A British view of Kennedy and Camelot: "we are now governed by winners of beauty contests rather than by people of principle who put the national interest first"

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How JFK's 'Camelot' myth tarnished our politics for ever
By Simon Heffer, November 15, 2013

Next Friday is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It also represents another depressing milestone in the history of modern politics — the beginning of an era during which style has triumphed over substance.

Indeed, as I shall argue, JFK was the first politician to fully embrace the black arts of image manipulation to create his own legend.

It was a cynical process in which Washington sycophants and his acolytes in the liberal media were persuaded to subscribe to the whole, bogus ‘Camelot’ myth of Kennedy and his louche court.

The reality, though, is that he was a poor president and commander-in-chief, not least in handling the Cold War, which reached its most dangerous point partly due to his own incompetence.

In 1961, he sanctioned sending, without proper back-up, 1,800 American-trained soldiers to invade the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in the hope of overthrowing the country’s communist leader Fidel Castro.

Not only did the invasion end in humiliation for America, it also precipitated the Cuban missile crisis the following year, when Russia threatened to station nuclear warheads a few dozen miles from the American coast.

In order to cool matters, JFK had to promise never to try to invade Cuba again.

The key figure behind Kennedy’s original ascent to the White House was his bullying, womanising, Nazi-loving father who tore up the rules of conventional democratic politics.

It was Joe Kennedy who realised that policy had become less important than image and he used vast sums of money to fund image-promotion methods. These quickly poisoned American politics and, eventually, crossed the Atlantic to corrupt ours.

Throughout JFK’s presidential campaign, the Kennedy image was driven home: he was young, patriotic — having served in the U.S. Navy — and the author of a book on the Munich Agreement (though his father had paid for someone else to write it). So he had youth, heroism and a reputation, however false, as an intellectual.

This message was accepted unquestioningly by an unctuous media. The Press were invited into the Kennedy court and, in return for favours such as good access and inside-track stories, they were expected to paint a positive picture.

JFK’s opponent in the fight for White House in 1960 was Richard Nixon, the incumbent vice-president, who despite being a tough and cynical politician, was unversed in PR trickery.

Nixon was lured into televised debates with Kennedy, next to whom he looked shifty, swarthy, sweaty and stilted.

Historians agree that the outcome of their battle depended entirely on style and tone — for there was almost nothing to choose between their policies.

Though infinitely more experienced than his rival, Nixon lost. He had failed to realise that politics had changed and that in a TV age, style was more important than substance.

The effect on British politics was almost immediate. In the 1964 election, Labour’s Harold Wilson fought the patrician Tory Alec Douglas-Home as a genial, pipe-smoking, easy-going Yorkshireman.

In comparison, the Old Etonian 14th earl sounded clipped and uptight. Wilson’s election as Prime Minister demonstrated for the first time in British political life — and thus setting a pattern for the following decades — that sleight of hand and spin, sadly, could overcome integrity.

We have Jack Kennedy to thank for the fact that only politicians who can get a certain image across to the public will succeed these days.

Labour’s Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, of course, were maestros in these arts, employing even blacker arts to promote their leader and his message.

The consequence was the ascendancy of Tony Blair, one of the most vacuous and dishonest politicians of recent times. 

As a result of this image-is-all philosophy, people of ability and integrity today rarely achieve high office, and some are deterred from entering politics at all. 

The tragedy is that we are now governed by winners of beauty contests rather than by people of principle who put the national interest first.

Until JFK, top-class politicians were chosen for their wisdom and devotion to their country. Now, it is someone who can perform a flirtatious interview with a breakfast television dolly bird, irrespective of what they say.

JFK’s victory of style over substance has deeply damaged political life on both sides of the Atlantic and for that we are all the poorer.
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