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>.