PRINCE JACK IS STILL DEAD: GET OVER IT!

The Death of Camelot

The American Thinker ^ | October 31, 2010 | Bruce Walker

Fifty years ago, American government -- even American society -- entered into a wonderland of youth, prettiness, chic, and charisma. John Kennedy had defeated Richard Nixon in the presidential debates (or at least JFK defeated Nixon in the eyes of the millions of Americans who watched the debates -- those who heard them on the radio felt that Nixon had won). The election of 1960 was incredibly close and could have torn the country apart, except that mean-spirited Nixon (unlike Nobel Prize winner Gore) chose to concede and spare the nation a political civil war.

A glorious age was about to begin! The sophisticates and academicians -- the aristocrats of the republic -- would now guide us to a new Golden Age. John Kennedy was handsome, young, and married to a wife with movie star looks. Television was endemic in American life, and color television on large screens would very soon replace the small black-and-white television in the living room. Kennedy inspired us (or at least we were told that he inspired us over and over again), but it was hard to put one's finger on exactly what Kennedy actually did.

He quickly fumbled his meeting in quasi-summit in Vienna with Khrushchev, showing just how much less our young president knew about the world than Eisenhower, the balding older man who guided a coalition of democracies in a crusade against Hitler and then presided for eight years over a peaceful, respected America. Kennedy horribly mishandled the Bay of Pigs Invasion, leaving freedom-fighters to face Castro's Gulag so JFK would not have to face too many questions. It is ironic that the "highpoint" of Kennedy in the White House was that he brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and then "won" (which meant that we gained nothing but looked as if we did).

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