Inventing Camelot

I caught a bit of anniversary coverage; as expected, in the breathless style of, "He was so glamorous! Then: he was shot! Do you remember where you where?!"

Also very predictable: conservative punditry, per Digby—

It was such fun yesterday watching all the right wingers try to appropriate John F. Kennedy as the one true conservative just as they do whenever we honor Martin Luther King. It's actually a good strategy to take credit for the things your popular enemies do that are in line with your agenda, so I don't blame them. Democrats should do more of it themselves. (Reagan the peacenik! Newt Gingrich the environmentalist! George W. Bush the ... patron of the arts?)

Unfortunately, the conservative economic mavens have Kennedy wrong. I have no way of knowing what he would do in today's circumstances and neither do they. But we have a pretty good idea of how he thought about economics in his day, and contrary to Grover Norquist's fevered tweet dream, it wasn't a celebration of laissez faire capitalism. Last night Stephanie Kelton posted this fascinating excerpt from his speech on that subject at Yale in 1962, that's well worth reading, if only to remind yourself that there is nothing new under the sun.

And fifty years ago this, if also nothing new under the sun, became the model for our media myth-makers: Jacqueline Kennedy's invention of the "Camelot" legend. Theodore White permitted her to re-write his post-assassination article for Life; in Rick Perlstein's account

... History should celebrate the Kennedy years as a time of hope and magic, [Mrs. Kennedy] ... insisted. White sat mesmerized for more than two hours, listening to the rambling and disjointed monologue.... She sneered at the 'bitter old men' who wrote history." ..."Finally, she came to the thought that had become her obsession, a thought embodied in the lyrics of the the Broadway musical—Camelot. Over and over again, she and the president had listened to the words sing out of their ten-year-old Victrola…"

What came next is pretty damned astonishing, a nadir in the history of court journalism, something that better belongs in the annals of the Kremlin. White retreated around midnight to draft his article in the maid's room, "mindful that Life was holding its presses at a cost of $30,000 an hour. When he finished, Mrs. Kennedy took a pencil to White's work, crossing out some of his words and adding her own in the margins. She hovered near the kitchen telephone—adamant that her Camelot portrayal remain the dominant theme—as he dictated the revised version to his editors." The article came out. Arthur Schlesinger, baffled, said, "Jack Kennedy never spoke of Camelot." One Kennedy hand said, "If Jack Kennedy heard this stuff about Camelot, he would have vomited."

Certainly, as Perlstein says, "The whole thing is a great object lesson in the horrors of access journalism—and access history." It's also been the model for the last fifty years. As Perlstein goes on to suggest the connections—

... here's a new Big Idea: journalist sycophants like White helped give us Watergate.

Consider: White felt so guilty at having slighted Nixon in Making of the President 1960 that he turned Making of the President 1968 into a virtual love letter to him, and sent him the book with a fulsome apology. Making of the President 1972 sucked up to Nixon even worse. But then, oops—I discovered this in research for the book I'm finishing now—White had to postpone publication so he could tack on a chapter about a little thing called Watergate, whose seriousness caught him completely by surprise.

Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972. (Read Tim Crouse's Boys on the Bus for the full story.) Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long—because, after all, America was ruled by noble men.