The Bad Guys Won…
Fifty years ago today the bad guys won. Fifty years ago today, JFK was murdered.
Now, before you suspect that I’ve decided that JFK was our savior due to his having a full head of hair, and my having a vagina: no. I was a history major, so I know allll about how Joe Kennedy, Sr. thought we should appease Mr. Hitler, and eventually stole, fair and square, the election for his golden son. But Kennedy was one of the good guys if only because he inspired millions of Americans to believe in themselves and their country. You know how you create a life you love? You believe in your ability to do so, and you get out there, every day and. You. Do. It! Inspiration is a gift. Whatever we know now about Kennedy’s compulsive womanizing, etc., he made many Americans believe that they could conquer the world, and themselves.
Jackie Kennedy, returning to Washington, D.C. with her husband’s corpse, refused to change her blood-splattered clothing saying, “Let them see what they’ve done.”
And what they did was pave the way, eventually, for a very bad man to become president. Richard Milhous Nixon rode the country’s explosive fear, anger and chaos into the White House. A very bad man: or, at least, that’s how Tricky Dick thought of himself. So bad, that despite winning his second term with a history-making landslide, he eventually approved “a third-rate burglary,” to quote his third-rate press spokesman Ron Ziegler (who warmed up for his reign as Nixon White House Press Secretary by skippering the jungle cruise at Disneyland), and had to leave the presidency in the shameful defeat he always imagined for himself. So the bad guys won, and then the bad guys destroyed themselves. As people who dislike themselves are wont to do.
Years later, on that August day in 1974, as Nixon and family left the White House on Air Force One, for the last time, with his staff stunned, and weeping behind them, Pat Nixon said, “It’s so sad, it’s so sad.”