The Metamyth of Camelot
In recent years, there has been much talk of the “Mandela Effect”, which is shorthand for a widely held false memory among the public, e.g the Berenstein Bears were really the Berenstain Bears or that that Sinbad appeared in a movie called “Shazaam” which is actually nonexistent. Of course, the Mandela Effect originally refers to people’s belief that they heard Mandela had died in prison in the 1980’s; first and foremost it is a political phenomenon. Mis-remembering cultural phenomena is a curiosity, but we mis-remember political phenomena because the presentation of such phenomena is intentionally misrepresented to us by mass media.
Today, most people are aware of the “Myth of Camelot” in regards to the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. But what I am trying to tell you is that even the myth of Camelot is itself as myth, the feelings of unity and hope we envision when we think about that era are entirely illusory, and were engineered in the minds of collective generations after the assassination of our 35th President. The myth itself is that JFK’s presidency was a time of hope, unity, and optimism and that he was a beloved figure whose legacy was tarnished by a shabby Lyndon Baines Johnson and then an even shabbier Richard Nixon. The myth has grown to such proportions that conservatives of the present have tried to claim him as one of their own, the “last good Democrat” in their minds.
This myth is wrong in every single way. JFK’s presidency was a time of paranoia, fear, and unrest, and he was widely despised by conservative ideologues in his time for extremely similar reasons and in extremely similar ways that they recently hated Obama. And he if had lived, and been re-elected, he would have been remembered by liberals in a similar way as they know remember Obama; a disappointment, perhaps even a failure, even if he was preferable to the alternative. In fact, they may have repudiated him as they have the Clintons, given what we now of Kennedy’s extraordinary emotional brutality towards women.
MYTH 1: Kennedy Was Loved
He must have been, right? He was a handsome, well spoken, patrician looking war hero. No wonder John Kerry thought he could plagiarize JFK’s supposed persona in 2004. In fact, much like Kerry, Kennedy was an unsatisfying compromise candidate to satisfy the Northeast establishment (whose candidate was Adlai Stevenson) and the Sunbelt conservatives, whose preferred candidate was LBJ. In American textbooks, the election of JFK is represented as the optimistic choice of a young nation yearning for change away from the staid years of the Eisenhower administration. And TV only enhanced his attractiveness to voters, compared to the untrustworthy Nixon.
By this logic, Kennedy should have won in a landslide.
He barely won. He and Nixon were in a statistical tie. Nixon was actually the favorite to to win and he consistently held a slight lead. He was held back by the fact that like Kennedy, he was young and inexperienced, and his term as Vice President was not seen as consequential. Nixon was under the colossal shadow of Eisenhower, who did not particularly like him and indeed actively sabotaged him. Ike tried to dump Nixon as a running mate in 1952, later telling him “ your place is not serving eight years as Vice President — because people get the idea the Vice President does nothing.” When asked about constructive ideas put forth by Nixon during Eisenhower’s presidency, Eisenhower said “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.”
Nixon was in fact an accomplished TV politician who recognized the power of this medium and used it his advantage. The Checkers Speech, wherein Nixon defended himself against charges of financial impropriety, was seen by 60 million viewers and decisively tilted public sympathy in his favor. Many people saw Nixon as an underdog who came from modest means while Kennedy was a pretty rich boy, like Justin Trudeau today. Regardless, Kennedy won after all, because Mayor Daly, whom the FBI suspected of having ties to organized crime, stuffed the ballot boxes for him in Chicago, out of a sense of parochial ethnic loyalty. The shining Prince of Camelot had to cheat in order to beat Tricky Dick. In a developing country, we would report this as “ Plutocrat Ascends to Power With Aid of Ethnic Kinsmen Amidst Reports of Electoral Irregularities” or some such.
MYTH 2: JFK’s Camelot Was An Era of Political Unity
Take a look at the handbill above. It, and others like it, were circulating in Dallas the day before Kennedy’s assassination. Basically it’s identical to what the Tea Party said about Obama; in fact, almost the exact same lines are used, ironically by people who would probably claim to love JFK’s memory today. There was a Tea Party in JFK’s time, which hated him, called the John Birch Society (it still exists, feebly.) Partisan interests were just as passionate as they are now, but then restricted to smaller circles and heard by smaller audiences. Intense partisan feeling had not yet spread to the population for a couple of reasons. While people were both relatively and absolutely poorer than they are today, there was a feeling that work was always to be had and that things would get better. Most people separated politics from their daily lives and saw it as a matter of negotiation and wheeling and dealing, not the metaphysical struggle between light and darkness it is treated as today.
But similar social divisions existed between blacks and whites, and the cities and rural areas. They had simply not yet aligned with the two party system. This was a time when what we could consider to be “conservatives” and “liberals” were still divided between the Republicans and Democrats because regional interests were stronger than ideological ones. In this sense, partisan polarization is an organic process, where time, space, and even identity have been shrunk by technology, mass media, and physical mobility among the population. I mentioned earlier that Kennedy was a compromise candidate. Though a member of the Eastern Establishment Elite, he was not an ideological liberal to the same extent of Adlai Stevenson or Hubert Humphrey. His father favored appeasement while his brother Bobby Kennedy was actually an assistant counsel (aka an inquisitor) for Joseph McCarthy’s investigations. McCarthy was a family friend of the Kennedys and a fellow tribesman in a time when ethnic political interests were more pronounced than they are today.
Nonetheless, the Neo-Confederate wing was indispensable to Kennedy’s governing coalition and at the same time viewed him with great suspicion, particularly for his internationalism (typical of his social class; the moneyed elite are invariably xenophiles) and tepid support for civil rights. This was the entire reason why Kennedy came to Dallas in November 1963, to assure the sunbelt conservatives that interests would be met and keep their support at least through the 1964 election. This was such a perverse and unwieldy alliance that ironically its contradictions were only resolved by JFK’s murder. The great show of ideological bipartisan unity came only after his assassination.
Myth 3: The Camelot Myth Existed In Its Own Time
The Camelot myth was entirely posthumous. People were not necessarily hopeful in Kennedy’s time; they were fearful and nervous, especially Kennedy himself. His administration lurched from crisis to crisis and he was perpetually terrified of starting World War III, which explains his restrained conduct during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Take this JFK quote: “Yesterday a shaft of light cut into the darkness. Negotiations were concluded in Moscow on a treaty to ban all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water.” The darkness was not metaphorical. Much as people today live in existential dread of Climate Change, they lived in that era with an existential dread of nuclear war, a fear that was wholly justified. In 2004, when I was a student at the George Washington University, Robert McNamara came to speak at the Foggy Bottom campus. He told us to our faces that the peaceful outcome of the Missile Crisis was accidental and anomalous, and that all the “rational” choices led directly to war.
Racial divisions were violent, bleak, and disruptive. Both the Southern whites and the ethnic whites in the North were hostile to integration and Civil Rights. Like Eisenhower before him, Kennedy had to resort to using the US military to force Southern educational institutions to accept black students, like James Meredith (who was later shot by a sniper, but survived.)
Kennedy’s international involvements were frustrating and unsatisfying. He went along with the Bay of Pigs fiasco and was embarrassed by the construction of the Berlin Wall, which basically tore up the Four Powers agreement in Berlin. Few people today care about the Congo, but it held similar international attention in the early 1960’s as Syria does today. The Belgians abruptly gave the Congo independence in 1960 with scanty preparation and the huge country quickly fell victim to tribal secession movements and a Neo-colonial one in the form of Katanga, where a local black leader, Moïse Tshombe, was propped up by Belgian settlers, European mercenaries, the Union Minière mining company, Britain, and France.
Meanwhile, both the Soviets and the United States were anti-Katanga. Many American conservatives were vehemently pro-Katanga and they hated Kennedy for his pro-UN, anti-Katanga stance (as you can see on the handbill pictured above). The immediate crisis was resolved when the US airlifted in soldiers from Ireland, Sweden, and India to crush the secession. But the Congo’s broader political dysfunctions were never resolved; they were simply too complicated for the great powers or the UN to resolve and everyone patted themselves on the back and pretended it was a job well done. India still has thousands of troops there to this day.
So domestically and internationally, Camelot was obviously non-existent. How did it come to exist? It’s in fact a throwaway line from Jackie Kennedy in regards to the musical Camelot: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.” Jackie also said, “there’ll be great Presidents again, but there’ll never be another Camelot again.” I doubt these were her personal feelings; JFK (who had once abandoned her during a miscarriage to dally with a mistress on a yacht in the Mediterranean) treated her abysmally. Our image of JFK was entirely curated by the media of the time, which was a socially incestuous world of the Eastern Establishment.
In other words, they were his fellow creatures and kinsmen and they were as determined to give him as good press as Fox News was to give GWB and Trump. It was for precisely this reason they hated LBJ and Nixon, who were cultural outsiders to their world. (I’m not trying to rehabilitate Nixon. His desire to use the Drug War to crush black communities shows he was worse than we realized, but he was no less capable or intelligent than Kennedy; his removal of the US dollar from the gold standard to a floating fiat currency without compromising US political and economic hegemony is proof of that.)
And everyone accepted this Camelot story for three reasons. One is that the archetype of the Young Prince Coming Unto His Kingdom is an extremely ancient one and readily understood and accepted. Second, the shock of his murder actually stabilized and legitimized the unwieldy political coalition he led. His deification was primarily the result of the Eastern Establishment’s grief for one of their own, but it proved deeply useful for LBJ’s domestic agenda. Third, it was seized upon by conservatives to demarcate a period of stability and decency distinct from the later turmoil of the ’60s and the post-Vietnam liberal political projects.
Conclusion
I will not address the vexed question of Kennedy assassination conspiracies. Personally, I am agnostic on the matter. If I were to argue against them, I would be adding nothing new, and were I to argue for them, I currently have insufficient information to support such assertions.
It’s interesting to note how his death obliterated the realities of JFK the man. On one hand, you have the invalid nymphomaniac who once ordered a young White House employee to perform oral sex on a visiting friend of the president. American textbooks also obscure the fact that Kennedy was a writer, beyond alluding to Profiles in Courage. And this is understandable. How would we explain to American schoolchildren passages like:
“… Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”
Or:
“Fidel Castro is part of the legacy of Bolivar, who led his men over the Andes Mountains, vowing “war to the death” against Spanish rule, saying “Where a goat can pass, so can an army.” Castro is also part of the frustration of that earlier revolution, which won its war against Spain but left largely untouched the indigenous feudal order.”
The most accurate media presentation of Kennedy I have seen was bizarrely in the graphic novel Red Son, where Superman grows in the Soviet Union instead of the US. Here Kennedy lives, divorces Jacqueline Kennedy, and marries Marilyn Monroe. The graphic novel portrays him as a bloated political failure who unable to cope with the turmoil of the 1960’s.
But let me finish by saying one thing in JFK’s favor. It is clear he believed Vietnam was unwinnable and was preparing to withdrew the United States military. He was prepared to use incredibly cynical means to achieve this, like arranging the assassination of Ngo Diem and his brother less than three weeks before Kennedy’s own assassination.
That being said, Iraq has proven that long, protracted wars are extremely toxic to domestic tranquility and amity, and apart from the waste of lives and resources, they poison national harmony and twist all political discourse. For this reason alone, it was better that JFK should have lived and that the Myth of Camelot never should have come to be.
