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.
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.
