Obscure Kennedy History

The Memorial of the Inauguration of JFK

The 50th anniversary of JFK's inauguration seems to have brought out the history buffs. At the 50th anniversary commemoration at the Kennedy Center, they read a poem by Robert Frost, but not the one he recited at the inauguration, nor the one he had intended to read:

Both of these poems are pugnacious, echoing of American exceptionalism, and a bit bloody. The Kennedy's decision to trade them out for "The Road Not Taken," is an interesting one.

Instead, they chose the "The Road Not Taken", which I memorized as a child (got my only standing ovation at school from reciting a Frost poem). The rejection of history at the commemoration is one more indication of how much the dominant culture's values have changed in 50 years. (Though I think "Left on Left violence" actually started out as "Left on Liberal" violence. The political rhetoric of the Democratic Party under Kennedy included many elements of classical liberalism). We need to start using more specific language.

The Prelude to Watergate

Fifty years ago next week, Richard Nixon stood uncomfortably on the Capitol's inaugural platform and watched his rival John F. Kennedy being sworn in as president. "We won" the election, Nixon fumed, "but they stole it from us."

Indeed, the dirty tricks that helped defeat Nixon were more devious than merely the ballot-stuffing of political lore. In one of the least-known chapters of 20th-century political history, Kennedy operatives secretly paid off an informant and set in motion a Watergate-like burglary that sabotaged Nixon's campaign on the eve of the election. . . .

Indeed, the mysterious break-in to recover Nixon's incriminating financial documents convinced him that such burglaries were standard practice in national politics. Nixon vowed that he would never be caught unprepared again, and he ultimately established his own corps of hard-nosed operatives to carry out espionage and sabotage, which culminated in the botched break-in a dozen years later at the Watergate office of the Democratic Party.

A half-century afterward, Washington still lives with the residue of the Kennedys' little-known dirty trick, which helped unleash our modern scandal culture and continues to influence politics and media today.

So, it wasn't just Joe Kennedy paying off the Daley machine in Chicago to stuff ballot boxes? The author of this piece has written a book about the rise of the modern scandal culture during this time period. It's still with us.