The fiftieth anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination is, of course, an occasion for a fresh outbreak of the virulent hagiography that has corrupted the memory of his actual record. The New York Times, a paper that should know better by now, published an article this week that repeated the old lie that somehow right-wing hysterics in Texas were the people really responsible for Kennedy’s murder. A theory inconvenienced only by the fact Lee Harvey Oswald was a pro-Castro leftist. But never mind that. Better to reframe the assassination as a part of America’s culture wars. And we know who the guilty men are in those, don’t we?
American history is a quilt of many myths but few are so exasperating, perhaps even so pernicious, as the myth of Camelot. American innocence did not perish with Kennedy and nor did his death rob the United States of a glorious, peaceful, happy future. The tumults and traumas of the 1960s were not the result of Kennedy’s murder (though his death was part of it and a contributing factor).
Nevertheless, never in the long history of the republic has so much been credited to one man on the basis of so little.
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