Month: February 2023

Found on Tumblr, this old Esquire cover from 1967 advertising a piece within by Gore Vidal. I don’t recall reading the latter, though it’s in United States so I presumably did read it at some point… anyway, I took a quick look through it (again?), and Vidal evidently wasn’t impressed by John F.’s tenure; brutally shortened as it was, he still didn’t think a second term of Jack would be any improvement on the first, and that he was kind of holding the seat for Bobby to move into. Vidal basically sums up Jack’s career as his father’s “fuck you” to an American society that still bore prejudice against Irish Catholics, it was Joe Sr. building up first himself then his offspring (well, maybe not Rosemary so much) to get the first Catholic president of the US in the White House (initially it was supposed to be Joe Jr., but the latter had the misfortune of dying in that war that was happening in the 1940s).

Parenthetically, Mum once told me that when Kennedy was in line for the presidency in 1960, the Baptist church she attended (I think it wasn’t until the next year her and Dad moved down to England, so they were still in Scotland at the time) basically instructed everyone there to pray that Jack would lose. There are a number of things I don’t understand about Christianity, but that was one I was always particularly mystified by… I mean, Protestantism and Catholicism have always been at odds, but I’ve always been struck by the idea that this kind of pissant church apparently thought they could influence the politics of another much bigger and more powerful country. Which, obviously, they didn’t… but the mindset still baffles me.

Anyway, the somewhat gloomy prospect of a Kennedy dynasty (a Kennedynasty, if you will) (actually, please don’t, I wish I’d never thought of that now) underpins the essay, and it obviously inspired the magazine cover art… which, with hindsight, looks optimistic, shall we say. In fairness, that is hindsight talking; I’m fairly sure that in 1967, no one was expecting Vietnam to go so badly over the next year that “the hapless Nixon” (as Vidal calls him in the essay) could beat LBJ at that year’s election… similarly I don’t suppose anyone was expecting Sirhan Sirhan to deal with Bobby or the Chappaquiddick Island bridge to deal with Ted, though at least the latter did some good work later on in life. As for John-John… yeah. If nothing else they weren’t expecting what the then-6 year old would actually grow up to look like… and did he ever actually have a political career in mind? He seemed happier to promote other people’s in his magazine, though I suppose he could’ve been talked into it had it not been for that plane crash.

The kind of ominous thing about the putative dates for each on the cover, of course, is that clearly someone was not only envisaging each of the brothers and the nephew to automatically succeed each other but also that each would serve two terms (and, implicitly, so would the then incumbent LBJ) and that John Jr. would… just carry on? Weird that he has no use-by date for some reason… What a shame Vidal never lived to see the QAnon bullshit co-opting young Jack, I feel like he would’ve had some interesting things to say on that matter, and, obviously, the Trump era as a whole; I’m not sure how thrilled I’d be about a non-stop line of Kennedys, but I think it’d still have to be better than a line of Lord Dampnut’s kids. And you know they’ll be darkening the corridors of American politics for years to come, they’ve had a taste of the grift thanks to daddy and they won’t surrender it easily. Plus Don Jr.’s got to finance his coke habit somehow, why not via the federal budget…