Saving JFK

The day is here again, November 22nd. It's been 46 years now and, for those well over that age, no less painful with the passage of time.

His death was the first of a president in our living rooms--the motorcade, the rifle shots, the disarray in Dallas, the dazed swearing-in of his successor that night, the on-camera murder of the assassin two days later and then the funeral with our eyes and hearts transfixed by the beautiful young widow and two small children.

We are so inured now to TV wakes with old news clips and talking heads that it's hard to imagine how hard and how deeply John F. Kennedy's assassination struck a nation that had been moved by his youth, wit and optimism, all gone in an eyeblink and shown over and over again in slow motion.

The pain went so deep that, as a magazine editor, I published an article by a psychiatrist telling how he and his patients talked of practically nothing else in the days and weeks that followed, how JFK's death had taken over their psyches and became entangled with their inner lives.

For months after that Friday, I would awake from sweat dreams of the motorcade, book depository, silent screams, slow-motion lunges at a relentless assassin, saving JFK at the last moment.

Such rescue fantasies came naturally to generations marked by the central image of "Catcher in the Rye": children "standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them."

Holden Caulfield couldn't save JFK, and neither could we, but every November 22nd, those dreams come back to haunt us.

Kennedy Candor

“Atonement is a process that never ends,” Ted Kennedy writes in his memoir, confronting the shame shadowing his life that was avoided in a weekend of tributes--the death of a young woman at Chappaquiddick.

In a preview of the 532-page volume to be published later this month, the New York Times discloses that Kennedy "called his behavior after the 1969 car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne 'inexcusable' and said the events might have shortened the life of his ailing father, Joseph P. Kennedy.

"In that book, 'True Compass,' Mr. Kennedy said he was dazed, afraid and panicked in the minutes and hours after he drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island with Ms. Kopechne as his passenger.

"The senator, who left the scene and did not report the accident to the police until after her body was found the next day, admitted in the memoir that he had 'made terrible decisions' at Chappaquiddick."

Such candor has not been typical of the Kennedys, who fought fiercely to protect their family myth over decades. That's underscored in this month's Vanity Fair story of how Jacqueline Kennedy commissioned William Manchester's book about JFK's assassination, "Death of a President," and then went to court to force him to cut parts of it that family advisers (she herself couldn't bear to read it) deemed personally or politically incorrect.

During that period, I published excerpts from a light-hearted book by Red Fay, a college friend of JFK's who had been his Undersecretary of the Navy. After strong-arming the publisher into cutting dozens of such harmless revelations as two-year-old John Jr. splashing his father at poolside and calling him "poo-poo head," Robert Kennedy solemnly thanked me for going along to "protect the children."

In the 21st century, such control is long-gone. In its account of the Ted Kennedy memoir, the Times notes, "The book does not shy from the accident, or from some other less savory aspects of the senator’s life, including a notorious 1991 drinking episode in Palm Beach, Fla., or the years of heavy drinking and women-chasing that followed his 1982 divorce from his first wife, Joan."

The last of the Kennedy brothers lived long enough to learn that the public now insists on seeing its heroes in the full, warts and all.

Limbaugh and Lee Harvey Oswald's Mother

"President Obama Ordered the Killing of Three Black Muslim Kids" is his own headline for this week's Rush Limbaugh rant about the weekend rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips from Indian Ocean pirates:

"You know what we have learned about the Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers that were wiped out at the order of Barack Obama, you know what we learned about them? They were teenagers. The Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers who took a US merchant captain hostage for five days were inexperienced youths, the defense secretary, Roberts Gates, said yesterday, adding that the hijackers were between 17 and 19 years old. Now, just imagine the hue and cry had a Republican president ordered the shooting of black teenagers on the high seas."

Trying to imagine is hard, but the boggled mind eventually finds a precedent for Limbaugh's brand of logic in the reaction of Lee Harvey Oswald's mother when she was called to testify before the Warren Commission about her son's assassination of JFK.

Mrs. Oswald was miffed, she told reporters, about not being invited to the White House by Lady Bird Johnson, the new First Lady. "After all," she explained, "my son was killed in the same incident in which her husband became president."

For my editorial sins, I later had to have several phone conversations with Mrs. Oswald, and her shaky cause-and-effect connections became even clearer as she pursued her celebrity career as "a mother in history," eventually capped by calling JFK's death a "mercy killing" because he was suffering from Parkinson's Disease.

As he expands his own role in our era, Limbaugh is in as much danger as Mrs. Oswald of losing sight of reality before launching into grandiose analogies.

"They were kids," he said this week. "The story is out, I don't know if it's true or not, but apparently the hijackers, these kids, the merchant marine organizers, Muslim kids, were upset, they wanted to just give the captain back and head home because they were running out of food, they were running out of fuel, they were surrounded by all these US Navy ships, big ships, and they just wanted out of there. That's the story, but then when one of them put a gun to the back of the captain, Mr. Phillips, then bam, bam, bam. There you have it, and three teenagers shot on the high seas at the order of President Obama."

Somewhere in loony heaven, Marguerite Oswald must be nodding in agreement.

Lieberman, Leper-to-Be

The former Democrat, then Independent, now Republican sheep dog for John McCain refuses to go gentle in that good night, today barking lies about Barack Obama in the Wall Street Journal.

Obama, Joe Lieberman says, proposes "a blanket policy of meeting personally as president, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American regimes on the planet."

The Democratic nominee-to-be has proposed no such "without preconditions" thing, but that doesn't stop Lieberman from indicting his former party as having gone gutless, in contrast to the good old days of the Cold War when Kennedy was misled by hawks into the Bay of Pigs disaster and then, as Ted Sorensen tells it in his new memoirs, had to use an exquisite combination of brains, toughness and diplomacy to keep the world from blowing up during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But as Gilda Radner used to say, never mind. When Obama is in the Oval Office next January and Democrats have a solid majority in the Senate, Chairman Joe of the Homeland Security Committee may find himself a very lonely former Democrat, former McCain advisor and former Chairman.

Irish Eyes

After President Kennedy was killed in 1963, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart."

Growing up in the Bronx of the 1930s, almost everyone I knew was Jewish. In our apartment building, there was one Irish family whose men sat on the front steps in summer, drinking beer and joking. As the evening went on, their smiles got wider, their talk louder. They seemed to be breathing some other air. They were as poor as the rest of us, but so full of life.

As a young man in Manhattan of the 1950s, I would go after work to Costello's, a saloon where you could breathe that "other air" with writers, editors and artists, a place John McNulty had made famous in the New Yorker. Pat Moynihan was sometimes there, wearing an outdated straw boater, but no one seemed to think it odd.

Tim Costello was our Irish godfather, keeping us happy but grounded and civil. When Frank McCourt, who later wrote "Angela's Ashes," came over as an 18-year-old immigrant, Tim sent him to the New York Public Library to read Samuel Johnson.

It was Tim's policy to help the poor but never to buy drinks for anyone who could afford to pay for his own. When someone at my bachelor party told me he was coming and bringing a case, I said that, if so, a lawyer would be handling it. Tim came, empty-handed, but his presence was honor enough.

Over the years my life has been entwined with colleagues, friends and relatives by marriage who have leavened my Jewish gloom with Irish wit and cheer, so here's a St. Patrick Day's toast to Tim Costello et al, along with a new generation of Irish-American writers of all political persuasions--Peggy Noonan, Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins, Andrew Sullivan, P.J. O'Rourke and more--who are helping keep us sane as George W. Bush breaks our hearts.

Cheers to all.

Giving Thanks for President Kennedy

For anyone over 50, tomorrow will be not only Thanksgiving but the day JFK died 44 years ago. He has been gone now for almost as long as he lived and, in these days of White House infamy, not nearly as much in the national mind as his antagonist, Richard Nixon, whose all-time low approval ratings have just been eclipsed by George W. Bush.

A few years after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy wistfully told me that her husband was being remembered too much for how he died rather than what he had lived for. She was right. It was too soon then for Americans to appreciate what they had lost.

In 1960, I had made an unintentional contribution to Kennedy’s election. After my magazine ran a piece by Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Advice to the Next First Lady,” the producers of the “Tonight” show called me to ask Mrs. Roosevelt if she would appear with Jack Paar. To my surprise, she agreed.

On the way to the studio, I asked Mrs. Roosevelt, who had supported Adlai Stevenson during the convention and been visibly cool to JFK, what made her decide to take part in a talk show. “I want to help elect Senator Kennedy,” she said.

On the “Tonight” show, she did just that, comparing Kennedy to FDR during his first campaign in 1932, inspiring voters and responding to their enthusiasm, and predicted he would make a fine President. In Kennedy’s hairline victory, her testimonial may well have been significant, and he didn't disappoint her.

John F. Kennedy was the last president in memory who was still learning while in office. He admitted mistakes and profited from them.

Despite misgivings, he went ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba after being told Americans would be greeted as liberators and withdrew when he realized he had been misled, accepting “sole responsibility” for the fiasco.

As the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he put that lesson to use by overruling “experts” who wanted to bomb or invade Cubs and trusting his own instincts to avoid disaster.

After November 22, 1963 I wrote an editorial attempting to define the deep grief over his shocking death-—that beyond his attractiveness and intelligence, there was the loss of a leader “who was still growing—-in understanding, in skill, in compassion, in commitment."

Today's leading contenders for the Presidency are, for the most part, as cool and rational as Kennedy was when he was running for the office. For all our sakes, we can only hope that whoever wins can attain the stature he did in the thousand days he spent in the White House.

Truth-Tellers Who Lie

Brian De Palma has made a movie with images to “get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war."

He calls it “Redacted” to emphasize what the mainstream media has edited out of America’s picture of the war in Iraq. De Palma uses blogs, YouTube posts, videologs on the internet and the video diary of a soldier to convey the horrors of the Iraq war.

Only one tiny problem: The film, shown at the Venice Film Festival, is a “docudrama,” blending fictional techniques with all that unvarnished truth. "Everything that is in the movie,” he says, “is based on something I found that actually happened. But once I had put it in the script I would get a note from a lawyer saying you can't use that because it's real and we may get sued."

This is in the tradition of that other great Hollywood truth-teller, Oliver Stone, who filled the heads of a generation with his own paranoid fantasies about the death of a President in “JFK.” The truth ran a distant second to Stone’s inventions.

De Palma and Stone talk about art but their work is propaganda to blow-torch viewers’ minds. Kennedy’s assassination and the war in Iraq have left scars on the American psyche that are bad enough without the self-righteous, self-serving efforts of Hollywood “artists” to dig into them with their overheated imaginations.

Coppola told us truths about Vietnam in “Apocalypse Now,” but he didn’t call it journalism.

If the media have whitewashed Iraq, what purpose is served by a blackwashed version? Where are the shades of gray? If he read the polls, De Palma might see that most Americans don’t need him hammering at them to understand what has been going on in Iraq.