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When Larry King ended his long-running CNN show in 2010, the network honored him with a primetime special looking back on his most memorable interviews. An entire segment was dedicated to King’s discussion with John F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the slain president, whose own life would later be cut short by a 1999 plane crash. “He could’ve done anything,” King mused wistfully over shots of Kennedy addressing the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
Kennedy’s lost potential is once again stirring the zeitgeist, due in part to a new FX miniseries dramatizing his marriage to publicist Carolyn Bessette. The show isn’t very good. The plot leans heavily on love story tropes and clichés, making the presence of characters based on real people feel tawdry and exploitative. But it also demonstrates the enduring allure of the Kennedy myth, particularly at a moment when our country feels at sea.
So much of that myth is about lost potential. The elder John Kennedy, whose presidency was a symbol of generational change, was killed while preparing to run for a second term. His brother, Bobby, was gunned down a few years later while pursuing his own White House bid on a platform of economic justice and racial equality. Their youngest brother, Teddy, spent 47 years in the U.S. Senate, but his ambitions for higher office were forever (and rightfully) dashed in the muddy waters off Chappaquiddick.
John F. Kennedy Jr. never showed much interest in running for office, but his name and lineage forced many to wonder, “what if?” The timing of the FX series has revived those questions. It is impossible to say what Kennedy might’ve done with a longer life, but the American imagination almost certainly does not envision him trying to overturn election results or dispatching armed militias into city streets. The fact that Kennedy’s cousin is now waging war on public health from inside the White House only deepens this longing for an alternate reality, where decency prevails and promising young men don’t die.
All of this gets to a contradiction at the heart of American politics: it is focused on the future but thrives on nostalgia. It’s why Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” motto resonates. It’s also why the next Democratic presidential candidate will be whoever can strike that perfect balance between recapturing past glories and charting a new path forward.
I don’t like nepotism or uber-wealthy political candidates. Still, I get sentimental whenever I recall the words that Teddy used to eulogize his nephew: “We dared to think that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair.” |
