The King is Dead
In many ways, he was the last man standing, straddling a mythic family mantle of fame and a vaunted career of political service, all the while wearing the crown of Camelot decades after its heyday.I resent the Camelot myth as if I had grown up an angry son of the abusive father who had instilled in his sons the ruthless sense of entitlement with which the Kennedy sons were raised, and longed for the world to see through the facade that protected him from being seen for what he was.
His family was American royalty, conjuring visions of handsome brothers tossing a football in an age of innocence, long before Watergate laid bare the sins of ego and power on the presidency.While Jack Kennedy managed to create the symbolism the country could be inspired by at that moment in history, Camelot was about ignoring his flaws and seeing a fantasy.
He was a rich, sailing, East Coast blue blood, well-connected and much dissected, who could have walked away from Washington long ago yet didn't. While his personal foibles and his celebrity sometimes outpaced his significant work in Congress, Mr. Kennedy lived the life in public service that he and his brothers, John and Robert, accepted as their lot in life.Perhaps pulling a ship as big as this country requires a showman - perhaps it can only be done through sleight of hand. Maybe the constitution configured a presidency so weak that we need to be tricked into having enough belief in them that they can lead.
Mr. Kennedy was hailed as "a natural heir to a legacy," an "indispensable patriarch," a surrogate dad to a litany of fatherless Kennedy children and, for those who knew him, a "rock" on which his clan leaned -- even as it was diminished by notoriety and heartache. Some now argue that living up to the Camelot myth was too heavy a burden, even for a man accustomed to repeated loss.I prefer to think that we can do just fine on reality. Part of what makes Abe Lincoln the most compelling of presidential stories is his humanity - he tried and failed more than once before getting anywhere in politics, he micro-managed the execution of the war and suffered over every day of it, he struggled with a mentally ill wife and the loss of a child, his single guard wasn't up to the task of protecting him on the night of his assassination. Lots of punishing work, no magic.
A law was made a distant moon ago here: July and August cannot be too hot. And there's a legal limit to the snow here In Camelot.
Are we so different today that we can only be lead by fantasies? For the Kennedys to have been great leaders rather than the damaged sons of a criminal tycoon? Are we so disinterested in our responsibilities as citizens that we prefer to be conned into voting for unqualified, inexperienced candidates because we find their celebrity enchanting?
The press has a fascination with that family -- a lurid obsession that was the equivalent of political porn -- following them through the alcoholism, the Palm Beach rape allegations [surrounding Mr. Kennedy's nephew William Kennedy Smith], the accidents, the drugs and the drugs," said William McKeen, an author and professor who studies the intersection of journalism, history and popular culture. "Ted Kennedy fought his own battle of excesses but when things were at their worst, he was often at his best."
I believe we're better served by the imagery of the Eisenhowers and the Trumans than the Kennedys and the Obamas. And with Teddy's death and Barack's presidency already caving in around him, I'm hopeful that we'll be able to bury Camelot, and the need for such fantasies, along with them.
Camelot! Camelot! I know it sounds a bit bizarre, But in Camelot, Camelot That's how conditions are.
The choice of Barack Obama to the Presidency will likely go down as one of America's greatest electoral mistakes. At a time of war and economic crisis, we put the least experienced man available at the helm - one who happens to be an ideologue with beliefs that fall far outside the mainstream.
The rain may never fall till after sundown. By eight, the morning fog must disappear. In short, there's simply not A more congenial spot For happily-ever-aftering than here In Camelot.
The blunder was made possible by the heightened power of broadcast media in swaying the electorate at a moment when journalism has been taken over by TV's entertainment divisions. The President as Celebrity, as if pulled from the contract actors on the lot of Louis B. Mayer.
