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Hitchens Wonât Mourn the Passing of the Kennedy âAuraâ
EFLI am taking just a few passages from the article which give some sense of what it is about, but I strongly recommend reading the article itself. Very eye opening. Another inheritance from that period, the Berlin Wall--which he did not oppose until well after it had been built (having again risked war on the proposition but not felt able to follow up on his punchy short-term rhetoric)--did not disappear from our lives until a quarter century later. His was the worst hard-cop/soft-cop routine ever to be attempted, and it suffered from the worst disadvantages of both styles. On the civil rights front at home, by contrast, even the most flattering historians have a hard time explaining how the Kennedy brothers preferred the millimetrical, snailâs-pace, grudging-and-trudging strategy. But at least this serves to demonstrate that they knew there was such a thing as prudence, or caution. Every smart liberal of today knows just how to deplore "spin" and "image building" and media strategy in general. Quite right too, but does anyone ever pause to ask when this manner of politics became regnant? Which Kennedy fan wants to disown the idea that the smoothest guy wins? Yet this awkward thought is gone into the memory hole, along with the fictitious "missile gap" that the boy wonder employed to attack Eisenhower and Nixon from the right. As I said at the beginning, I am glad that this spell is fading at last. But I wish its departure would be less mourned. The Kennedy interlude was a flight from responsibility, and ought to be openly criticized and exorcised rather than be left to die the death that sentimentality brings upon itself. I guess Christtopher can forget about being invited to one of Teddyâs shindigs... Oh wait: thatâs a good thing Posted by: badanov 2003-11-22 |
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