JFK’s Rule Was No Camelot
Had President John F. Kennedy not been assassinated, he might well have gone the way of all flesh in old age, remembered at best as a mediocre president most notable for the Cuban Missile Crisis and his failure of nerve during the U.S.-backed invasion of anti-Communist Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. Beyond that, most of what we know about him is that he and his fetching wife, Jackie, brought dignity and white-tie-and-tails class to the White House. Such was JFK’s bewildering charm and good looks, and the High Hopes for his New Frontier, as Frank Sinatra’s campaign theme song went, that the time was called “Camelot,” where “July and August cannot be too hot,” “there’s a legal limit to the snow,” “winter is forbidden till December,” and “summer lingers through September.”
But the late trailblazing conservative writer M. Stanton Evans probably expressed better than anyone what really happened when the Kennedy Circus erected its tent. He analogized with Chubby Checkers’ West African shuffle: “I say The Twist was originated in Washington by the Kennedy administration — a lot of frantic motion with no visible progress.”
That dismal record explains why most of what we see and hear about JFK appears in nostalgic family photos and films: Kennedy Christmases, touch football at the Hyannisport “compound,” or now dead John-John peeping out from under POTUS 35’s Oval Office desk. And of course, every November 22, we are treated to an assassination retrospective and endless loop of the Zapruder Film, which recorded the moment his head exploded in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.
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