SO WOULD MR. CLARKE HAVE US BELIEVE...:

Obama's JFK Playbook: Barack Obama & JFK The remarkable parallels between Obama's rhetoric and Kennedy's. (Thurston Clarke, 11/07/08, The Daily Beast)

Caroline Kennedy titled the January 2008 New York Times op-ed in which she announced her support for Barack Obama, “A President Like My Father.” It will be years before we will know if, and how, the Obama presidency resembles that of John F. Kennedy’s. But the first clue will come on January 20, 2009, when President Obama delivers his inaugural address.

The comparisons between Kennedy and Obama have fallen into four categories: their style, their “cool,” unflappable, and somewhat dispassionate demeanor; their families, their attractive wives and young children; a charisma that excites young voters; and their symbolic, “transformational” nature—the first Irish Catholic president and the first black one. One important similarity has gone unnoticed: the fact that both have understood the organic connection between a campaign and the presidency that follows it, recognizing that it is difficult, if not impossible, to follow an immoral, deceitful, and divisive campaign with a high-minded, transformational, and inspirational presidency.

...that JFK's catting around, prescription drug abuse, bugging of Martin Luther King, betrayal of the Cubans, and assassination of Diem were a product of things like lying about a missile gap and the vote-fixing in IL and TX?

Actually, that's the compelling argument that Thomas Reeves has made in the best bio of JFK, He Was No Jack Kennedy: a review of A QUESTION OF CHARACTER A Life of John F. Kennedy. By Thomas C. Reeves (Robert Dallek, NY Times Book Review)

In "A Question of Character," Thomas C. Reeves, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, and the author of biographies of President Chester A. Arthur and Senator Joseph McCarthy, comes down emphatically on the side of the iconoclasts. Mr. Reeves's Kennedy is a compulsive womanizer, a liar, a bully, an amphetamine addict -- a ruthless, lazy, corrupt, self-indulgent hypocrite. He was America's first successful television politician. Television magnified his surface attributes -- his good looks, warmth and humor -- and helped turn him into a national hero leading the country on to a new frontier.

The Kennedy in "A Question of Character" was, like his father, Joseph Kennedy, a man of bad character. He was the product of an emotionally impoverished childhood. He suffered from an "inability to love or express feelings." He grew up "hostile . . . toward marriage and the family. Women were at best sex objects." Chasing women became "a career." His Navy heroics on PT 109 during World War II were the invention of publicists. He was not a particularly good commander and, Mr. Reeves says, his poor judgment contributed to the sinking of his boat and the death of two crewmen.

Though Kennedy emphatically denied it throughout his life, his father played the decisive part in pushing him into politics. He was a lazy Congressman, Mr. Reeves says, who spent much of his time seducing secretaries and airline hostesses. His father had to manage his finances; he surrounded himself with obsequious friends, whom he bullied, and he showed no interest in any political issue. When he ran for the Senate in 1952, his only concern was winning: "Jack, like his father and his brother [ Robert ] , was without any guiding intellectual, philosophical, or moral vision in his pursuit of office. Politics, like life, was about winning, and little else."

Spurred by his father's ambition to run for President, he pulled out all the stops to win. His successful campaign in 1960, Mr. Reeves writes, "involved the cynical manipulation of issues, unrestrained spending, vote fraud, the Mafia, ceaseless adultery, and dishonesty about Kennedy's intellectual achievements and physical condition."

Mr. Reeves's portrait of Kennedy as President is no less scathing. In the White House, his bad character played a major part in making him a poor President. He had little interest in domestic affairs, made a number of bad judicial appointments, demonstrated cautious opportunism in dealing with pressing civil rights questions and fouled up royally in dealing with the Bay of Pigs invasion and escalating American involvement in Vietnam. Whatever his superficial attributes, as President, Kennedy "was pragmatic to the point of amorality; his sole standard seemed to be political expediency. . . . Jack's character . . . lacked a moral center, a reference point that went beyond self-aggrandizement."

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 7, 2008 7:31 AM