To be fair, he only governed for less than three years of his term. But in that time, he faced some serious challenges: The Cuban Missile Crisis, the escalating Vietnam War, civil rights, the integration of the University of Mississippi with the assistance of U.S. Marshals, the murder of Medgar Evers, the erection of the Berlin Wall -- there are more, no doubt, some of much lesser importance that kept the man busy. Some he handled capably, others he stumbled on. But in this regard he was no different than any other president.
Kennedy's shortcomings were largely personal. The fact that he was electable is owed not only to his war hero status, but his father's enormous wealth that was amassed bootlegging liquor during Prohibition. Of course his father, Joseph Kennedy, always did what was expedient: He used insider information to trade stocks that were later ruled to be illegal. He was also an anti-Semite, a charge he disputed.
Perhaps the biggest boost to Kennedy's candidacy, aside from his father's fortune, was that Kennedy, as the first viable Catholic candidate, was an novelty. Electable, married to a photogenic wife, he gave voters a reason to overlook the concerns from some quarters that his Catholicism meant rule directed by the Vatican, a silly assertion in any event but back then an eminently believable one.
But as a person, Kennedy fell far short of the mark. In recent years, his string of extra-marital affairs has tarnished the shining image of Camelot. Numerous women, not the least of which was Marilyn Monroe, were rumored to be his mistresses. It's even said that his wife, Jackie Kennedy, knew of his dalliances. What's more, they were covered up by the attorney general, his brother and future presidential candidate in his own right, Robert Kennedy.
For years, I've been saying that the greatest myth about Kennedy was his supposed support and love for the black community. Although it would seem natural that an Irish kid excluded from Brahmin Boston's largely Protestant circles would find common cause with blacks, he really didn't know them at all. This fact was set forth in Juan Williams' history of the civil rights movement, Eyes On the Prize. Instead, the politically savvy candidate took a page out of his father's Playbook of Expediency and realized that in order to defeat Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign, he'd have to woo the black vote, which he did successfully.
Why this is of any consequence now is that the anniversary is approaching but also because in the lead-up to the anniversary, black activists are coming out with the real story. Harry Belafonte has come out and said the following to the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia last week:
Harry Belafonte, an American musician and social activist, supported Adlai Stevenson during the 1960 democratic primary, but agreed to meet with Kennedy, who tried to recruit him. The meeting left Belafonte unimpressed with Kennedy.
“I was quite taken by the fact that he knew so little about the black community,” Belafonte said in a NBC News interview with Tom Brokaw. “He knew the headlines of the day but he really wasn’t anywhere nuanced or detailed on the deep depths of black anguish of what our struggle was really about.”
Belafonte, a confidant of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said he had asked Kennedy during the meeting about Dr. King and found that the future president “knew very little” about the civil rights leader.
He “just knew that somewhere there was this force and he was out there making some mischief,” Belafonte said.
Kennedy wanted to keep distance from King, Belafonte said, in order to secure votes from “the most important element within the democratic party, which was the southern Democratic oligarchy, the Dixiecrats” – a short-lived segregationist political party.
The civil rights movement was not on Kennedy's radar, according to Clarence Taylor, professor of history at Baruch College and at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
"He had other concerns as both a candidate and as president," Taylor said. "Major concern was foreign policy, so civil rights was an annoying issue for JFK."
Based on the meeting, Belafonte declined to support Kennedy in the primary. But after Kennedy secured a Democratic nomination and exhibited a broader understanding of the civil rights movement, Belafonte got on board.
“As events grew and as events revealed themselves, and he had to make decisions, he became more caught up with us,” Belafonte said. “The moral persuasion of our cause made him take a hard look at who we were.”
When Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested on October 19, 1960, in Atlanta for a sit-in and sentenced to four months of hard labor, Kennedy called Coretta Scott King directly to express his sympathies, Belaftonte pointed out. Bobby Kennedy called the judge in Georgia and King was released on bail a few days later.
Taylor said Kennedy's phone call was a shrewd political move to win black votes. The African-American community took notice of that gesture. During the 1960 election the black vote was crucial in the swing states of Illinois, Michigan and South Carolina that Kennedy carried.
But as president, Kennedy couldn't ignore the civil rights movement. In 1962 he sent hundreds of U.S. marshals to enforce a court order to admit James Meredith, a black student, to the University of Mississippi. And in 1963, after a series of protests from the black community, he addressed the nation to ask for support of the civil rights bill "giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments."
After the assassination, it was Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, who pushed the bill through Congress and signed it into law in 1964.
"JFK couldn’t walk away from [the civil rights movement]," Taylor said. "It became the major issue of the day. But I think it’s overblown, portraying Kennedy as a civil rights president. Johnson should’ve been given much more credit."
The notion that Kennedy was the savior of the black community is not only misleading but it's false. LBJ, as Belafonte says, deserved far more credit. Yet LBJ was more coarse than Kennedy and he lacked the photogenic wife. Marilyn Monroe never sang him Happy Birthday. So the more convenient myth for Democrats is to give Kennedy the credit for civil rights advances, just as it blames Johnson for Vietnam, when in fact it was Kennedy who started us down that slippery slope by sending advisors in 1961 and bankrolling the South's military.
Hindsight is 20/20, they say. It also serves to put targets in a smaller focus so as to obscure their true image. Kennedy, like wine, has only improved with age.
(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
No comments:
Post a Comment