| | History has been kind to President John F. Kennedy.
I am about one-third into the biography by Theodore Sorenson. Having lived through those years in my early teens in a highly politicized house, the book is an eye-opener to me an as adult and as an Objectivist.
Sorenson makes no apologies for not being objective. He reports the facts -- from his perspective. He says that this is the book that Kennedy would have written after one term (or two). That may or may not be.
Kennedy was not a liberal. He was not concerned about civil rights. He served on Joseph McCarthy's investigative committee. When he sought the Democratic nomination in 1960, he could not get the endorsement of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Kennedy headed a senate committee to investigate "labor racketeering" (apparently some kind of crime) and his brother Robert ("Bob" not "Bobbie") served as a field worker and administrator. That made enemies out of organized labor. They went over to Nixon in 1960. (More on the "hard hats" later.)
So, Kennedy had no base among the liberal intellectuals, the minorities or labor. But he was the victorious candidate on the Democrat party ticket -- and he built a consensus, uniting with him the factions that had opposed him.
One thing that is funny (or not funny at all, really) is the vitriolic hatred that his campaign unleashed from the religious right. Protestant ministers from their pulpits told their parishoners not to vote for Kennedy because he would take orders from his church. A little Aristotle would have gone a long way there...
Sorenson paints an uncompromising picture of Kennedy because Sorenson was riding high on the wave of grief following the assassination. Forty years later, the words have different meanings. And yet, if I were transported back to 1960, I would not only have voted for Kennedy, I would have worked for his campaign.
If Ayn Rand could rightfully excoriate Kennedy for "fascism" we can only wonder why she was mute about Nixon.
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