One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering Kennedy by William Manchester

One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering Kennedy by William Manchester

Author:William Manchester [Manchester, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Presidents & Heads of State, Biography, United States, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, 20th Century, History, Politics
ISBN: 9780795350399
Google: jYkfDgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 42655802
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 1983-11-01T00:00:00+00:00


***

“Shamelot,” said the politicized intellectuals after he was dead. They had never understood him, or he them, though he had tried harder. It was in his character; his instinctive approach to a problem was cool, impersonal, analytical. They had blamed him for the Bay of Pigs, which was fair enough; he had blamed himself. But they were neither angry nor disappointed—they were exultant. “What gets me,” he told you, knitting his brow and shaking his head, “is that all these people seem to want me to fail. I don’t understand that. If I don’t succeed, there may not be another President.” They didn’t care; if he came to grief, it would prove them right, and the vindication of one’s judgment, for some men, has absolute precedence. Jack wondered aloud: “What do they want me to do? Why don’t they put it on paper?” Some did; the Reporter did. But in Georgetown, cocktail talk was easier, if more irresponsible, and as you made the rounds of these parties, you reached a curious conclusion. A yearning for the past has long been attributed to the necromancy of conservative Republicans, to those who pine for a vanished America—for celluloid collars, flypaper, whalebone corsets, harvest-home suppers, and the benevolent paternalism of the Cleveland Business Men’s Marching Club. By the early 1960s, however, that longing had been matched by a liberal hankering for the Great Depression, childhood of a generation, when New Deal liberalism was a flaming cause and Fala was alive, wagging his little tail.

In the Kennedy years the idioms of the New Left had not yet entered America’s street language. The Radical Right, on the other hand, had made great progress. The John Birch Society, whose mirror image the Students for a Democratic Society would become, had been flourishing for four years. In a rare lapse of political judgment, the Kennedy brothers had increased its fame and heightened its profile by denouncing it, the attorney general calling it “ridiculous” and the President warning that it was an inept adversary of communism. Its head, Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer who liked to be called “The Founder,” seemed to enjoy the publicity and was doubtless aware that it helped recruit new Birchers. Welch was strange, and he had even stranger allies. Under the Right umbrella were gathered such groups as the Reverend Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade and Dr. Fred Schwartz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. C. D. Jackson, publisher of Life, bore reluctant witness to the power of Dr. Fred’s crusade. After an issue of his magazine had treated Schwartz with contempt, advertisers’ protests forced Jackson to appear before a Schwartz rally in the Hollywood Bowl and eat crow: “I believe we were wrong, and I am profoundly sorry. It’s a great privilege to be here tonight and align Life magazine with… Dr. Schwartz and the rest of these implacable fighters against communism.”

Only once did a member of a lunatic fringe come close to triggering Jack’s temper, and then, with a spasm of his fist, he suppressed it.



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