"ICH BIN EIN BERLINER!" (626)

[Monte Davis]

Kai sez:
 
> re. Pynchon & Kennedy: Unlike other American left-liberals like
> Lou Reed ("Most of all I wish I'd forget the day John Kennedy
> died"), Pynchon seems to be very critical on Kennedy. 
 
At 10 when JFK was elected, I found it easy to admire him: he was young,
vital, vivid, and (for a nascent intellectual like me, and 90% of the US
intellectual establishment) incomparably wittier and more cultured than the
boring old Eisenhower my parents had voted for. And then, of course, he was
martyred, and as things went sour  from the mid-60s onward, it became (and
remains) easy to invest JFK with all the optimistic "might have beens," and
blame Johnson and then Nixon for all the nasty realities.
 
It took me 10-20 years to question that. I now think of Kennedy as a very
glamorous image wrapped around (1) a more radical and adventurist cold
warrior than Eisenhower, who sharply accelerated the arms race, (2) a
political tactician every bit as sharp-elbowed and unscrupulous as LBJ or
Nixon, although much smoother at it, (3) much less deeply and productively
committed to civil rights and domestic reform than LBJ, (4) a frequent user
of scary amounts of painkillers and stimulants, and (5) compulsively
promiscuous to a degree that would make Bill Clinton blush.
 
Seymour Hersh, a great investigative journalist who has been highly esteemed
on the left from the time he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in
Vietnam up through his current work on prepaations for war with Iran,
substantiated this view in a book called "The Dark Side of Camelot" --
which, revealingly, dropped into a resounding and embarrassed silence in
most circles on the left, as if good old Sy had farted in church. 
 
To those for whom Pynchon endorses a Golden Age idealization of the 1960s
(and other moments when American impulses to the left went astray), his
misgivings about Kennedy will remain a puzzle. To those who notice that
Punchon doesn't cut *anybody* much moral slack, and has as clear an eye for
the fecklessness and self-destructiveness of his "heroes" as for the
malignity of his "villains," it's entirely consistent.
 
 
 
 
 
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