Profiles in Hype
VIEWPOINT
by Eldon Griffiths
Back in Orange County, after a talking tour of the Southern states, I ran into the recent television blather about two of the most overrated personalities of the past half-century,Michael Jackson and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Of Jackson, the media already has said so much about so little that there’s nothing I usefully can add, except that I don’t like his music, can’t stand his appearance, don’t much care what happens to him,but would still feel perversely pleased if the whole tribe of celebrity-mongers and smut peddlers, from the self-serving district attorney of Santa Barbara to the prattling Peeping Toms who sell their quotes on the box, were to get their comeuppance from the courts.
TV’s presentation of the 40th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination was of course, in a different league. And many a reader may charge me with blasphemy in mentioning the Democrat’s boy hero of the l960s in the same breath as the weirdo, Jackson. But it was the media, not me, who juxtaposed the replay of JFK’s death with the circus over Jacko’s arrest, and though the coverage of both was humongous, the difference in standards was startling.
Thus in Jackson’s case every scrap of filth and scuttlebutt was dredged up and splashed from the rooftops. By contrast, in Kennedy’s case, we saw the triumph of spin and image making,and a cover-up of his sexual predations. Call it a classic case of the poet Virgil’s complaint about the gossips of Rome: “Suggestio falsi; suppressio veri” (“they promote what’s false and suppress what’s true”).
I met JFK only once, when he came to dinner at Time magazine. And I remember as if it was yesterday: his good looks, smart tailoring and that engaging Harvard twang. I also recall the news of his death clattering into Newsweek when I was one of the editors and the question that came up like thunder, “What in God’s name is happening to America?”
Yet as I look back, my suspicion is that fundamentally, Kennedy was a phony. His assassination was an event of far less significance to the stability of the republic than the gunning down of Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Civil War. Kennedy’s legend lives on in large measure because a whole industry of hagiographers has worked hard to keep it alive; because his presidency ended in drama, its promise unfulfilled; above all because his brief time in office coincided with the advent of the new medium that changed the world, television.
Kennedy was,and still is,magic for TV. From his “torch has passed” inaugural to the world-shaking epic of a young American St. George slaying the dragons of those Russian rockets in Cuba, he gave us a succession of pictures made for the screen. His death perpetuated and sanctified them: Jackie cradling the bullet-shattered head; their brave little son, John Jr., saluting as the gun carriage went past; and the family walking behind like the British royals. And docudramas continued. Bobby Kennedy murdered in the Ambassador Hotel. Chappaquiddick. A girl clubbed to death 20 years later with a golf stick at the Kennedy beach house in Florida. The crash of John Jr.’s plane on his way to fish.
Not even Shakespeare could have dreamed up more spectacular dramas but, forgive me, where’s the beef? What were Kennedy’s achievements?
As a senator he achieved almost nothing, except self-promotion (and pork for Boston). As a candidate for the presidency, his big-gest claim was a lie,that Eisenhower had allowed the Soviet Union to open up a “missile gap” that placed the U.S. in peril. As president, Kennedy put through far fewer social and economic reforms than his derided successor, LBJ, while in foreign policy he gave us the Bay of Pigs fiasco (in which I participated) and the first deployment of U.S. troops to Vietnam.
Style, charm and Camelot aside, Kennedy’s reputation essentially rests on his facing down the Soviets in Cuba. That indeed was a moment in history when the world stood on the edge of catastrophe. Yet as I ponder that much-vaunted “victory,” I see now what I missed at the time: that JFK’s pledge never again to use force to change the Cuban regime made Castro president for life and that his quid pro quo removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey served only to postpone until Ronald Reagan’s day the virtually inevitable triumph of the better-armed west in the Cold War.
None of this was properly reflected in NBC or CBS or CNN’s recent glorification of JFK. Nor was there much reference to his compulsive sexual liaisons that had they been reported in Bill Clinton’s case (credible) or George Bush’s (incredible),or Michael Jackson’s for that matter,would have whipped up a media tsunami. It was left to the professor of liberal studies at New York University, Christopher Hitches, to offer the only mainstream attempt to put things in perspective:
“Kennedy was a president frantically high on pills (that’s when he was not alarmingly ‘low’ for the same reason); a president quick on the draw and willing to solicit mafia hit men for his foreign policy; a president who bugged his Oval Office and used the executive mansion as a bordello; and whose name we might never have learned if not for the fanatical determination of his father to purchase him a political career.”
The reality of JFK is as remote from his statesmanlike image as that oddball Michael Jackson’s may well turn to be from the picture of a compulsive pederast that’s currently being presented on TV.
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, lecturer, journalist and former member of the British House of Commons.
