DOMESTIC
VANDERBILT POLITICAL REVIEW
Ninety miles from armageddon
The buzz surrounding the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination has
reinforced an unsettling but unsurprising trend in American thought:
Americans heavily prioritize November 1963 in their vision of the
Kennedy legacy. This collective memory obscures both the historical
realities of JFK’s tenure and Kennedy’s ultimate contribution to
mankind in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
N
ovember’s semicentennial of John
Fitzgerald Kennedy’s demise did
little but confirm the vigor of the
Kennedy death fetish. In the popular mind,
the legacy of our thirty-fifth President is
his very public death, so stunning but also
such fodder for conspiracy. The media
have made good on the macabre spectacle.
Fetish spokesman Oliver Stone’s JFK has
had hardcore conspiracists chanting “back
and to the left” for twenty-two years. But
even those with the shallowest conception of the Kennedy Administra ѥ