JFK was one of America’s most liberal presidents, right? Wrong. Former aides Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ted Sorensen rewrote history to make him more liberal than he really was.
President Kennedy was a tax-cutting Cold Warrior who was tough on unions (“the cancer of labor racketeering”), slow on civil rights legislation, and called abortion “repugnant.”
So how in the world did he wind up as an icon of liberalism?
The matter puzzled even some of JFK’s former aides: Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen acknowledged at one event, “Kennedy was a fiscal conservative. Most of us and the press and historians have, for one reason or another, treated Kennedy as being much more liberal than he so regarded himself at the time.”
One answer is that immediately after Kennedy’s assassination, liberal authors began sculpting the story. The first culprit was Theodore White, who interviewed Jacqueline Kennedy at Hyannis Port on November 29, 1963, for Life magazine.
White dictated his account of the interview by phone while Life was being held open after its deadline at a cost of $30,000 an hour in printing plant overtime. The resulting article, he conceded in his 1978 memoir, “heavily edited her.” Among the lines that White cut in his heavy editing was this one from Jacqueline Kennedy: “All I wanted was his name on just that one booster, the one that would put us ahead of the Russians.” The line suggests that even in November 1963, after Kennedy’s death, his widow wanted JFK’s legacy not to be some kind of peaceful cooperation with the Russians on the space program, but beating them.
Sorensen himself, in his 1965 book Kennedy, rewrote the president’s story in a way consonant with Sorensen’s own dovish views and with the views of Sorensen’s peace-activist father, to whom the book is dedicated.
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How the Left Spun the Kennedy Myth - The Daily Beast
President Kennedy was a tax-cutting Cold Warrior who was tough on unions (“the cancer of labor racketeering”), slow on civil rights legislation, and called abortion “repugnant.”
So how in the world did he wind up as an icon of liberalism?
The matter puzzled even some of JFK’s former aides: Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen acknowledged at one event, “Kennedy was a fiscal conservative. Most of us and the press and historians have, for one reason or another, treated Kennedy as being much more liberal than he so regarded himself at the time.”
One answer is that immediately after Kennedy’s assassination, liberal authors began sculpting the story. The first culprit was Theodore White, who interviewed Jacqueline Kennedy at Hyannis Port on November 29, 1963, for Life magazine.
White dictated his account of the interview by phone while Life was being held open after its deadline at a cost of $30,000 an hour in printing plant overtime. The resulting article, he conceded in his 1978 memoir, “heavily edited her.” Among the lines that White cut in his heavy editing was this one from Jacqueline Kennedy: “All I wanted was his name on just that one booster, the one that would put us ahead of the Russians.” The line suggests that even in November 1963, after Kennedy’s death, his widow wanted JFK’s legacy not to be some kind of peaceful cooperation with the Russians on the space program, but beating them.
Sorensen himself, in his 1965 book Kennedy, rewrote the president’s story in a way consonant with Sorensen’s own dovish views and with the views of Sorensen’s peace-activist father, to whom the book is dedicated.
more
How the Left Spun the Kennedy Myth - The Daily Beast
