Counterpunch | The legend of Camelot has had a decidedly devastating effect on the
sober appreciation of US government institutions. The Kennedys were the
US variant of the Royal Family and even more to the point, seemed
photogenic, intellectual, glamorous.
The Kennedy family was itself the architect behind the faux
aristocratic fantasy, the fiction, if you like, of an administration
awash with shiny competence and brain heavy awareness. In truth, it was
essentially piloted by a medically challenged and heavily medicated
figure who suffered, amongst other conditions, Addison’s disease.
President Kennedy’s rocky stewardship, as Robert Dallek notes in
considerable detail, was marked by anti-anxiety agents, sleeping pill
popping, stimulants, and pain killers. The public image of a
formidable, robust Cold War warrior was itself an elaborate fantasy,
padded by its own conspiracy of deception. As if realising the
implications of his medical burrowing, Dallek had to reiterate the point
that Kennedy was still functioning and capable and was at no risk of
cocking up during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.[2]
The Kennedys were successful enough, be it through their army of
ideological acolytes and publicists (think of the unquestioning pen of
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.), to create the impression of knight-like
purity, intellectual sagacity and calm. To kill, then, what is noble,
became an essential American trope: JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther
King, Jr. Behind each had to be a gargantuan conspiracy, an
establishment puppeteer.
The Kennedy files that are promised for release are hardly going to
rock the boat, alter the world, or change a single mind. Historians
will be able to bring out modestly updated versions of old texts;
official accounts might be slightly adjusted on investigations,
locations and suspects, but the conspiracy set is bound to stick with
grim determination to ideas long formed and re-enforced by assumptions
that refuse revision.
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