Or maybe not, the Kennedy mythmakers calculated. They set about creating the fable that Kennedy died battling "hate" — established code, then and now, for the political right. The story became legend because liberals were desperate to imbue Kennedy's assassination with a more exalted and politically useful meaning. Over and over again, the entire liberal establishment, led by the New York Times — and even the pope! — denounced the "hate" that claimed Kennedy's life. The Supreme Court justice Earl Warren summed up the conventional wisdom — as he could always be counted upon to do — when he theorized that the "climate of hatred" in Dallas — code for heavy right-wing and Republican activity — moved Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president.2
The fact that Oswald was a communist quickly changed from an inconvenience to proof of something even more sinister. How, liberals asked, could a card-carrying Marxist murder a liberal titan on the side of social progress? The fact that Kennedy was a raging anti-communist seemed not to register, perhaps because liberals had convinced themselves, in the wake of the McCarthy era, that the real threat to liberty must always come from the right. Oswald's Marxism sent liberals into even deeper denial, their only choice other than to abandon anti-anti-communism. And so, over the course of the 1960s, the conspiracy theories metastasized, and the Marxist gunman became a patsy. "Cui bono?" asked the Oliver Stones then and ever since. Answer: the military-industrial complex, allied with the dark forces of reaction and intolerance, of course. Never mind that Oswald had already tried to murder the former army major general and prominent right-wing spokesman Edwin Walker or that, as the Warren Commission would later report, Oswald "had an extreme dislike of the right-wing."3
Amid the fog of denial, remorse, and confusion over the Kennedy assassination, an informal strategic response developed that would serve the purposes of the burgeoning New Left as well as assuage the consciences of liberals generally: transform Kennedy into an all-purpose martyr for causes he didn't take up and for a politics he didn't subscribe to.
Indeed, over the course of the 1960s and beyond, a legend grew up around the idea that if only Kennedy had lived, we would never have gotten bogged down in Vietnam. It is a central conceit of Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times. Theodore Sorensen, Tip O'Neill, and countless other liberals subscribed to this view. A popular play on Broadway, MacBird, suggested that Johnson had murdered JFK in order to seize power. But even Robert F. Kennedy conceded in an oral history interview that his brother never seriously considered withdrawal and was committed to total victory in Vietnam. Kennedy was an aggressive anti-communist and Cold War hawk. He campaigned on a fictitious "missile gap" with the Soviets in a largely successful effort to move to Richard Nixon's right on foreign policy, tried to topple Castro at the Bay of Pigs, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis, and got us deep into Vietnam. A mere three and a half hours before Kennedy died, he was boasting to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce that he had increased defense spending on a massive scale, including a 600 percent increase on counterinsurgency special forces in South Vietnam. The previous March, Kennedy had asked Congress to spend fifty cents of every federal dollar on defense.4
The Kennedy myth also veers sharply from reality when it comes to the issue of race. The flattering legend is that Kennedy was an unalloyed champion of civil rights. Supposedly, if he had lived, the racial turmoil of the 1960s could have been avoided. The truth is far more prosaic. Yes, Kennedy pushed for civil rights legislation, and he deserves credit for it. But he was hardly breaking with the past. In the supposedly reactionary 1950s, Republicans had carried most of the burden of fulfilling the American promise of equality to blacks. Eisenhower had pushed through two civil rights measures over strong opposition from southern Democrats, and in particular Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who fought hard to dilute the legislation. Again, Kennedy was on the right side of history, but his efforts were mostly reactive. "I did not lie awake worrying about the problems of Negroes," he confessed.5
There is considerable irony in the fact that in the first election to replace Kennedy, Barry Goldwater was roundly hailed as the "fascist" in the race. The bespectacled small-government conservative in funereal suits was about as far from a fascist as one can get in American politics. Meanwhile, the intellectuals denouncing Goldwater as a crypto-Nazi failed to grasp that it was John F. Kennedy who was advancing fascist themes and aesthetics in American politics. FDR had been the first president to use modern technology to construct a mythological narrative about himself, but it was Kennedy who transformed that technique into an art. "Camelot," a phrase never used to describe Kennedy's tenure when he was alive, has become a catchall for every gauzy memory and unfulfilled wish of the Kennedy presidency. In 1964 James Reston summarized the newly minted liberal nostalgia for America's Greek god of a president. "He was a story-book President, younger and more handsome than mortal politicians, remote even from his friends, graceful, almost elegant with poetry on his tongue and a radiant young woman at his side."6
Many elements of the Kennedy myth are as obvious now as they were then. He was the youngest man ever elected president (Teddy Roosevelt had been the youngest to serve). He was the first president born in the twentieth century. He was a man of action — a bona fide war hero. He was also an intellectual — the author of a best-selling book on political courage — who made liberalism cool and glamorous, but at the same time a pragmatist who would never let the pointy-headed Ivy Leaguers with whom he surrounded himself get in the way of the right course of action. He represented a national yearning for "renewal" and "rebirth," appealing to American idealism and calling for common sacrifice.
Recall the key themes to Mussolini's cult of personality: youth, action, expertise, vigor, glamour, military service. Mussolini cast himself as the leader of a youth movement, a new generation empowered through intellect and expertise to break with the old categories of left and right. JFK's stirring inaugural spoke of "a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage." Mussolini's entire movement (like Hitler's) was built around the generation of Italians who'd been tempered in World War I and their resentment against the bitter peace of Versailles. The Italian Fascist government, billed as a "regime of youth," sold itself as a technocratic marvel in which Mussolini ran many of the ministries himself through force of will and indomitable vigor. Fascist propagandists saturated the media with pictures of Mussolini chopping wood, skiing, running, and standing bare-chested in the Alpine snow. Moreover, Mussolini's reputation as an intellectual and writer was in fact well deserved — unlike Kennedy's.
The Kennedy operation endeavored mightily to send similar messages. Nary a newspaper article could be printed about the new president without references to his love of action, his youth, his vigor. Films of his manly exertions seemed to be everywhere. He could not be so obvious as Mussolini in his womanizing, but his cultivated status as a sex symbol was the product of decided political calculation. Kennedy ran explicitly as a war hero, and his political troops could usually be recognized by their PT-109 insignia pins. His campaign commercials, crammed with images of Kennedy the warrior, boasted that this was a "time for greatness." Kennedy, like Mussolini, promised a national "restoration" and a "new politics" that would transcend old categories of left and right. He insisted that the forceful application of his own will and that of his technocratic aides would be more effective in solving the nation's problems than traditional democratic means.