Most of their leanings were aristocratic. John opposed civil rights and tried to defame MLK with Bobby’s help. Bobby did nothing of note in his entire career.

Ted talked loudly, but was unable to accomplish almost anything.

In fact, if he had died instead of Mary Jo, history would not have changed one iota.

Kennedy was transformed into an all-purpose martyr after his death for causes he did not subscribe to. He was turned into a martyr for the religion of big government due to the manipulations of the Kennedy circle and to the (very cynical) machinations of LBJ who all harnessed it for their own purposes.

You bringing ‘right wing lunatics’ whom Kennedy supposedly showed up into the picture is amusing – it reminds me of the reaction of the left immediately after his assassination by a Marxist. After his death in Dallas, on cue it seemed to be characterised as ‘the city of hate’. The young Dan Rather heard a rumour that some Dallas schoolchildren had cheered when they heard the news of Kennedy’s death. The rumours were not true, and the local Dallas CBS affiliate refused to run the story. Rather ran around the network and reported the story anyway. Dan Rather wasn’t the only one to immediately point the finger at the political right – within minutes, Kennedy aides were blaming deranged and unnamed right-wingers. One headline proclaimed that the murder had taken place ‘deep in the hate of Texas’. But when it became clear that a deranged Marxist had done the deed, Kennedy’s defenders were dismayed.

‘He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights,’ Jackie lamented to Bobby Kennedy when he told her the news. ‘It’s – it had to be some silly little Communist’. Somehow, the image did not conform to the Kennedy showmanship – after the war JFK would spend hours lip-synching Churchill speeches on the’ I Can Hear It Now’ album narrated by Edward R. Murrow.

Yet Kennedy mythmakers set about creating the fable that he died battling ‘hate’ – established code, then and now, for the political right. The story became legend because the left were desperate to imbue Kennedy’s assassination with a more exalted, politically useful meaning. The liberal establishment, led by the New York Times, the even the pope denounced the ‘hate’ that claimed John’s life. Earl Warren summed up the conventional wisdom (as he could always be counted on to do) when he theorised that the ‘climate of hatred’ in Dallas – code for heavy right wing Republican activity – moved Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the President.

How could a card-carrying Marxist murder this liberal titan? Oswald’s Marxism sent the left into deeper and deeper denial (their only choice other than to abandon anti-anti-communism). And so, over the course of the 1960s, the conspiracy theories spread, and the Marxist gunman became a patsy. ‘’Cui Bono?’’ asked the Oliver Stones then and ever since. The military-industrial complex, allied with the dark forces of reaction and intolerance of course was the answer. Never mind that Oswald had already tried to murder a prominent right-wing spokesman, Edwin Walker, or that he had an ‘extreme dislike of the right-wing’ according to the Warren Commission.

Indeed, over the years a legend grew up around the idea that if only Kennedy had lived, America would never have gotten bogged down in Vietnam. It seems to be the central conceit in books like Arthur Schlesinger’s ‘Robert Kennedy and His Times’. Yet even Robert Kennedy admitted that his brother never seriously considered withdrawal and was committed to total victory in Vietnam. JFK campaigned on a fictitious ‘missile gap’ and was determined and successful in moving to the right of Richard Nixon on foreign policy. A mere three and a half hours before Kennedy died, he was boasting to the Forth Worth Chamber of Commerce that he had increased defence spending on a massive scale, including a 600 percent increase on counter-insurgency special forces in Vietnam. The previous March, John had asked Congress to spend 50 cents of every dollar on defence.

Now, John Wayne also alludes to the idea (another myth, in fact) that Kennedy was an un-alloyed champion of civil rights. In fact, the myth veers sharply when it comes to reality on issues of race. Supposedly, if he had lived, much of the racial turmoil of the 1960s could have been avoided. The truth is more prosaic. Yes, Kennedy pushed for civil rights litigation, and he deserves credit for it. But it 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 right 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.

‘Camelot’, a phrase never used to describe Kennedy’s tenure when he was alive, has become a catchall for every gauzy memory and un-fulfilled wish of the Kennedy presidency.

The work he he did his political life is unsurpassed. He was a multimillionaire who fought for civil rights, poor people, womens rights and generally the people at the bottom of society.
I love the way he brought out the true coloursof right wing lunatics. as witnessed in some comments here.

Now, I’ll be fair. Kennedy, like FDR believed he was a true democrat. While many aspects of their regimes had fascism written all over them, it might be unfair to label them fascists. Yet, Kennedy was as good as Mussolini in coming off as a strongman and a possessor of fascist traits that can go down well with any electorate. His obsession with fostering crises in order to whip up populist sentiment demonstrates the dangers of infatuation with fascist aesthetics in democratic politics. Ted Sorenson (who chaired the committee to write JFK’s book Profiles in Courage, which Kennedy only partly oversaw – yet of course he accepted the Pulitzer prize alone) counted sixteen ‘crises’ in Kennedy’s first eight months in office. Kennedy created ‘crisis teams’ that could short-cut traditional beaurocracies and even the rule of law and the democratic process to ‘get things done’ the strongman way. Some people like Henry Fairlie and Gary Wills (hardly right wing critics) dubbed the Kennedy administration a ‘guerrilla government’ for its abuse and contempt for traditional government. In fact, Otto Strasser, the left-wing Nazi who helped found the movement said in an interview that Kennedy’s abuse of authority and crisis-mongering certainly made him look like a fascist. His attitude towards the steel industry is a case in point.

Everything about Kennedy’s politics conveyed a sense of urgency. He ran on a ‘missile gap’ that never existed and governed based on a heightened state of tension with the Soviets that he laboured to create. He constantly spoke the language of ‘danger’, ’sacrifice’, ‘courage’ and ‘crusade’. His first State of the Union address delivered eleven days after his inauguration was ‘a wartime speech without a war’ according to one commentator. We think that duck and cover drills were a hallmark of the 1950s, but it was during his administration that the extreme paranoia so laughed at today reached a height. Various agencies competed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to turn schools and hospitals into fallout shelters. His administration distributed 55 million wallet sized cards with instructions on what to do if the missiles rained from the sky.

The nationalistic appeals to unity and the creation of crises were matched by Kennedy’s desire to transcend ideology in favour of cool pragmatism. He told Robert McNamara that ‘every problem could be solved’ by technocratic means (a position adopted by Bismarck and a hallmark of Nazi thinking). The Third Way was the peak of ideological sophistication under that man. His famous declaration: ‘ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country’ can be seen as a fine patriotic turn of phrase – or the dark shadow of fascism creeping up once again to consume the individual (the most vulnerable minority) into the collective. It could be the best warning of the slavery to come, like Adlai Stevenson’s (an admirer and associate of Kennedy) series of essays stating that Americans needed to transcend ‘the mystique of privacy’ and reject ‘the supermarket temple’ – words used by every fascist, Communist and totalitarian minded person in their visions for social change.