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Saturday, November 22, 2003

On the anniversary of the assassination, Hitchens is wishing the legend would hurry up and die, too.

OpinionJournal - Where's the Aura? - Forty years later, the JFK cult has faded. It's about time.

...Had Napoleon Bonaparte been fatally hit by a musket ball as he entered Moscow, it was once pointed out, he would have been remembered by history as one of the greatest generals who ever lived. It would be cruel and unfeeling to say that Kennedy's luck and "charisma" did not desert him even in death, and in any case I prefer to blame this callous opinion on those who actually hold it--namely his hagiographers and mythologists. Who now seriously believes that Kennedy intended to undo his own rash commitment in South Vietnam? Can we not at least agree that his zeal for the assassination of President Diem--whom he had installed at some price in blood--was a somewhat contradictory indicator of any intention to disengage?

That would make a point, as it were, for the "left." But what of the pugnacious anticommunism that Kennedy also maintained when he thought it suited him? Having tried assassination and "deniable" invasion in Cuba, and having helped provoke a missile crisis on which he gambled all of us, he meekly acceded to the removal of American missiles from Turkey and to a pledge that Fidel Castro's regime would be considered permanent. He and his brother did not completely hold to the terms of the latter agreement, it is true, but as a result the United States became indelibly associated with mob tactics in the Caribbean, and Castro became in effect the president for life. In this sense, we may say that the legacy of JFK is with us still...


I can't argue with Hitchens' analysis. I don't have the knowledge of history to do it, but I think there's some danger of throwing out the baby with the bath-water here. Sure, you can go through the Kennedy record, bit-by-bit, to bring it down to earth. But, it seems to me, there's some value in this era of nihilism of having some political figures that provide us with image - an image that members of both parties can find some value in.

This article, it seems to me, encapsulates one of the worst habits of the Left - not just to work to bring our icons down to earth...but to obliterate them utterly.

Update: Power Line comments on the Hitchens piece.

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