Far too many people have projected a face on Obama and heard what they wanted to hear in his words.

Vaughn Meader made several comedy albums about the Kennedy family in the early 1960s. They were very popular. My parents had them as did many of their friends. It was said that JFK enjoyed listening to them. Unfortunately, JFK’s assassination put Vaughn Meader’s career into an eclipse.

One line I recall from Vaughn Meader illustrates what people thought of JFK’s wit, from the Press Conference skit.
JFK/Vaughn Meader: “Here is the woman whose questions haunt me. Like the Asian Plague. Fasten your seat belts, ladies and gents, here is Mrs. Craig.”
Reporter Craig: “I don’t want you to be angry. I don’t want you to be sore. Will Rockefeller be President in 1964?”
JFK/Vaughn Meader: “If I were living in New York, he’d be my candidate. It’s the best way I know to get him. Out of New York State.”

Granted, this is fictional, but this is an illustration of what people thought of JFK’s wit.

And BTW it is still taboo to speak ill of JFK.

When I was in a high school American History class discussion about JFK back in the ‘60s, a classmate said that her parents never had thought much of JFK. A shock wave went through the room.

Her parents were Republicans. JFK was a Democrat. That simple. My classmate was of New England Yankee Republican background, what is sometimes called old stock. Her brother was named for their ancestor, a Revolutionary War hero. Blunt, unpretentious folk.

I had a Kennedy poster on my bedroom door until I left for college. My worship of all things Kennedy changed when a childhood friend worked at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis one summer. My friend summed it up by stating that while the Kennedys presented themselves as rich people with a conscience, they were simply rich people. He said that the employment agencies on the Cape that staffed houses with maids and such household help no longer dealt with the Kennedys because the Kennedys routinely didn’t pay for the last week or two of their workers’ employment.

My opinion of Ted, Ethel, and Joe Sr. is a lot lower than it is of RFK, JFK, Jackie, and Joan. My friend who worked at the Kennedy compound said that Jackie was a concerned mother, a good mother. His opinion — and mine- of Ethel had to do with political hypocrisy, not with her conduct as a mother.

I now view JFK as a skilled campaigner, probably the first to turn TV to his advantage. Those who listened to the Nixon-Kennedy debates on radio, such as my babysitter, said that Nixon had won. Those who saw it on TV said that JFK had won. JFK lied about the “missile gap” during the campaign. Perhaps one thing that in later years led me toward an analytical view of JFK instead of a hagiographic view was that for a Politics class in 9th grade I had to read and give a class presentation on Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1960.

As expat points out , it is hard to see JFK making an apology tour, though he apparently didn’t do too well with Nikita in Vienna.

While it is true that in retrospect many have made Kennedy out to be a saint who would have solved all our problems, I think many still like him and his era because of his patriotism. He would never have made a bowing and apologizing tour of the world. You can’t really draw a parallel to Obama, although Obama certainly tried to do so. Also, Kennedy’s foreign policy stances were based on his real experiences in pre-war Britain and in the war itself. His Berlin speech certainly helped those in Germany who did not want a communism creeping from the East. Obama’s world views are fantasies, and if he draws a line in the sand, it lasts only until the wind shifts the sands. Kennedy was a flawed human being and a politician. Obama’s character flaws are an order of magnitude greater.

Obama should have been a laughing matter, with luck he may make it yet.

Second, what a post-modernist, and what a solipsist, this President is. He really seems to believe that nothing is real except himself, nothing matters except his wishes, even those have few if any real consequences, and if the sometimes-amusing soulless constructs that comprise his citizenry disagree with his views, it’s only because he hasn’t explained them well enough, and all he has to do is make some more speeches and they’ll revert to their proper form: adulation and bovine passivity.

Yikes. The reason the Tea Party arose at this time is because SOMEbody’s got to take a shot at convincing this President and his buds that we’re real. That effort – convincing him – may fail, but since we are in fact real, he’s going to be the ultimate loser; reality doesn’t indulge solipsism.

And BTW it is still taboo to speak ill of JFK. When I was in college (early Aughties), I got scolded by my peers for it – these silly kids who weren’t even born at the time. It is thought to be morally wrong to say that stuff – like as in “don’t speak ill of the dead”. Nevermind that one can speak all the ill they want of all the other dead in the world, just not JFK.

So maybe we have collectively been down the Obamagasm road before.

Hoffer always did his own thinking g-d bless him.

First, Kennedy’s was the first election that boomers noticed, which meant he had a lot of people paying attention. He represented a new generation just coming of age, and he was someone who set a direction for the postwar era.

Second, he was patriotic. In many ways he gave my generation its Morning in America speech. His Irish Catholic heritage represented an opening of society to all. He was a war hero to us (PT 109), so he fit the John Wayne tales we had grown up with. His wife was Euro-savy, but with her WH tour, she reminded us to cherish our heritage. The kids were adorable.

Third, we didn’t really understand the lead-up to the missile crisis at the time. What we saw was that he didn’t back down.

And perhaps most important, he was killed before our eyes. I was in chem lab when the television was turned on with the report of what happened. We didn’t have the experience of hearing about the deaths in WWII or Korea, and we were facing the death of our president live on TV. We didn’t know what would happen next.

The dirty laundry that came out later never really replaced that traumatic experience or completely countered our youthful dreams of Camelot. After Kennedy came race riots, more assasinations, and the social upheavals of movements like feminism. During the antiwar movements, Kennedy represented a good America we could be proud of. He was a resting place between decades of war and turmoil.