President John F. Kennedy was a man in the spotlight of the American public. He started his campaign that way, taking advantage of both his youth and the emergence of television and winning over the hearts of the people. As he won hearts, he also won votes, and in 1960 he just slid into office, beating Nixon by a perfectly styled hair. Once President, he and his family remained in the public eye, becoming popular in much the same way movie stars of the time were. They influenced even fashion and the arts, and eventually the family in the White House came to be known to America as Camelot. They were the seemingly perfect balance of politician and celebrity.

But not all was perfect in the Kennedy family—John suffered from two endocrine diseases, was often on medication, and had at least one extramarital affair. None of this, though, was discovered until after his death. And with his death came a whole new set of questions. The official story became that he was killed by “The Lone Gunman”, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was then killed by another man working alone, Jack Ruby. But the abundance of facts available about Kennedy’s assassination has lead to hundreds of questions and conspiracies about his killers, their technique, and their motives, despite all official reports meant to explain what happened that day.

John F. Kennedy’s very public life and death, and the discoveries and conspiracies that came to be after his death, prove that no matter how much information we think we have, we can never really know the truth about a famous person, much less a “Legendary American”.

Camelot presented to the American people the image of a perfect family life in the White House. John F. Kennedy had his gorgeous wife and kids by his side through his campaign and Presidency, supporting him and then becoming famous in their own way.  Jackie Kennedy had two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, and had a handsome, rich, and successful husband. She was seen as an icon around the country, creating new fashion trends and signaling new trends in the arts and thus creating interest in the general public.

But not all was what it seemed. Camelot was crumbling on the inside. J.F.K. was suffering from both Addison’s disease and hypothyroidism, and depending on three doctors (one of which was known for his controversial treatments) to help with his pain and other symptoms. Jackie lost her new born son just a few months before her husband died, the second she lost. And the medication that John was on made him especially… virile, as doctors at the time put it. So, as is often corroborated, it was later discovered that he engaged in extramarital affairs with several famous women.

Despite the presence that the family exuded to the public, and all that America knew about the family, with the constant media presence they allowed in their lives, no one actually knew what was happening in their lives. No one knew the pain they were experiencing until after they died, and we still don’t entirely know the extent to which the disease and medication affected Kennedy in regards to his political life and decisions.

Nowhere is this lack of insight into this seemingly transparent life more evident than in regards to Kennedy’s death. Due to the publicity of his death, with the Zapruder film catching it in its entirety and every television and radio station mourning his death in the weeks following the assassination. Then when doubt came into the picture, once Lee Harvey Oswald was killed as well, the Warren commission’s investigation was supposed to end all questions with a thorough explanation on what happened that day. And yet the commission had so much differing information about the characters involved that day and so many conflicting depictions of the event that their explanation could not cover every single thing that happened that day. So only more questions were raised, especially considering the connections that each of the people in the case—Kennedy and his brother, Robert, had been rooting out mob bosses, and Oswald supposedly had mob connections, there were suspicions that Kennedy was the target of Cuban exiles after his failed Bay of Pigs invasion, even Lyndon B. Johnson and the Secret Service were considered possible backers of the assassination.

Several more commissions looked into the assassination and came to approximately the same conclusions that the Warren Commission had, until finally the records were sealed for the next thirty years.

So despite all the publicity, how much information the public was given about the assassination— 60,000 documents involving the assassination were gathered and unsealed from 1992 to 1998 by the Assassination Records Review Board so that the public could draw their own conclusions— we still don’t know for sure what went down on that fateful day in November 1963.

Even in the age of television and celebrities constantly in the public eye, we still can’t separate myth from fact when it comes to public figures. Even in death they remain a mystery to the public at large, never to be known fully by the millions that thought they loved them. No matter how much people think they share with the public, a person (because that’s all a celebrity is, behind all those cameras) still has a private self, one they don’t want to share with the world, and that private self may never come to light.

We can never truly know what another person’s life is like, never truly establish what is a part of their legend as opposed to their history. Public figures reveal this better than anyone else, and the Kennedy family and legacy is a prime example. Myth will always blur the lines of truth.

Prompt 1: What makes a good president? Roosevelt is frequently listed in the top 5 of all presidents. Explain what makes Teddy a good president, keeping in mind the attacks against him in some of these readings.

Teddy Roosevelt strikes me as less of a “good President” than just a man who was loved by the nation and had good intentions. There’s a striking parallel between him and John F. Kennedy, in this sense. John F. Kennedy had all these grand ideas about how to make the nation a better place, but he really never got any legislation through. Similarly, Roosevelt had great ideas for conservation or fighting big business, but, as discussed in the “Bully Boy” excerpt, nothing worked out as planned. And both of these men are now seen as “great” Presidents, often making top 10 in the lists of greatest Presidents, despite this.

They were also both great presences in the public eye, with “dynamic personality” (Bully Boy). Teddy was known for his trademark glasses and grin, and it was Kennedy’s charisma that got him into office. The nation loved them.

With how little either of these men really got done towards their goals, and, for Roosevelt, considering his ideas of race, I wouldn’t peg either of these men as “good” Presidents. I think the public just remembers them as such because they look back and only remember the public personas. They remember what the men had intended to get done, rather than what actually happened, and they remember that they were good men. And in this case, they’re both misremembered.

The public memory of them has gone through heroification, like Laura talked about in her post last week, to the point we no longer hear about things like Roosevelt’s racism.

A truly “good” President should be one that solves problems by getting good legislation through, and leads the nation to a better place than where it was when he first got into office. But because the President is just one man, rather than, like Congress, a group seen as one that is much more difficult to see in terms of individuals, the nation’s like or dislike of the man becomes much more personal, and likely to be based on reasons other than whether or not he is a legitimately good leader.

In order to pull all of our proposed topics together under sensationalism, as we discussed, I thought I would firstly tie them all together, just so I could see it written down:

~Religion: it was a big deal that Kennedy was a Catholic, a hot topic of debate at the time, comparison to candidate in the 20s, more press coverage because of this?

~Polls: what do the polls show us about how Americans feel about their leader during uncertain times?

~Assassination/Personal life: emerging media culture, seen widely on television, sensationalist true crime story that played out in front of the world, the idea of conspiracy keeping it sensational even today, because the death was such a big deal- we make Kennedy a bigger deal, losing someone young in the public eye

~Children’s book: the kid’s book seemed to make everything a big deal (the lifejacket story)- but still more evenly biased than older children’s texts, comparing the stories to Weems’ cherry tree story, did people like Weems make their tales ‘sensational’

I think we’ve really got a good connecting topic here with the sensationalism.

We can talk about how much of JFK’s memory today is still based in the fact that all the things we remember about him are these huge moments in history, like the Cuban Missile Crisis and his assassination, but when it came down to it, he didn’t really get that much done while he was in office. He set the foundation for a lot of things to come, but he didn’t get much legislation passed. Comparatively, Woodrow Wilson did a lot in his time in office, and he’s remembered just as highly, but, as we learned this week, he has this whole dark background that students often don’t learn.

I just noticed where Laura mentioned in her last post about not allowing discussion of J. F. Kennedy’s death to overlap with previous discussions on Crockett’s, but I thought they might make for an interesting comparison, considering we know so little about Crockett’s death and so much about Kennedy’s. Maybe too much, which is what leads to all these conspiracies. And people are so willing to look at everyone’s faults in the Kennedy administration so that they might find the culprit, but people jumped up to defend Davy Crockett when it seemed he might not have died the honorable death everyone had assumed. Does that say something about how much more “legendary” one might be than the other? Just a thought that jumped into my head.

Prompt #2: Based on evidence presented in this week’s readings, how much of a role do you think textbooks, schools, and educators play in Americans’ sense of history and the past? If Americans have a distorted or selective view of the past, are teachers and schools the primary culprits? Or are there other causes that you can point to?

By looking at Loewen’s article and the examples presented, I think it’s very clear that education has a hand in what exactly American students remember about historical figures. There was so much more to Keller’s and Wilson’s stories, big chunks that just get left out of texts, and so some kids never hear about. Personally, while I’d heard some things about Keller being a socialist before, just because of my own readings, I had no clue about the darker side to Wilson. I’d never had the opportunity to learn about that. So yes, textbooks play a role in what students are able to learn about, especially if these are students that aren’t going outside of class for learning opportunities.

But the “primary culprits” are not those we normally associate with education.

In Stephanie Simon’s article about the Texas Board of Education, it is presented to us the idea of changing textbooks and curriculum in order to have a focus that some specific reviewers believe is better than the one at present. Some of them are perfectly reasonable requests from people that are knowledgeable in the subject area– for example:
“Reviewer Jesús F. de la Teja, a former state historian, calls for adding names such as Juan de Oñate, who led the Spanish expedition that settled New Mexico and José Antonio Navarro, a proponent of Texas independence. He also recommends a deeper study of Texas history.”

One would assume that in Texas, we should know about Hispanic figures, since they are so tied into our culture and history, and as a former state historian, that Teja has a good idea of what students should learn about their state.

On the other hand, we have men like the Reverend Marshall, “who preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War and Hurricane Katrina were God’s judgments on the nation’s sexual immorality”, who are insisting that we essentially censor historical figures like Anne Hutchinson and Thurgood Marshall, in favor of teaching more about “revival movements” and “that America’s founding principles are biblical”.

There is quite a bit wrong with that image (education is supposed to be secular, like the government), but what matters most is that these people are fighting for what they believe, and that is what they believe kids need to be taught. Whether or not our education plays a role in who we grow up to admire, these people think that it does, and they’re willing to fight for it, which shows that, as a whole, in our society, it does matter to us what “Legendary Americans” we are taught. Any distortion or selectivity we have in what we retain is embedded in the society we are a part of, not specifically because of teachers or schools.

At this point, for our presentation, I’m looking back on some of my older posts in order to narrow down some talking points.

~Dying young as a politician, could be an interesting topic, if the focus is held on the political aspects of his life that were cut short, though, as was mentioned in the meeting, dying young is very likely to be a hot topic amongst the other groups and we don’t want to repeat what they’ve said. We could talk about how the possibilities of the time he did not get to finish as President was much more effective than what he could have accomplished if he had survived.

~Comparing his assassination to that of others in history, like Lincoln’s, since I looked into that, or even to other historical leaders outside the United States, I could look into that. How different the reactions were, because of the timing of their deaths, but how we get to remember them as great men, as Peter said in his post this week, because they never had to deal with the aftermath of certain events. So I suppose this is very similar to the first topic I suggested.

~Is the conspiracy what makes JFK still a relevant legendary American?  There are a lot of interesting possible “what if”s here. For example, if it had been straightforward assassination, all evidence pointing to one man with a gun and a mission, how long would the nation have mourned?  Would his memory just be mourned in the moment, and then moved past, if there wasn’t all this mystery behind his death?

~If we use the essay I was looking into last week, we can discuss how crises can affect an entire nation, and bring it together, and if this is a reason JFK’s death still lingers in the nation’s memory. The pulling together, the national mourning, the services of all denominations– the whole nation was affected by JFK’s death. Is this the reason everyone remembers so clearly where they were on that day? And why exactly did everyone feel as though they’d lost one of their own?

I think the last two are the best to focus on, the first two could probably be combined if we wanted to use them, and the second to last one connects really well to what Peter was saying in his blog post this week and works well as a continuation off of the first two subjects.

Prompt 2: Based on evidence provided in the readings, what does the popularity of Elvis in the 1950s tell us about his era? Are the reasons for his continued popularity today the same as the reasons for his popularity then?

Betrand writes about Elvis and the barriers he crossed, racial and otherwise, and that seems to be a major reason as to why he became so extraordinarily popular. Despite the one nasty rumor about Elvis being a racist, Elvis was beloved amongst young people of all ethnicities. This seems clearest when reading about the Goodwill Revue where he just walked out on stage and was immediately bombarded with screaming girls of all skin tones. This seems to me a hint, that social and racial change was imminent– maybe not quite in the air, yet, but it’s there, under the surface, as “black, brown, and beige girls” all scream for the same idol.

Rosenbaum presents us with the idea that Elvis’s popularity now is more about a connection to the man behind the King, than it is about the gyrating racial-barrier-crossing superstar that’s more reminiscent of Justin Bieber than B.B. King. The girls were screaming for him then, but now his fans look to him solemnly for comfort. There are, of course, the casual music fans, as there surely were when he first became popular, but the die-hard fans, the ones doing their pilgrimages to Graceland every year during Death Week, they’re the main reason he’s still popular– why you can still buy Elvis’s face on anything, as Bertrand discusses. And to them, Elvis as he was closer to the end of his life is the reason they feel so connected to him. They feel his pain, they know he would understand theirs. Some of them may think he heals people, heals the fans that love him dearly, but it seems to be a placebo effect. Because of this connection they have to the man, they feel they can bare their soul to his, and that he can do something about it, and because they believe it so strongly, it works. Rosenbaum puts it well when he suggests that “finding a way to love [Elvis in his decline], may be our way of finding, in our own decline, some forgiveness, some humor, even some healing.” It’s a continuation of the comparison between Jesus and Elvis as well, with these moments akin to the followers of Jesus being healed by his hands.

“Political crises are decisive moments in socities.”

The book The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public; Social Communication in Crisis contains essays that deal with reactions across the nation to the assassination of Kennedy and how the reactions moved and changed with media and between people. I decided to focus this week on one that combines assassination and politics, The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment.

The essay discusses what the Kennedy assassination showed about American politics, and how the average man felt about it.

Firstly, it generalizes, crises put institutions to the test. It is in these testing times that major events can occur, and when people “not ordinarily involved in politics are suddenly deeply involved,” and learn the true nature of their political system.

This is shown most simply in the ease of transfer of power from one President to another. No one spent the time after Kennedy died jockeying for power, and there was even very little change in the direction of policy. The American people accepted that this is how the American government works, with no question. This is fundamental to the validity of our government.

The emotional reaction to Kennedy’s death was telling of the connection that Americans have with the public families– people are often quoted as saying they felt as if they’d lost a member of their own family. Despite the fact that they knew it was an important political issue, it was a much more personal issue to them. Socially, we attach emotional meaning and commitment to the common symbol that stands for the unit– in this case, the President to America– and so we react when they are attacked. This can be seen when people attack or defend the person at the head of a political party rather than their argument, and are offended when people do the opposite.

Also, interestingly, despite all the controversy due to Kennedy’s Catholicism, religious services were held all across the United States after his death. Verba, the author, suggests that this illustrates an underlying religiosity to even our most secular institutions, even if it is not specific religion based. Governmental institutions “may have a significance of a religious kind”. And so that places the President  (or any other major political leader, really) in a curious head-of-church sort of position that makes him even more defensible.

Next Verba gets into discussing the effects of a crisis, and what specifically this crisis had on the American public, which I think will be a good place to look to for next week.

This essay as a whole is 12 pages, if we want to use it. I think it would be of more use than anything I’ve found thus far, because it ties back more to what the others have been talking about.

Greenberg, Bradley S., and Edwin B. Parker. The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public; Social Communication in Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1965. Print.

We Americans love conspiracy theories. Or we love to hate them. Either way, we perpetuate even the most absurd of them, ones about 9/11 being planned by the American government, the white car that got away from Princess Diana’s accident being full of assassins, and, most relevant to us, the many many theories behind President John F. Kennedy’s death.

An article online discusses the psychology behind conspiracy theories as a combination of individualism and an inability to control. People want to have control over their own lives, but when they feel they lose this to an outside larger power, their likelihood to believe in a conspiracy theory wholehearted goes up.

Studies are showing that individualism is a trait that is occurring more often now that it used to, as well as anxiety, which can lead to paranoia.

So between the rise of a tendency to want to believe in conspiracy theories and more theories popping up, it’s no wonder the J.F.K. rumors aren’t dissipating. The American public is still very concerned about the truth behind what happened that day. And because we are still so concerned as a nation about his death, Kennedy remains a very relevant topic in our society. This combined with the fact that people are often idolized after they die, especially after they are murdered, keeps Kennedy in the minds of the people, and therefore in the back of their minds when considering conspiracy theories.

Each of the conspiracies remain alive because people still consider that they might be true. This loop of remaining pertinent and heightening concerns about conspiracies may keep the theories about Kennedy’s death around for another fifty years.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-narcissus-in-all-us/200809/paranoia-911-and-the-roots-conspiracy-theories

Prompt 4: Based on what you find in the readings, what can outlaws tell us about the changing nature of laws and government authority in American history?

Outlaws became big in a time of when the everyday man felt beat down by those on top, by those in charge. The Depression was hitting the nation hard, and there was nothing the heads of households could do to fight back. One day they had money, the next, they just didn’t. The banks had nothing to give them. So when people heard tales of men taking charge and fighting back, outside the law or not, they were intrigued.

Those laws that the outlaws were breaking, and the government that they were rebelling against were the ones that had taken away everyone’s personal power. Those law-breakin men were sick of being held down, and so dispense, as White calls it, “private justice”, as opposed to “the order provided by law”.

Gorn describes it even better, comparing Dillenger and Hoover to Frued’s Id and Superego. In psychology, the Id is described as the pleasure-centered part of someone’s personality, and the Superego as the conscience. Americans at the time knew that Hoover was supposed to be the good guy, but Dillenger was the man they wanted to be.

There was just very little respect for the government in this era, once everyone’s hope was at it’s lowest. And seeing the outlaws all over the news, evading capture, driving cool cars, and sticking it to the man, helped ease the pain of the common man.

The perception of the government and law wasn’t the only thing changing. The law was pulling itself together, from being disorganized to creating the Federal Bureau  of Investigation, and finally carrying guns on them. Forensics like fingerprinting were being used for the first time in attempts to catch Dillinger. Hoover, “ever vigilant about his agency’s image”, made sure that the public was aware that catching Dillinger was a “triumph of scientific investigation and sophisticated police work” (Gorn).

Both the perception by the American people and the new actions of the government and the law in general were changing rapidly in the era of the Great Depression, and it made outlaws like Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and Jesse James famous men.

I was sick all weekend, so it’s back to having no new book to look into for this week. But I’ve been looking around online at reactions to Kennedy’s and Lincoln’s death and I can’t really find anything that goes up against what I saw last week- Lincoln had people that were practically celebrating his death, but Kennedy had a whole nation weeping for him.

I read the entire wikipedia article “Reaction to the assassination of John F. Kennedy”, and the only mention of negative feelings towards him was that “It has been reported, though, that some stations in parts of the country where Kennedy was unpopular carried on with their normal programming as usual.” Nothing else.

Peter, I believe, talked a week or two ago about Kennedy’s poll numbers. Around the time of his death, they were not as high as they had been. People were feeling disenchanted with Kennedy and his administration, just as people had been feeling disenchanted with Lincoln’s. Tensions were high in both cases. There’s just something about Lincoln that made him just a victim, where Kennedy became a martyr.

I think it has to do with the strength of the tensions toward the Presidency. Certainly Kennedy was not having an easy time in the position, but he was not seen as an enemy in the same way that Lincoln was. The grumblings toward JFK probably just had to do with feelings that he was incompetent, or fear that he would lead America somewhere it shouldn’t be. But in the case of Lincoln, he was an enemy to half the nation. He had brought the Union back together but they were not a happy family yet. He represented everything the Confederacy had fought against, and now he was leading them. So when we look back at the reactions to his assassination, sure, half the nation mourned, but the other half smiled. And so we don’t have on record this mass mourning that we do for Kennedy.

Records are a big component, too. Everyone on record was mourning Kennedy. That’s not to say that there were people off the record with counter opinions. They just didn’t pipe up. And if they did, we have no records of it, because they were free to say as they pleased amongst friends (if willing to put up with the social shunning), whereas with Lincoln we have on record soldiers that were busted and punished for celebrating.

So time may find more records of people not quite sobbing over the death of John F. Kennedy, but for the most part the nation saw him as a martyr, much unlike how the nation had seen the death of the only other President to be assassinated and have the possibility of conspiracy surround his death.

“Reaction to the Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 19 Oct. 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_to_the_assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy>.