The Long Shadow of the Kennedys

Given the daily degradation of our democracy—not merely its practice but its symbols and forms, which matter, too—it seems merely worth a baleful look that more of the so-called Kennedy files, which the National Archives released last week, on Donald Trump’s order, turn out, so far, to contain what is technically called bupkes: nothing of consequence or revelation. Whispers about such obvious hoaxes as an alleged letter written by John F. Kennedy, Jr., calling Joe Biden a traitor—a document long ago revealed and debunked by the F.B.I.—created some excitement on social media, including on Elon Musk’s X, but the files mostly inspire the same old rumors of the same old kind—the C.I.A., Israel’s intelligence agency, George H. W. Bush—the same horses revolving on the same carrousel, with the paint peeling from them by now. Trump’s motive in releasing the files seems to have been to appease the Alex Jones wing of his base—and likely also his Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—which clings to conspiracy theories as rational conservatives once clung to the Constitution. But most of the records had long been available; the big difference here is that some of the (mostly self-evident) names and sources are revealed. (And, with the usual Trump chaos, the names and even the Social Security numbers of various bystanders to the story have now been inadvertently released, creating the possibility of brand-new lawsuits.)

The reality, as confirmed by the Warren Commission, in 1964, remains as it has been ever since that November afternoon: that Lee Harvey Oswald, an unhappy man in his early twenties, whose absurd sense of self-aggrandizement oscillated with an unappeasable sense of grievance—the very type of a political assassin—acted alone. His motives for killing Kennedy remain uncertain—though he may perhaps have simply intended to impress Fidel Castro. (Assassins’ motives are often confused: Mark Chapman killed John Lennon out of a toxic compound involving an Esquire article about Lennon’s wealth and an obsession with “The Catcher in the Rye.”)

Oswald was a violent man in a violent mood. Only months before in Dallas, the Warren Commission found, he had tried to kill the far-right former Army Major General Edwin Walker, and less than an hour after Kennedy’s assassination he killed a police officer. Each accumulated piece of evidence—firearms evidence, ballistic evidence, eyewitness evidence—creates a mountain of essential certainty as to Oswald’s means and opportunity. The failures of the day to protect Kennedy are, in retrospect, shocking, but, although the Secret Service can adjust to the known, it can’t foresee every possible unknown. At that time, Presidents rode in open cars; now, they don’t. (They also regularly walked, waving and smiling, from public events to the Presidential limousine until 1981, when Ronald Reagan, doing just that, was shot and very nearly killed.)

The other side of the historical inquiry is also long known. As the Times reported, when Tim Naftali, an adjunct professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, researched the files, “his review of the documents convinced him that some previously redacted information had not been classified to protect details that cast doubt on what happened to Kennedy but for a much simpler and more sensitive reason: to protect the C.I.A.’s sources and methods.” What was suppressed at the time but is suggested by these documents, is that the C.I.A. engaged in morally dubious and illegal operations—including, as has been known at least since the findings of the Church Committee, in the mid-nineteen seventies, assassinations and attempted assassinations during the Kennedy era (of Castro, above all)—and that the agency was understandably nervous, not to say panicked, that one or another of its sinister practices could have “blown back” or, at a minimum, might have been disclosed in the course of an investigation. (Perhaps only the maverick journalist I. F. Stone said unequivocally at the time that our services had been conspiring to kill other leaders even as our own was killed. But Stone did not think that anyone conspired to kill J.F.K., a man whom, against his better judgment, he admired.)

The sheer felt devastation of what happened is still staggering and speaks, as well, to the continuing shadow cast by Kennedy’s long reputation. For the past sixty years, people have been undermining that reputation, and yet somehow it stands—so much so that R.F.K., Jr., despite having been denounced by his family (most pointedly by his cousin Caroline, J.F.K.’s daughter), persists in public life largely because of the continuing hold of the family name. The efforts to cut short that shadow have been many and multifarious. Kennedy, though married to the idolized Jackie, was a man with many alleged lovers, even as President (including, recklessly, one with connections to the Mob), a fact obviously kept from the public at the time. (As “Mad Men” rather usefully reminded us, though—and as John Updike’s stories of the nineteen-sixties in this magazine might have reminded us, too—casual infidelity was a fact of the time.) He accepted the ground rules of the Cold War mostly unreflectively, which helped lead to the disaster of the Bay of Pigs. And he was slow, not to say cautious, in addressing civil rights, the great issue of his Presidency.

But there are good reasons that his memory remains. J.F.K. was a handsome man—handsome in appearance, but also handsome in attitudes and speech and personal manner. Richard Reeves, preparing a book about Kennedy in the late eighties and early nineties, said that “half the people I interviewed began with this sentence about John F. Kennedy: ‘He was the most charming man I ever met.’ ” It was a charm that was irresistible to others because it rested on a foundation of courage. It’s significant that, for all the revisionism, no one has ever challenged the story, first reported in the pages of The New Yorker, of his almost ridiculously courageous conduct in the Second World War, when, as a young Navy lieutenant in the Pacific, his patrol boat was hit by a Japanese destroyer and he towed a wounded comrade through the waves holding the strap of his life jacket in his mouth. The charm with which he handled later political confrontations is still rightly legend—in 1946, in a room full of Boston working-class pols, after each was pointedly introduced as a young man who “came up the hard way,” he disarmingly announced, “I see I’m the only one here tonight who didn’t come up the hard way.” He later addressed the Texas delegation at the 1960 Democratic National Convention all on his own, very much a Daniel in the lion’s den, and won over many of the lions. These are all details of tone and temperament, and the relative absence of obvious and substantial policy achievements is part of the indictment against J.F.K. But the tone of a society is central to its self-conception. Personal manners are the surface of public morality.

Conspiracy theorists (and those of us who argue with them have the scars to show for it) often maintain that the ones debunking the conspiracies are allied with the conspirators. But, as generations of Marxist scholars have written, the essence of intelligent social criticism is to recognize that things would have happened more or less the way they did because of the inherent economic and ideological forces in a country. So, the Vietnam War, far from being a monstrosity thrust upon the government, in Kennedy’s absence, by Lyndon Johnson, as Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” suggests, was a natural, misbegotten outcome of long-standing beliefs about the Cold War and confrontations with Communism. It was encouraged and executed under Johnson by many of the same people, almost all of Kennedy allegiance—the famous “best and the brightest”—whom Kennedy recruited into government.

Individual character matters crucially in history—it’s conceivable that Kennedy would have recognized the trap of a ground war in Asia sooner than L.B.J. could, being less pathologically insecure, but it’s also quite possible that he would have made the same fatal errors in Vietnam, and for the same reasons. Had Vietnam been lost in 1965 instead of in 1975, right-wing Republicans, already led by Ronald Reagan, among others, would not have said, “Oh, thank God we didn’t waste tens of thousands of lives staying there and fighting an obviously doomed contest.” They would have cried cowardice and appeasement, and many, perhaps most, Americans would have listened. Would J.F.K. have resisted that circumstance better than L.B.J. did? Conceivably. But it was the same circumstance.

And so we come back to that long shadow. Countless American institutions were named in Kennedy’s honor right after the assassination: the airport once known as Idlewild became, and remains, our own J.F.K., and, in a still astonishing episode, Cape Canaveral, in Florida, was briefly renamed Cape Kennedy. (The original—and four-hundred-year-old—name was restored after a decade.) Yet no memorial seemed better suited to the Kennedy style than the dedication of a national arts center in Washington, D.C., which attempted to cure F. Scott Fitzgerald’s old complaint that the division of America between two capitals—one cultural and intellectual, in New York, and the other political, in Washington—had harmed the country profoundly.

The successor often gets the credit for what the rival started. Dwight D. Eisenhower first pushed the idea of an arts center in Washington, to put the city on even footing with other world capitals as an “artistic mecca that would be open to visitors from every land.” In the decades since its establishment, the center’s board has been distinguished and bipartisan—until last month, when, in a grotesque show of ego, Trump fired all the Biden-appointed members, and made himself its chairman. What Trump imagines filling the space is unclear. He has a weakness for bad Broadway musicals, and contempt for great ones—preferring “Cats” to “Hamilton” is in itself, as a close reading of the Federalist Papers should make clear, grounds for impeachment. (Although Trump’s affection for the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber is one thing that makes him seem very nearly human.) Trump’s case is that the Center previously discriminated against conservative culture in favor of the “woke” kind, and, though there is no evidence that this was ever the case, it is certainly true that no partisan monopoly on the performing arts should ever be encouraged. On the national stage, on any stage, there should be room for a first-rate right-wing playwright like David Mamet alongside a first-rate left-wing one like Tony Kushner. Pluralism is the first principle of a democratic culture. But what Trump wants is only shows that he likes. That is not reform.

Aesthetic dimensions—handsome and ugly, or charming and hateful—are not always the vectors or axes on which we judge politics. But there is much to be said for Eisenhower’s desire to see the symbols of our public life elevated and admirable, and for the people at the top at least to enact, if no one can entirely embody, the role that Aristotle called that of the magnanimous man—large of spirit, generous to enemies, and modest about one’s own accomplishments, because sure of them. “The mere accumulation of wealth and power,” Kennedy said, at a 1962 fund-raiser for what would become the Kennedy Center, “is available to the dictator and the democrat alike. What freedom alone can bring is the liberation of the human mind and spirit, which finds its greatest flowering in the free society.” That it is impossible to imagine these words rising from the man who now follows him—and who seems to believe that, since the accumulation of power and wealth is so easily available to the dictator, only a sap would choose to be a democrat—is a sign of how uniquely ugly our time is becoming. ♦