I was in 4th grade in 1960 when JFK beat my family’s candidate Richard Nixon. The Democrats back then were as busy letting the dead vote in Chicago as the Republicans today are busy keeping the living from the polls. When school started that year I told my next door neighbor Becky Penney that Nixon would beat her family’s candidate Kennedy. It was the first of my many subsequent bad guesses about election outcomes.
When he was assassinated two years later I knew a horror had been committed because I was steeped in the lore of Abe Lincoln’s murder. However, being just shy of 13 I was too young to get caught up in the thrall of Camelot which some folks a little older than me have never managed to let go of even after 50 years.
I like to see the warts on historical characters so that I don’t get too caught up in their myths. Even so, I was rather sad to read this unsparing assessment of JFK’s widow Jackie and even sadder to find myself agreeing with it. But as my buddy who sent me the link wrote: “…who doesn’t have feet of clay?”
