Howie Carr: John F. Kennedy was the last good Democrat
President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas 60 years ago today – on Nov. 22, 1963.
And it’s been all downhill since then.
It doesn’t matter what you think of JFK’s presidency – I’d say he was okay, but not great – but who can argue that the country hasn’t changed for the worse since that terrible Friday?
In the aftermath, much of the nation’s elite – the best and the brightest – had a collective nervous breakdown, and they and their descendants have never recovered. They now careen from one “existential” crisis to the next – one hysteria after another, decades of panic, from global cooling to global warming to acid rain right up to the present.
Trump! COVID! George Floyd! Trump!
The country stumbles on, more and more resembling, in the prescient words of Richard M. Nixon, “a pitiful, helpless giant.”
It’s easy to overstate how much that one assassination has changed everything. As Adam Smith observed after a British defeat in 1777: “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
Which if true is very lucky for us. I think at least some of the nation’s ongoing nervous breakdown is related to the fact that nobody still really knows for sure who killed JFK.
I know, we’re supposed to believe it was the original lone wolf, Lee Harvey Oswald, a Communist. But I don’t believe it, and neither did Lyndon Johnson, for that matter. (It’s on the White House tapes when LBJ is talking to Sen. Richard Russell.)
Who did it? The CIA? The Cubans? Even LBJ has had books written about him as a suspect, since he was apparently going to be dumped from the ticket in 1964. My money would be on the Mob, for double-crossing them after they went all out for JFK in 1960, but that’s just me.
As time has gone on, less and less attention has been paid to this anniversary. The days of Kennedy hagiography as a cottage industry are long over.
Attention spans are short. For most people, JFK is not within living memory. He’s not a contemporary. Indeed, none of the Kennedys are, which is why the last Kennedy to run for elective office in Massachusetts lost to, of all people, Ed Markey – a K-Mart Kennedy, as we used to call those knock-offs with the fake accents and the swept-forward hair and all the rest of the affectations.
But there’s another factor at work in the declining interest in the Kennedys. The fact is, JFK no longer fits comfortably into the modern Democrat pantheon.
As a matter of fact, if he were alive today, JFK wouldn’t even be able to get on the ballot to run in a Democrat primary in Massachusetts, let alone prevail over a wokester’s wokester. He could never get 15 percent of the vote at a state Democrat convention that he’d need to make the primary.
Maybe JFK’s most famous quote was: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
That’s practically hate speech for Democrats nowadays. He also talked about the “long twilight struggle” – meaning, the Cold War, against Communism. Nowadays, in the Democrat party, the long, twilight struggle against the US and the people Kennedy represented.
The last time Kennedy came to Boston was in October 1963, a big fundraiser at the Commonwealth Armory for the Democrat governors of New England. His room was at the Boston Sheraton. He had his 19-year-old White House girlfriend Mimi Alford come up from Wheaton College. The president asked her to perform oral sex on his little brother, Sen. Ted Kennedy.
She declined.
Now, not far from the Sheraton, the state is planning to put up hundreds or thousands of illegal aliens from parts unknown, many of them no doubt criminals, very few of them planning to work anytime soon.
Does anyone think Jack Kennedy would think open borders was a good idea? He wasn’t that much of a liberal, after all.
You’re not supposed to talk about it, but he was a pal of Sen. Joe McCarthy. He gave $1,000 cash to Richard Nixon when he was running for the Senate in 1950. He voted against statehood for Hawaii.
He palled around with some of the biggest segregationists in Congress, all Democrats. He used to go down to pre-Castro Havana with Sen. George Smathers of Florida, another Democrat, and enjoy the finest hookers Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante had to offer.
He spent much of his time in Palm Beach, where blacks were prohibited by law from opening property until at least 1962.
In November 1951, Congressman JFK addressed the Boston Chamber of Commerce:
“We cannot abolish the poverty and want… There is just not enough money in the world to relieve the poverty of all the millions of this world… It is not only beyond our grasp, but is beyond our reach.”
The next year, while JFK was running for the Senate, the New Republic reported on a speech he gave at Harvard in which he said:
“… that he could see no reason why we were fighting in Korea, he thought that sooner or later we would ‘have to get all those foreigners off our backs’ in Europe… that he rather respected Joe McCarthy and thought he ‘knew Joe pretty well, and he may have something….”
Sixty years later, they’re not making Democrats like John F. Kennedy anymore. And whatever his shortcomings were, that’s too damn bad.
America was a lot better country before he was shot, and the Democrats were a lot better party.
(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)
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