The Kennedys still personify the thrill and chill of America

On the 60th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination, the divergent journeys of the dynasty’s present torch-bearers speaks of American disunion. Here in Australia, the late president’s daughter, Caroline, has become an exemplary ambassador both for her family and her country. Earlier this year, she even recreated her father’s heroic World War II swim in Solomon Islands where, in 1943, he rescued crewmates from the US patrol boat under his command after it collided with a Japanese destroyer.

Illustration by Simon Letch.Credit:

Back home in America, meanwhile, Robert Kennedy Jr, the son of RFK, who was also assassinated, this time in June 1968, cuts a very different figure. The 69-year-old has been described as a fringe conspiracy-monger, who earlier this year claimed that “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people” and that those most immune were Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese.

Members of America’s most famous political family seem almost genetically predisposed to make the White House the target of their ambitions, and Robert Kennedy Jr is now running for the presidency as an independent candidate, having initially sought to oust Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee.

Despite a long history of controversial views – or perhaps because of them – one poll suggested he would get 22 per cent of the vote in a three-way match-up with Biden and Donald Trump, an unusually strong showing for an independent candidate. As Robert Kennedy Jr’s popularity reminds us, the fringe has now gone mainstream.

Caroline Kennedy, the US ambassador to Australia, and her son Jack Schlossberg on their visit to Solomon Islands.Credit: Instagram

Posthumously, JFK’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr, who was killed in a plane crash in 1999, has also been dragooned into political combat. One of the wackier theories promoted by QAnon supporters is that John Jr faked his own death, and intended to dramatically reappear so that he could become Donald Trump’s running mate in next year’s election.

Two years ago, on the 58th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, QAnon diehards even gathered on the famed grassy knoll in Dallas where the president was shot dead on November 22, 1963, fully expecting John Jr to reappear. Some even believe that John Jr is “Q” himself.

An irony is that, on the day of his death, President Kennedy intended to explore some of these themes during a speech at the Dallas Trade Mart, where his motorcade was heading. Railing against “ignorance and misinformation”, his prepared text warned of “voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality”, and of a worrying rise in anti-government sentiment among conspiracy theorists.

November 22, 1963, the day president John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.Credit: Getty

“We cannot expect that everyone…..will ‘talk sense to the American people’. But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense”.

On the eve of Kennedy’s murder, in another cosmic coincidence, the celebrated American historian Richard Hofstadter delivered a lecture at Oxford University in which he spoke of “the paranoid style” in American politics, phraseology that almost prophesied the emergence of Donald Trump.

Speaking of how politics had become “an arena for uncommonly angry minds”, Hofstadter used the word paranoid “because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy”.

A heavy dose of fantasy, it is also important to remember, has also shaped our thinking about John F Kennedy. “Camelot”, a term never attached to his presidency during his 1000 days in the White House, was the invention of his widow, Jackie, who, less than a week after her husband’s murder, summoned the country’s foremost political chronicler, Theodore H. White of Life magazine, in the hope of framing his legacy.

The late president, she told White, had loved the hit Broadway musical based on the legend of King Arthur, and, in particular, the lyrics of its signature song which spoke of “one brief shining moment” that became known as “Camelot”.

As a child, it was this myth of Camelot that became my gateway into a lifelong fascination with US politics, a path no doubt shared with many others. Only after studying Kennedy’s record more closely at university, and making his fabled civil rights record the subject of a doctoral thesis, was I exposed to the shadier sides of Camelot.

Far from being a crusading champion of the struggle for black equality, for example, he regarded it more cynically as a political irritation. At a time when the Democratic Party was deeply divided between northern progressives and southern racists, Kennedy, a pragmatic centrist, tried to walk both sides of the street.

For all its shortcomings, Kennedy’s presidency remains an inspiration to many, and his speeches still take flight. The words of his inaugural address – “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” – sound especially poetic in an age of “American carnage”.

At a time of such political ugliness, his telegenic presidency shines bright. But in most polls of historians, who tend not to be swayed by the romanticism of Camelot, Kennedy does not even make it into the top 10 list of presidents.

Nowadays, much of the Kennedys’ enduring appeal is because they have become so malleable, and can be moulded into whatever we want them to be.

In Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, we see a good and faithful public servant promoting traditional American values around the world. In Robert Kennedy Jr, there’s an iconoclastic anti-politician. In John Jr, QAnon eyes a ghostly talisman.

Sixty years after Dallas, then, the Kennedys have come to embody the flip sides of American exceptionalism. A country that continues to enthral. A country that continues to bewilder.

Nick Bryant is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality.

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