Talkin' Jack Kennedy Blues...

I regret that Jack didn't live through two terms but then Lyndon was pretty good -- for a while. And would Bobby have become prez in '69? I ain't so sure but that's what Gore Vidal "feared."

He feared a Kennedy "dynasty" going on into the 1970s and '80s which would perhaps have the constitution altered so a twenty four year old John-John could assume office once his Uncle Ted was through (1985)? And NOW what about Caroline? Ambassador to Japan when she coulda been a senator AND then in 2016 --? Huh? Huh? (Hillary MOVE OVER for "the REAL thing"!?)

I just watched the 1964 film of Vidal's play "The Best Man" with Henry Fonda as a fictional version of Adlai Stevenson with a dollop of Jack, Cliff Robertson as a rather scary amalgam of Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon and add a dash of Robert F actually. Lee Tracy plays an atheistic opportunistic version of Harry Truman, ex prez with power, and Edie Adams is a kind of proto Sarah Palin and Marilyn Monroe, i. e., not really as "dumb" as she sounds, as the wife of Robertson, and comedian Shelley Berman plays of all folks a JEWISH version of Whittaker Chambers?

It's directed by Franklin Schaeffer who later did "Patton," one of the best WWII films, and because Vidal really does "know" what he's satirizing the movie has a certain profundity about who exactly is "the best man" and who is would perhaps surprise you -- or not, depending on how you interpret the phrase.

Otto Preminger's 1962 "Advise and Consent" (also with Fonda, this time as an Alger Hiss-Adlai combo -- Fonda's great at suggesting intelligence combined with a hidden personal weakness in both films) is probably the "best" movie about the US senate (is it one wonders the ONLY movie about the US senate?!*) and "The Best Man" does a political convention (in LA as per 1960 and the Ambassador hotel as per 1968 the main venue) better though again I'm at lost to recall at the moment another political convention movie?**

So gee Vidal's "heart" belonged to Adlai I think, as did the hearts of so many liberal intellectuals of that time, and he never quite transferred it to Jack, his friendship with Jackie (they also "shared" the same stepfather, one Hugh Auchincloss) notwithstanding and marred obviously by Bobby's homophobia and consequent hostility toward Vidal.

Anyway if politics in movies doesn't bore you "The Best Man" is an overlooked "gem"...

* No of course there's Frank Capra's 1939 "Mr Smith Goes to Washington" which is a fantasy senate really that annoyed most senators of the time.

** Help me someone -- there MUST be one and an obvious one but it just doesn't come to mind...

Manchurian Candidate?
Medium Cool?

Good! Yes, I should have thought of them although "The Manchurian Candidate" has only the "final" scene at a convention but what a scene eh...

I thought I might just "ruminate" over my thoughts about John F. Kennedy at the time of his presidency and in the fifty years since. They may be only of interest to me but then I often entertain myself if no one else.

In 1960 I was eleven years old and had never heard of the senator from Massachusetts or maybe ANY senator from Massachusetts for that matter. (Well Daniel Webster!) I began watching the Los Angeles convention because I watched "everything" on tv at one time or another and I became rather fascinated with all these "unknown" (to me) RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT! when the prez was The Good and Great Man Eisenhower after all.

I remember I heard Johnson speaking at some convention "event" and I liked him maybe because he sounded like a "cowboy" (not a "bad" word for me at that age) and I must have heard Kennedy too but HE sounded like no one I -- living in Arizona -- had EVER heard!

I was for Nixon because he was The Great and Good Man's vice president and that was "all" I needed then. My parents seemed well a bit unimpressed with Nix but they indicated they'd vote for him because after all he had "experience."

I watched at least one of the famous "debates" though I hardly understood it -- "Quemoy"? "Matsu"? -- but I couldn't help but be impressed with Kennedy's later folks would call it "cool" I guess. I began to worry that Nixie would -- in contrast indeed not so impressive -- not make it.

Election night I had to go to bed before the results were final but it was SO close yet Nixon was behind and I found myself disappointed and saddened that not only did Pat Nixon cry but I did too. I don't think I've ever cried since over a presidential election -- but maybe I should have.

Kennedy's inaugural was well on the day of my father's funeral -- he died with the old prez so to speak, two days before and the day after he MADE me listen to Eisenhower's now famous "farewell" in which he spoke of "the military-industrial complex." I confess I really didn't comprehend what he was getting at, only that yes "we" were saying goodbye to The Great and Good Man who happened to resemble my father's idolized father deceased since 1941.

The Kennedy presidency I only was half aware of I must admit -- bay of Pigs, strange things going on in that odd place called "the south" where black folks, "Negroes," were somehow so upsetting, the Cuban missile crisis of course (I could hardly miss that!) and I also remember watching K on tv at the Berlin wall and saying "Ich bin ein Berliner!" which again I didn't quite understand but everyone was cheering him and I felt sort of proud.

The day he died I was then living in La Crosse Wisconsin and attending Lincoln Junior High School, ninth grade, and right after lunch I went to phy ed class and coming out of phy ed kids were talking in the halls -- "Kennedy was shot!" or "Kennedy is dead!" and the girls were crying and the boys were looking pretty confused; me too.

I went to English class and the teacher said she knew what we knew and wasn't going to talk about it but she read us a story -- oddly it was one about a kind of manhunt on some island which struck me as a very weird thing to read to us at the time but --???

When the final bell rang it was raining (appropriately) outside and my brother (an eighth grader) and I walked out toward the street and saw our mom in the car; she was picking us up re the rain. We got into the car and told her "President Kennedy was shot" and she blanched. She hadn't heard the news yet.

We went home and like everyone else turned on the tv and as it was Friday we barely turned it off through that long and bemusing weekend. What was the president doing in DALLAS of all places; I didn't get it but hour after hour guys like Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood, Dan Rather etc., filled me in and made me well a helluva lot "smarter" than I had been walking out that school.

Again Friday night we saw the new president (he still sounded like a cowboy and that actually reassured me) land in Washington and speak simply and directly and for me impressively. Saturday was full of Oswald I recall (a lot of media crowding that jail) and then came Sunday morning.

I wasn't watching -- the tv was off for a time because my mother thought "we" should go outside for a while; it was "too much," not "healthy" -- when Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby but when we came back inside I of course went right for the tv and when I turned it on the networks were all reshowing that first murder televised "in real time." Again shocking and shockingly weird, like a well I guess it was, a "tv show."

Over the years since I came to idolize Kennedy for a time which cooled when the Vietnam war really got going but then I transferred it to Bobby which cooled when he was killed and Nixon became prez and began confusing me (I seem to have been easily confused huh) -- was he going to end the war or not? Or try to "win it" and could he?

At times I thought as many did that the Kennedys were "the answer" -- Ted but then Chappaquiddick eh -- and then 1980 and Ted ran at last but lost and to Carter! Then I thought maybe the Ks weren't so "great" after all but by the way I never thought badly of Jackie marrying Onassis; you know sort of "getting out" while the getting was good though I must admit that in the movie "Bedazzled" (the first one, the "good" one) I laughed when one of Satan's magic phrases is "Jackie Onassis!"

Now I see the Kennedy "thing" as many do I guess -- "unfulfilled" but a prez with some "promise" and certainly "stylish" and a real celebrity, a Democratic version of Reagan or more accurately Reagan was a Republican version of Jack?

Whew! This is much longer than I meant it to be but not much is happening on this blog right now and I just felt like acknowledging the time and the place, i. e., the "anniversary" huh.

Forgive my logorrhea huh...