts. One of the first to do so was Victor Lasky in JFK: The Man and the Myth. Gradually, other authors followed in Lasky’s footsteps, including Gary Wills (The Kennedy Imprisonment), Nigel Hamilton (JFK: Reckless Youth), Thomas Reeves (A Question of Character), and, more recently, Maureen Callahan (Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed). Kennedy’s foreign policy “accomplishments” have been scrutinized and found wanting by historians such as Fredericke Kempe (Berlin 1861), Paul Johnson (Modern Times), and Michael Beschloss (The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963), among others.

We now know that JFK secretly took a vast array of drugs while he was president, including amphetamines, from a physician known to White House insiders as “Dr. Feelgood.” We know Kennedy, as president, carried on an affair with the girlfriend of a top mafia boss. Even pro-Kennedy historian Robert Dallek revealed that JFK had sex with a 19-year-old White House intern.

We know that the JFK administration authorized wiretaps on civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and that Kennedy was at best a reluctant “champion” of civil rights for fear of offending southern whites. It was JFK’s (and Lyndon Johnson’s) defense secretary Robert McNamara who unilaterally surrendered our nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. And it was JFK who started our country’s long and tragic descent into the Vietnam quagmire.

Lord quotes President Ronald Reagan’s remarks at a fundraiser for the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation as evidence of JFK’s heroics and great contributions to America and the world. This was likely nothing more than Reagan being gracious at an appropriate moment at an event where the truth would serve no purpose.

But the truth is what conservative writers should write about JFK, even in an article noting that JFK would be 108 years old. There is no sense in conservatives perpetuating the myth of JFK’s greatness. Leave that to the liberals. Conservatives like Jeffrey Lord, who usually writes splendid and informative articles for The American Spectator, should know better.

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