Subject: Re: J.D., J.F.K. and I
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Fri Jul 20 2001 - 04:39:03 GMT
'... I'm not sure Kennedy knew anything about the war ...’
I agree one must be extremely sceptical when faced
with anything issuing from the Kennedy spin meisters -
but I *am* inclined to believe at least the bones of
the PT 109 story.
And while he was evidently - at an operational level -
just as cynical & manipulative as the rest of his tribe, JFK
always retained in the star-struck eyes of my generation
that air of irony & urbanity that set him apart from the others
- & preserved much of his attractiveness long after the stories
of slime & failure had begun to emerge. People who knew
him as a young man in London report that - at at time
when he was, on the face of it, unlikely to be more than
a reserve player in the Kennedy game plan - he genuinely
was showing some signs of the literacy & natural wit that
the machine later made such play with.
I wonder if, in the aftermath of the war, they might
have communicated rather better than we assume. Both,
after all, came from privileged backgrounds (the Kennedys
considerably more so than the Salingers, of course) -
backgrounds in which the relatively recent vulnerability
of the immigrant was now coated with the sophistication
of money & a good, expensive, East Coast education.
They seem both to have been socially poised & highly
attractive to women - no need for either to compensate
with the fantasies of the weedy bookworm.
But I suspect that with each it was the experience of war
that concentrated their minds in its own unique way -
focusing JFK on political power & JDS on its literary
equivalent. My own fantasy is that both had known
that moment when, recognising within themselves
the peculiar conjunction of personal potency & opportunity,
they realised they actually WERE going to have it - that
they belonged to that very special few for whom the dream
was about to be replaced by the reality.
Just for those few summers at the end of the Fifties
they might well have enjoyed each other’s company.
But then the roads diverged rapidly & widely. Even had
he lived, I cannot see Kennedy having much to say
to the bean-eating, elder citizen of Cornish.
Scottie B.
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