Mark Malcomson
The Kennedy Legacy

Mark Malcomson | The Kennedy Legacy | 03.26.24

Visuals presented throughout the presentation.

- Thanks, good evening everyone. Delighted to be back here this evening or this afternoon, depending on where you are. And for those of you who’ve seen a few of my previous lectures, you’ll know that American kind of presidents and presidencies is a bit of my thing. This one’s interesting because, well, I hope it’s interesting is it’s more about what happened after a presidency, and it’s also looking at the nature of America and to be honest, the world as well. So what I want to do this evening is look at the post 22nd of November, 1963 world and realise what might have been, what was, and understand the possibilities and the reality of Kennedy’s assassination and what that left. Quite a lot of it is actually what happened. And then there’s some degree of, well, imagine what if. The one thing I’ve learned, and I think I mentioned this in one of my early talks about the presidency, is there’s nothing given. There are maybe one or two inevitable presidents, presidents who you could see, you know, years and decades before that they were going to probably end up as president.

Most presidencies are a combination of skill and luck. You know, the person has been diligent, has got to the right jobs, and then the right opening happens. There are very few presidents, certainly in the last a hundred years that I believe that were ones that were inevitable. The two that interestingly come to mind are Herbert Hoover, who spent most of the 1920s being expected to be president and being courted by both parties. And then Dwight Eisenhower and we talked about him a couple of times in the last few weeks. Eisenhower was very much courted by both parties, really, from the end of the Second World War until when he finally became president in 1953, after the 52 election. But otherwise, it’s a combination, as I said, of skill, luck, chance, daring, opportunity, and at the same time, a huge amount when the person is the president, can change the course of where it was going. And certainly in the lifetimes of most people who are on this call, Kennedy is in that category of what ifs. He becomes a president at a very young age. He then dies, is assassinated in the most brutal way at a very young age. And so therefore he’s the subject of conjecture.

He, you know, I think all presidents are what ifs. What if something could have happened? What if this happened to have happened? What if so and so had gone at such and such a date, et cetera. But Kennedy, for many, many reasons has got a space in the history books, but also the popular imagination. And that’s something that’s very unusual and so on tonight, I’m kind of, I’m not usually one for alliteration, but I do think there are three things and three themes that I want to discuss this evening that kind of combine. And at the same time kind of effect our view of Kennedy. And I know there’ll be quite a lot of you out there who are big fans, and then there’ll be others of you who are not and that’s fine. And I think what I’m trying to do is to understand Kennedy’s place in essentially modern history, and also play it forward a little bit. And imagine, you know, maybe a hundred years after his death or 200 years after his death, what are people going to be thinking?

Last November, we commemorated Kennedy’s 60th anniversary of assassination. And yet again, there were pictures, articles, magazine articles, another slew of books that came out. and going back to this idea of alliteration. I think there are three elements that make the Kennedy legacy so potent. Camelot, the curse and conspiracy, those three things individually creates something that’s quite unusual, but together, confect to be something that is something like we don’t really see with any other president. Now, of course, in our lifetime, there’s only been one president assassinated. And that is something that is incredibly jarring in history. The previous president to die, Franklin Roosevelt had been an older man and somebody who had been in ill-health for a long time. He had also been president for over 12 years, and he had been a peacetime president during the Great Depression, and then a wartime president joining the challenges of the Second World War. Combining together, those 12 years are probably the most taxing of virtually any president, certainly for a long, that long period. Obviously Washington faced challenges, Lincoln in particular faced challenges, but that drawn out nature.

It was a shock, I should imagine, for FDR to die. But reality was it a surprise? Because as I said, he was an old man who had been around for a long time. I think the thing about Kennedy was that he was so young, but not just young, young and vital. We know now a lot about his health conditions, et cetera, et cetera. But the image, the image of the young man with the children playing around and under his desk in the Oval Office, was a specific juxtaposition to the presidency that proceeded him. Eisenhower, Eisenhower was the granddad. He and Mamie were the grandparents with pictures of them and the grandkids, Jackie Kennedy was incredibly glamorous, the most beautiful woman on earth and all of those things came together to create this Hollywood style presidency that America had never seen before. Of course, there is the great trivia pursuit dinner party question, which is John F. Kennedy is not the youngest American president in history, but he’s the youngest elected American president in history at this point. Having said that, at the moment, we seem to be going in the other direction in terms of age, but that’s a different issue.

Of course, the youngest president in American history is Theodore Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, because he came to the presidency when another President McKinley was assassinated, and he was a year younger than John F. Kennedy. He doesn’t get elected to the presidency in his own right until four years in, by which time he would’ve been older than John Kennedy. But John Kennedy is the youngest elected president in American history, which again adds to that sense of horror, drama, et cetera, et cetera. It also, I think there’s another element that I think is very important, and for me that’s something we should be thinking about is the fact that, you know, presidents had died, but it had been since the beginning of that century, since another president had been assassinated. But you then get a period of the 1960s of where it seems to be that you have just disaster after disaster. So you start the sixties with this brave new frontier, this new ideas, this young president, the young White House, so much hope and possibility, the end of 63, you get his assassination, but it doesn’t extinguish the flame completely. And then you fast forward, you know, four or five years to 1968, and you get the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

And then you get the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. And the triptych of those assassinations change the narrative in my view. They change the narrative from hope to despair. Also, Kennedy’s assassination, in my view, controversial maybe, is that you have 20 years of presidencies that fail, and I’m using fail in a very loose term, is that they do not succeed to getting to the end of a second term. You have Kennedy, Kennedy’s assassination cuts short his presidency. You have Lyndon Johnson who assumes the presidency, then gets reelected with a massive landslide, but essentially declines to run again in 1968 for fear of defeat. He’s a broken man and is being rejected by the American public. Richard Nixon wins by a hair’s breath in 1968, and in 1972 wins a massive electoral college landslide, 49 states, only to be equaled by Ronald Reagan. And despite that overwhelming endorsement by majority of American people is within two years, he’s gone. The only president to resign, not because he resigns but resigns because he’s under threat of impeachment and removal from office. So he gets ahead of the game.

Gerald Ford is the accidental president, the man that was never elected to be on a ticket either as president or vice president. So he has that dubious honour, comes close to winning in 1976 after a number of stumbles and falls, but fails. And so his presidency is consigned to being that trivia pursuit question around, you know, who wasn’t ever elected on a national ticket to being president. And then you get Jimmy Carter, a great man in so many ways, a great, an amazing former president, but somebody who, in hindsight was not equipped to deal with the world that they were taking over as president. And he’s also a very much a reaction to Nixon. And there’s one of my books back here is called Nixon Shadow. And Nixon Shadow kind of comes over a series of presidents going forward. So essentially you have five presidents from the beginning of 1960s until 1980, who, you know, five presidents in 20 years. Now, that’s an amazing turnover for America and American history and none of those presidencies end happily. It takes Ronald Reagan to break the cycle, whatever you might agree.

But think about Ronald Reagan as Ronald Reagan completes eight years. Obviously he has the issue of the Iran-Contra scandal at the end and some sort of post questions around his mental acuity. But at the same point, he leaves the presidency with his head held high. He actually does something that’s very, very rare, which is to leave his presidency to his vice president. George HW Bush gets elected by a quite big landslide in 1988, although fails to get reelection in 92. So in a way you have the Eisenhower presidency and the Reagan presidency, and in between you have these 20 years and the parallel universe could easily have been John Kennedy would’ve got reelected in 64 and you would’ve had a successful presidency. And then, and then, and we’ll come to that at the end and some of the, you know, sort of what ifs. But I think it’s worth us thinking about the presidency of Kennedy and why I’ve talked about this situation with, I’m just going to put the slides in, the situation with the Kennedy legacy and why I said the idea of Camelot, the idea of the curse, and then also the idea of conspiracy, which has taken hold so much.

So there they are, mom and dad and the nine children, part of the lore and legend of the Kennedy family, this huge Catholic family in a generation where Catholics were still not of the mainstream to the same degree as they have become now, it’s interesting that we think Kennedy broke the challenges around a Catholic or a non Protestant becoming president. And we kind of think, well, that was, it settled, but it took another 60 years for a second Catholic president to become president in Joe Biden and in American history, we’ve only had one Catholic vice president, Joe Biden. So in a sense, you know, it was amazing breakthrough, but at the same time, it maybe wasn’t as much as a breakthrough as we thought. There’s loads of lectures, there’s loads of talks. Interestingly, I went on the internet just before I came on and put in the British version of Amazon, John F. Kennedy into the book section, and it came out with 8,000 books. And I’m sure there are more than that. For me, the Kennedy legacy, the Kennedy family, the Kennedy, the whole lore and legend of it has become an industry in its own right.

And that’s something we should be thinking about. He’s a soldier, he’s a congressman in the House of Representatives, and then he wins a surprise upset in 1952 in beating Cabot Lodge, Senator Cabot Lodge in Massachusetts. All of America goes from, pretty much from Democrats to Republican. Eisenhower wins by a landslide. He has got very long coattails. There is only one seat in the United States Senate who kind of goes the other way. Cabot Lodge is a part of the New England establishment, very much seen as a kind of winner in his own state. And John Kennedy has challenged him against his father’s wishes and against the family wishes. And he wins. 1956, he’s audacious enough, and this is him at the podium in the Democrat Convention, is to put his name forward for Vice President. Does he do it because he thinks he can win? I think a little bit. Does he do it because it puts a marker in the ground for future? Absolutely. He loses, but he loses well, and to be honest, given he would’ve been running to Adlai Stevenson’s II ill-fated run. It actually gives him kudos and credibility to run in 1960.

But he then runs in 1960 without the encumbrance of being part of a losing ticket, as we all know, he wins one of the closest elections in American history in 1960 and becomes president. And there’s the imagery, et cetera, the new frontier, the man wearing the, just the suit where everybody else is in coats, the young projected, healthy, vital, all of those things, quite a lot. He was young, but he was not healthy. All of those things are part of the image of Kennedy and the new frontier. And the torch has passed, new generation happens, the presidency is, and it’ll depend on your political views. I think I personally feel a successful presidency, very shaky start with the Bay of Pigs. But in my view, he handles the Cuban Missile Crisis tremendously well, and he looks very much, looks like he is going to win reelection in 1964. He’s probably going to win reelection in 1964 because he’s John Kennedy and because he’s being successful, what would’ve also helped was I think anybody on the Democrat side running against Barry Goldwater would’ve won. And one important convincingly.

So, you know, we’re now getting close to the run’s conjecture because he obviously didn’t get to run. But you look at the opinion polls, you look at what was happening in 1963, he was doing well. He goes over to Berlin, million plus Berliners turnout to welcome him. As he said to one of his aides, these days don’t go any better than this. He’s at the top of his game. He’s finding how to work out government. He’s not got a great legislative record. Probably one of his great failings. He under utilises, in my view, Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, the great legislator of his and many generations is left to languish when he could have been used very effectively to move Kennedy’s agenda forward. But certainly in foreign affairs, Kennedy has a number of successes. And then of course, in Dallas, in November, 1963, the shock that happens. And I think in a way we’ve maybe seen the Zapruder tape, we’ve seen the pictures of, the shocking pictures of him being killed, but at the time it was done by radio. And there will be many people who are listening tonight that remember it. And there will be many other people who will be told by parents or grandparents that they know when Kennedy was assassinated. And I think there’s virtually nothing, there’s no one event in modern history that has had that effect.

And for me, I think that that is something, something that you didn’t, it jars and you know, if you go to the Kennedy Library in Boston, which even if you’re not a fan of Kennedy, it’s just one of the most beautiful pieces of modern architecture on Earth in my view, is you see the, as an alleyway of where you have Walter Cronkite on television taking his glasses off and wiping away a tear when he announces Kennedy’s death. My mother-in-law was from Ohio. She passed away a few years ago, but she had the kids in the car. The kids remember mom stopping, you know, Italian Catholic family and mom just bursting into tears because the radio had announced something they didn’t really weren’t paying attention to. They were probably all too busy fighting in the back, and she couldn’t drive, she was so distressed. My mom, I was born in Nigeria. My mom talks about how she remembers hearing in Nigeria and late in the evening, what had happened.

It went around the world and it caused consternation and it was a massive, massive shock to the system. Lyndon Johnson, as we discussed a couple of last week, handles the situation as best as anybody can and rises to the occasion, tremendously rises to the occasion, particularly for that first year, but deals with America during that initial period in a way that steadies the ship. Also, you’ve got to remember that this is the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, all of these other things going on. And immediately there’s speculation. The president has been assassinated, president has been assassinated in Texas. Is it the Cubans, is it the Russians? Is it the mafia? Is it, you know, et cetera. Is it, you know, sort of mad conspiracies, Richard Nixon had left Texas the night before. Was it Nixon set it up, but Lyndon Johnson comes from Texas, was it him? You know, it starts quickly and starts soon. And that creates an era of instant paranoia of the President has been killed by person or persons unknown. The whole nature of the immediate aftermath of the assassination of the new president, having his picture taken on Air Force one, the just now deceased president on the plane with the grieving widow covered still in blood.

The dramatic nature of that is also coupled with the first televised murder in American history. The stations decide to cover the transfer of Lee Harvey Oswald from the one prison to another for the court to the courthouse. And they televise that and people on there see him being shot by Jack Ruby. Of course, that means that us ever knowing what was in Lee Harvey Oswald’s mind, whatever we think about, all went. And so therefore we’re presented with another layer of conspiracy, another layer of challenge. What then happens is that Jack Ruby never fully explains why he did it. And as a result, you add speculation, conjecture, conspiracy around that. So for me, all of that’s going on, and that’s the immediate aftermath. But also what happens in terms of the immediate aftermath is this, Jackie is devastated. Jackie has two young children, and she is faced with being a widow in the most horrific way. Your husband’s brains have literally been blown out next to you.

You have to comfort your children who don’t really understand what’s going on. And you also have to now take a role almost as a secular saint in society, as the fallen widow. And she does an amazing job in those first few years, but also what she does is very clearly become guardian of the legacy and one of the very interesting bits around the legacy is, in one of her first interviews, she talks about how John Kennedy’s favourite musical was Camelot. And of course, I don’t know whether it was, I’m assuming, I think she was, you know, legit about it. But what’s fascinating about it, it’s a story of a great king. And with knights and treachery and goodness and all of these things, it kind of sounds like something that’s just happened. and Camelot becomes the narrative.

When William Manchester writes the Death of a President, it’s commissioned by the Kennedys, but there’s a falling out ‘cause Jackie doesn’t like some of the details in it. So Jackie Kennedy really presents herself as the guardian of the Kennedy legacy and ensures that it’s steered in the right direction. You end up with Cape Kennedy, the Air Force, sorry, the Air Force, the Space Centre, you end up with Kennedy, Kennedy Avenues, boulevards, schools, all around the world. I mean, literally you go on Wikipedia and look at the citations from memorials to Kennedy. It’s everywhere. You’ve got his statue outside of the Palace of Parliament in the United Kingdom. You’ve got him everywhere. and that is taking that legacy forward in a way nobody would’ve probably expected had he not died. He enters the mythological that he goes up to Mount Olympus to a large degree. And Jackie plays a huge, huge part in that. And her grief though is absolutely real, and it devastates her.

And of course, at the same time, the tragedy is a national tragedy. But people look to the Kennedys and then there’s this concept of is there a Kennedy curse? Are they destined to die? Now this story obviously has legs in the years to come, but people start to talk about there in the nine children, the Kennedy children, while actually John Kennedy is the third, but numbers one and number two are already dead in tragic circumstances. Joe Jr who you see here, dies in 1944. Foolhardy, brave, foolhardy and brave, he’s flying for the American Air Force. He takes on one of the, he could have gone home, he’d done his tour of duty, he’d done everything that he was necessary to do, and he decides to carry on. Some people say it was competitiveness with John, because John, with the PT109 had become a bonafide hero. So Joe Kennedy wanted to be that hero. And he takes this mission, which is essentially flying a flying bomb in to attack German positions in France. It’s a plane full of explosives and they’re meant to basically crash it but escape, et cetera.

You kind of read it and you go, yeah, whoever thought that that was going to work, but somebody in planning did and Joe Kennedy agreed to do it. The plane blows up over the south of England. His body’s never found. It’s blown to extremes and the family has its first tragedy. Also as part of the lore and legend is he was the one that, he was the first born, he was being lined up to be the next president. So he was lined up to take the congressional seat. He was lined up for the Senate. All of this stuff was meant to happen. And John comes in as the understudy. John always feeling like, you know, he talks about, I would’ve been, I would like to have been a journalist or a writer or something different. Politics wasn’t always for me. Now I think that’s nonsense. I think the Kennedy men in particular had it all in their blood, but his death propels John forward. But that’s the first part of the curse. The oldest daughter, number two in the family is Kathleen Kick. She’s fun, she’s vivacious. John Kennedy adored both of them.

Absolutely hero worship, the Kennedys kind of come in batches. The oldest three were very much a three. And then there’s another batch. And then, yeah, but Kathleen is also a bit of the wild child. And despite, it is an interesting one about the, the Kennedy’s Catholic faith and certainly Rose’s faith is that despite, on one hand, desperately keen, because Joe Kennedy senior had been ambassador to Britain, desperately seemed keen to have validation for being the ambassador of the court of St. James and hanging out with the young members of the royal family and all of this type of stuff. She has the audacity to fall in love with a member of the British aristocracy who is a Protestant. And she marries him. And the family are outraged, mother and father essentially won’t speak to her. He dies tragically. And then in 1948, she meets, interestingly, another member of the British aristocracy, the Fifth Earl of Fitzwilliam. And they are flying down to meet dad to see if he will give the approval for them to get married. Their plane crashes and they’re both killed.

So the curse predates John Kennedy, the curse, but it’s validated. Kennedys are cursed in some way. The family has this, they’ve the tragic overlay of the three oldest have all died. And that’s not the end of the story, really. And of course, I don’t know, I’m not a statistician. You have a very big family. You have a very big family in a time of a war. You have a very big family in times of where aeroplanes aren’t as safe as they are now. One thing I think we learn on this is Kennedys and planes are really not a good combination. And that goes right the way through until 1999. But you know, statistically, are they any more cursed than any other family? I don’t know. Big families, maybe, maybe not, but they’re a very big family. And by the time you get to the next generation with nephews and nieces in abundance, stuff’s going to happen. Small family stuff happens, big families, more stuff happens. It’s the law of statistics. So are they any more cursed than before? Also, are there such things as curses, I don’t know, but it’s a narrative. But what happens is this element of Greek tragedy takes place and Jackie and the young children, Bobby Kennedy there, who of course is going to, I’m talk about a little bit in a minute.

They’re devastated, the family is devastated. But in Kennedy fashion, they continue and they go on. So you have 1963 morphing into 1964. Lyndon Johnson is at the peak of his powers. Lyndon Johnson, by the way, who spends many, many days not allowing Jackie Kennedy to be removed from the White House. Eventually his own people go, Lyndon, this cannot be, the president cannot not be living in the White House. And he can’t bring himself to actually take the widow, this new widow out of the White House and eventually get it sorted out. But Lyndon Johnson actually is very, very honourable in this particular thing. And I think it’s really interesting how he doesn’t handle it. He handles everything else really well, but he actually is an incredible gentleman about it all, trying to look after Jackie and Jackie’s wellbeing. You see Jackie joining this period is the model wife. She fills the role that America expects her to fill.

Interesting, this painting, which I don’t like particularly, it’s in the White House. It’s part of a pair. The famous one of the pair is John Kennedy looking down, very pensively in a dark suit, it’s a dark brown suit and it’s a masterpiece. It’s by far the greatest piece of presidential art in history in my view and this is the matching one by the same artist. And this is just like some Laura Ashley nightmare as far as I’m concerned. Maybe a bit unfair, maybe a bit harsh. For those of you like Laura Ashley. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s just not, it’s a very weird painting. Whereas the other painting is in my view, is a masterpiece. A masterpiece of capturing Kennedy, but also the weight of power, et cetera, et cetera. Jackie does well as the widow. And she does look after her children tremendously well. She becomes very close to Bobby Kennedy. They kind of grieve together.

But when it gets to the assassination of Bobby, as I said, which we’ll discuss in a minute, she has enough and she leaves America and she commits heresy in terms of the narrative, which is she goes off with Aristotle Onassis and the Jackie O, the thing I put up there was a famous biography of her, of the shock of it all. And the shock of how she was, to be honest, you know, I think the part of the things which is meant to have said is they’re killing Kennedys and I need to get my children out of there. And that kind of makes sense. And she, she moves away from America and nobody can blame her except lots and lots of people do. So she fulfils that narrative. When Onassis dies, she moves back to America. She never remarries again, although she has a long time companion. She brings up the children, she lives in New York, she becomes an editor of one of the big publishing houses. And she lives this life. One of her great latter-day contributions is the fact that she is absolutely instrumental in saving Grand Central Station from the redevelopment that had destroyed, oh my goodness, the other station, Penn Station.

Penn Station, which is an abomination now, which needs, you know, was just taken apart. Same thing would’ve happened to Grand Central. And Jackie not only saves it, but is instrumental in ensuring its rebirth and is one of the great pieces of American architecture. And I think that contribution is enormous and she dies of cancer. She’s buried at Arlington and she has that interesting art of the American psyche. She will always be the young, beautiful widow. There was no other president’s wife who’s been a widow of the same age. She was always glamorous, she was incredibly cultured with having all of the good and the great from the arts coming to the White House. She famously John Kennedy, when he went to France with the notoriously cantankerous President de Gaulle Jackie Kennedy regaled de Gaulle in fluent French and absolutely charmed him. And John Kennedy on the way back. He goes, I am the man who accompanied the first lady to France, which I thought was a wonderful line.

So Jackie Kennedy has her role to play and plays it tremendously well, the person who’s the challenge now, the person who is left devastated, but at the same time now has to embark on his life out of the shadows was Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy, number seven. You know, we think about Bobby and John as being incredibly close and ultimately they do become very close, but there’s huge age difference between the two of them, in all intents and purposes. They’re different generations of the family. So they don’t really get to know each other well until they’re grownups. And particularly Bobby then becomes in the role of his brother’s kind of henchman in terms of politics. And he’s very, very good at it. He helps the 1952 campaign. He helps do the floor managing of the 1956 vice presidential attempt. And he runs the 1960 campaign. And in 1960 he says, right, I’m done.

Well, we’ve won, great. I’m off to do my bit. He’d had other bits of careers. He worked for McCarthy and Roy Cohn and his all, you know, he’d done various bits in the 1950s, but predominantly his job had been to look after his brother’s political trajectory. The dad has other ideas. He wants him to take a post. Bobby’s dead fastly against it. John sees the advantage and they, he gets appointed as Attorney General. He’s 35 years old, which I think is fascinating. Bobby doesn’t want to do it. Bobby eventually gives in and does it. And then after having done it, John, because there’s always the sibling rivalry, John goes down and announces it. And Bobby Kennedy is massively insecure. He’s got a law degree, but he’s never practised, he’s never been a big lawyer. And then he said he’s going to be the most important legal official in the United States. And John quips after he does the appointment, I can’t see that it’s wrong to give him a little legal experience before he goes out and practises law, and Bobby’s absolutely furious. It’s like, you know, there you go. And John’s view is, well, you’ve got to make fun of it 'cause everybody else will do.

But you know, it does make me laugh a little bit. It’s a great line. But Bobby then becomes Attorney General and he becomes, in my view, one of the great attorney generals in American history. And he does wonderful work in civil rights, mafia kind of criminal gang busting, just also just really takes that brief and makes it something very, very different. But what becomes more important is after the Bay of Pigs, he becomes his brother’s conciliatory he becomes the man that his brother relies on. What his brother realises very soon is he can’t really rely on anybody. And the one person he can go to is his brother. and Bobby Kennedy in a way, I would say the analogy, British analogy is he becomes the prime minister to John Kennedy’s president. He has a roving brief across government. He ensures that the will of his brother gets done. So he is not just Attorney General, which is pretty much big full-time job. He keeps an eye on lots of other bits and chairs, lots of committees and subgroups, et cetera, et cetera. And he’s the one that Bobby, that John always go to.

So they are incredibly close. They become very close. As I said, it wasn’t a given and I wouldn’t say that we can always rely on it to think like that. He also gets, as he has done in the 1950s, this air of a thug, a you know, he has a massive falling out with Lyndon Johnson over Johnson’s appointment as vice president and tries to stop his brother appointing him. He constantly foul now goes after people who’s not doing the right thing by his brother. But he’s got a sensitive side too. And I love the very famous cartoon that came out about him, which I think is actually self-deprecating humour at its finest. And so you see this cartoon about Good Bobby and Bad Bobby, you can kind of go through it if you can see it. But the fact that Bobby Kennedy’s response around all of this as time goes on, was people say I’m ruthless, I’m not ruthless. And if I find the man who’s calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.

See, I think that’s just cracking that, that’s a very, very funny bit. So Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson makes a request of Kennedy’s cabinet that they all stay in post, which makes sense, continuity of government, they’re not going to defeat us, et cetera, et cetera. But then he’s left with a brooding, resentful, distraught, traumatised, attorney general. And the two of them just cannot abide the sight of each other and the, well, a very good book that was written a few years back called Mutual Contempt, really itemises the history of the animus between Johnson and Kennedy, Johnson and Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy. What actually happens is that there’s a lot of talk about Bobby Kennedy, the Vice presidency’s vacant. The 25th Amendment hasn’t taken place until the end of the sixties. So the vice presidency remains vacant until the next election, was a lot of push to put Bobby Kennedy as Johnson’s vice president doesn’t appeal to Bobby Kennedy particularly, but it really doesn’t appeal to Lyndon Johnson.

Lyndon Johnson’s like, oh my God, if I get lumbered with this, I am going to be, all I am are going to be just, I was elected on a Kennedy ticket and now I’m reelected on a Kennedy ticket. Bobby Kennedy helps 'em both hugely by resigning as Attorney General and going to run as senator from New York, he gets accused of carpet bagging because of course you think about the Kennedys and about Massachusetts, the reality was Bobby Kennedy grown up most of his life in New York 'cause that’s where his family lived. But of course we think about Massachusetts. And so he became the joke of him being the third senator for Massachusetts. He wins the race, but doesn’t do it with great style. Lyndon Johnson carries New York by 2 million votes. Bobby Kennedy only buys 700,000, but he becomes a senator and takes to being a senator. He moves out of his brother’s shadow a little bit and starts to find causes of his own, particularly around poverty. Is a very, as is all of his life, is very hard worker. He takes it very seriously. And what happens is that by the midterms, he’s found his feet in the Senate. Senate of course, is all about at this point, all about seniority, how long you’ve been in the Senate.

He’s a new boy. He might be, you know, the second most important man in America in terms of his brother’s presidency. He might have been Attorney General, but now he’s the junior senator for New York. Way, way down the pecking order compared to a lot of other senators, junior senators from New York often have this issue. Hillary Clinton, similar way comes in having been at the White House as, as you know, first lady, and again has this challenge. But Bobby Kennedy does the Senate well and he then really is challenged around his dislike of Johnson, but also his real challenges around the Vietnam War. And there’s a whole series of lectures about the Vietnam War, et cetera, et cetera. But it ends up that Bobby, Bobby knows that he’s becoming vocal, more and more vocal about the problems of the, oh, I said Civil war, Vietnam War, sorry. Oh, I dunno where that came from, the Vietnam War. And he’s getting more and more vocal around it as is the party, as is the American public. And certainly after the midterm elections in 66, Vietnam war becomes top priority.

Bobby Kennedy is encouraged more and more by friends and family to run against Johnson for the nomination. He refuses to do so because everybody knows that he hates Johnson. So everybody thinks it will be personal, but it becomes a challenge and he gets to 1968 and the pressure is getting relentless. Johnson is in deep political trouble. Bobby Kennedy refuses to run against in the New Hampshire primary, Eugene McCarthy, Senator from Minnesota decides to run against McCarthy, sorry, against Johnson, Loses, gets 42% in the New Hampshire primary against Johnson’s and 49, but the 49% destroys Johnson, Johnson decides to pull out of the race and dedicate himself to peace. But not until after Bobby Kennedy enters the race. You then have this situation in 1964 or 68 that you have the president, a democrat, incumbent president who is still wanting to be president, a White House that’s paralysed to a degree with the vice president wanting to enter the race, but really can’t. This pretender in Eugene McCarthy feeling outraged that he does the heavy lifting by challenging Johnson to start off with. And then Bobby Kennedy comes in as an interloper.

So you’ve got all of these dynamics. Martin Luther King is murdered, assassinated in Memphis in April, sets the scene for tragedy going forward and in June, after Bobby Kennedy has just won the California primary and almost certainly guaranteeing himself the nomination, he’s assassinated, he is in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, takes a shortcut back through the kitchens, is shot, doesn’t die immediately, eventually dies much later on the next day and is then the stuff of legends. He’s the what if, what could have been, the Kennedy curse is absolutely reiterated, again, more disaster, more problems. And of course it leaves the Democrats in disarray. Hubert Humphrey eventually steps in, wins the nomination, but loses to Nixon and you have all of these things going on in this maelstrom, and it creates the narrative. It reinforces the curse narrative. It reinforces the chaos of the 1960s. It’s the point where, inverted commas, hope dies. So you’ve got all of these different elements that are doing, and there’s a brilliant book called The Last Campaign, which is somewhere behind me.

I was just looking for it. And it’s fascinating about the fatalism that Bobby Kennedy has around those a hundred days of his campaign and how he kind of knows that it’s not going to end well. And it’s a very, very well written book. So you’ve got all of that taking place. and then what’s left, Republican president, a White House that’s, you know, the Democrats are now in X half of the White House after eight years, and you’ve got the one, you know, the Kennedys are moving down the list and you’ve got the next senator who’s in line, the youngest of the nine, the ninth in Teddy Kennedy. He’d taken Bobby, sorry, taken John Kennedy’s seat in 1962. They’d had a family friend, but Teddy was too young to take the seat in 1960 when it became vacant, family friend kept the seat warm and then Teddy Kennedy becomes president, sorry senator. The whole of his story then becomes wrapped into everything. 1968, there’s concerns or worries that he’s going to be most notably within himself.

He’s going to be drafted into being the presidential candidate. He doesn’t want to be, he doesn’t think he’s ready. And he certainly wasn’t ready and he doesn’t want to be vice president under Hubert Humphrey either. So he steers his way out of being dragged into the obvious, you are the last one standing. But his fates start to diverge from the good narrative. He has a plane crash, he’s very badly injured. He has huge problems with his spine that carry on for the rest of his life. So there’s that tragedy element. Kennedys and planes again. But most notably there’s the disaster in Chappaquiddick. He is at a party, he takes one of the staffers home, he goes off a bridge, he gets to safety and she dies. That could have been explained. He gets out, she doesn’t get out. It’s a terrible tragedy.

The problem becomes, and the problem always has been that the coverup, I’m not saying it was a crime, but there certainly was a coverup. They don’t phone the police to start off with. There’s a whole bits right the way through that are just don’t jive with his answers, the story changes, et cetera, et cetera. Somehow he survives the political fallout of it. But his reputation is very tarnished. 1972, which had been talked about as a Kennedy year to challenge Nixon, forget about it. In fact, actually the Kennedy legacy kind of loops a little bit at that point of where he becomes. It’s 1972, George McGovern becomes the Democrat candidate. Eagleton is meant to be his vice president. And then at the last minute after he’s been nominated, they find out he’s had electro shock therapy. They then go down a list of potential alternative vice presidents and they end up with Sergeant Shriver, who’s a Kennedy son-in-law. So he is married to one of the Kennedy sisters. So the Kennedy legacy loops a little bit.

Of course it’s a disastrous campaign that ends up with a 49 state loss, 76, a similar way, Teddy Kennedy steps out. But 1980, believes it’s his time and he decides to run against his own incumbent Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And it’s a hapless campaign. He doesn’t know why he’s doing it. One of the first things he’s asked in one of the first interviews, why do you think he should be president? And he just fluffs it. You’d think it would be the obvious question that he’d be prepped to the high heavens. And you never get the feeling that he’s up for it. What he does achieve is he damages Carter enormously during that period. He really does have, he dress rehearses the attack lines that Ronald Reagan can make a few years later. Fails in the nomination, luckily hasn’t left the Senate and becomes essentially the great legislatures, third longest serving senator in history and finds his place. He’s not the president that was slain. He’s not the would be president that was slain.

He becomes the great senator, the deal maker. The person who gets stuff through the Senate, can work across the aisle. He’s becomes a king maker in a degree with nominating, throwing his weight, very heavily right behind Barack Obama. And in 2008, he also helps steel the Medicaid, sorry, the Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act through parliament, through Senate and Congress, and then has brain disease and dies, no longer into the Obama presidency. He fixes himself and sets himself of being the great senator. And that’s something that means that the narratives have disrupted. You know, it’s a family of politicians, but it’s not necessarily a power family of always going to go for the top job. So I’m kind of got my timing’s a bit wrong. So I’m now going to blast through in a sense of just looking at the others. The two children, the two surviving children. There was obviously there was a third child who died just not long and not long after birth, and is buried by his parents in Arlington, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, the older sister, much loved by her father.

She keeps out the limelight for quite a while. There’s lots of philanthropic stuff. But in 2000 she makes a play. She’s been a big democratic donor, et cetera, and has been one somebody who’s been really in the forefront of Democrat politics. She decides that she would like to take Hillary Clinton’s vacated seat when Hillary Clinton stops being senator for New York. And so 2008, not 2000, 2008, Senator for New York becomes Secretary of State and Caroline Kennedy, kind of unofficially, but very clearly throws her name into the pot. And initially it’s greeted with like, wow, brilliant, JFK’s daughter comes, it’s a disaster. She again, hasn’t thought it through. She’s almost thinks it’s hers by birthright. And the campaign to get her the nod from the governor of New York falls apart quickly. And then she sort of says, look, I was never interested. It was just a thing, it’s not with me, and she withdraws. Obama appoints her to ambassador to Japan as a bit of a consolation prize. Now the Japanese, the American ambassador of Japan.

Japan is hugely important in the Japanese psyche. People like Walter Mondale have been it. More recently, Rahm Emanuel. It’s a very prestigious ambassadorship. And the Japanese take it as a huge compliment that somebody like Caroline Kennedy can become their ambassador. She’s now currently ambassador to Australia. She’s proved to be a very adept, very good diplomat. And that’s an interesting road that she’s decided to take. So public service continues, but not overtly political public service. Of course, the Kennedy curse is reiterated by the prince over the water. John John, little JFK Jr. seen saluting his father as is the horse, pulls it past at his funeral, always seen by people as a potential next generation leader. Doesn’t do a huge amount to dispel it, launches George, a political commentary magazine that is massively funded and actually I thought was very, very good in its time.

I thought it was very, very readable and very interesting. He gets his private pilot’s licence, flies his wife and his sister-in-law up to Martha’s Vineyard one Friday night in 1999 that he’s been warned not to. He’s still a novice about flying, but with hubris he decides to it and the plane crashes in the sea, he loses his bearings in the mist and all three people are killed. The are buried at sea. And again, the stuff of curse, the stuff of legends and stuff of conspiracy. Is he living somewhere, is it all a hoax? Et cetera, et cetera, why the coverup? It’s a big set of questions and of course it’s nonsense. He died in a plane crash and that’s just awfully tragic. But again, it kind of created this, what if, lots of what ifs, had he survived, would he have run for one of the Senate seats? Would he have been potentially Obama’s running mate? If, if, it carries on and it continues, you have Kennedys taking part in public life, all a lot lesser than they were. You have William Kennedy Smith who doesn’t take part in public life.

He gets accused of assault and the big trial that takes place in Florida is an awful sideshow and actually does a huge amount of damage to him, his family and particularly his Uncle Teddy’s reputation. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is left hand of governor of Maryland is expected to do really well politically and proves to be a tone deaf candidate. Joe Kennedy III failed for a bid to unseat an incumbent democrat senator in 2020. This generation not so good, which brings me on to however, really interesting twist, RFK Junior, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is running as an independent for the United States presidency. He was running for the Democrat nomination against Joe Biden, decided that wasn’t for him. And he’s running as an independent, he’s garnering anywhere between six and 12% depending on what you read in terms of the opinion polls when he is inserted in. And he’s certainly got the money.

He’s certainly got an odd constituency, an interesting article at the weekend about the demographics of his vote and where his vote is coming from. Is it hurting Trump, is it hurting Biden? He’s disowned essentially by the family. They want nothing to do with him. He’s an interesting but somewhat odd character. And if his name didn’t have the word Kennedy in it, would anybody care? I think probably not. But he’s got a constituency and he’s got a platform. And I think today might be the day that he’s possibly announcing who his running mate might be. He’s not going to be United States president, but it again shows the power of the name. This is a magazine in Britain, which is a philanthropic magazine sold by the homeless as a charitable adventure. This was the picture from 10 years ago, front page of magazines. The Economist did the same. So many articles, so many pieces were written 50 years on from the assassination.

And then again, last year, at the end of last year, 60 years on, again, the fascination with John Kennedy. And I think ultimately to finish, what I think is important to think about is, you know, you’ve got these conspiracies. Was he murdered for political reasons? Was there more than more man, the grassy knoll, was there more shooters. All of these things were there. But also you’ve got the curse piece, the deaths in the family. And you also have the conspiracy piece, sorry, the Camelot piece. This great lost leader and what I’d like to kind of leave you with is the what ifs. The what ifs are huge. And this is pure hypothesis. Had he not been assassinated, had this picture been a random picture in the archive of Governor Connolly and John F. Kennedy in a drive in Texas on a tour that nobody really talked about much. Would anybody ever mention Dallas? Would everybody ever have cared if he had gone on to reelection, would he have gone on to reelection without Lyndon Johnson? I think my personal feeling is I think he was ready to drop Lyndon Johnson. I think the Texas trip, the Dallas trip reiterated that the Johnson’s political power was waning.

The thing that I said last week that maybe makes a difference was had he appointed a different vice president, it would’ve made a contender against his brother. So the argument of keeping Johnson in place would’ve been to, he would’ve been a spent force in 68 and Bobby Kennedy would’ve been able to take the nomination in 68. If he hadn’t been assassinated, would you have created this, you know, narrative of assassination? Would Sirhan Sirhan have killed Bobby Kennedy? Would Martin Luther King have been killed? Would Bobby Kennedy have become president in 68? Would Teddy Kennedy become president in 76? And would you have essentially have a long term monarchy of Kennedys just going on infinitely? I don’t think so. I think, you know, had John Kennedy had a second term, it would’ve fallen foul of most second terms. The biggest question of course is Vietnam.

But what would’ve happened is that he would’ve had to serve eight years. And eight years is always problematic. Could he have still done well enough to be able to hand over to his brother, might have done, but would his brother have had the energy and the warmth to go right the way through for another eight years? But if the assassination hadn’t taken place, you would never have got a Johnson presidency one way or the other. By 68 Johnson would’ve been a spent force and wouldn’t have been able to take over. If you hadn’t had Lyndon Johnson or had John Kennedy like his brother and others said, pulled out of Vietnam once he’d been reelected, would you have had the narrative that Nixon could have run against or would’ve Nixon been again, who was the guy that lost to John Kennedy who was another vice president who didn’t win the presidency? If you hadn’t had Richard Nixon, you wouldn’t have had Gerald Ford.

If you hadn’t had Gerald Ford and Watergate, would you have Jimmy Carter. So there’s a whole 20 years that narrative I say at the beginning that might have gone very differently and you might still have ended up with Ronald Reagan, but the route there would’ve been very, very different. And would we be sitting here tonight talking about the Kennedy legacy? Had he been a good two term president who then died sometime in the 1980s, 1990s and is remembered for whatever he achieved during that period, young, telegenic, but then got old. All of that is what if. So I think the Kennedy legacy for me is a fascinating one because it just, it’s around a man, but it’s also around a time and place in history that make things very, very different. I’ve hopelessly run over and I could have run over even longer, so I apologise for that.

And I’m sorry I don’t really have time for questions, so I apologise for that. But hopefully you’ve had a chance to enjoy yourself and found it interesting and maybe a little thought provoking. Thank you very much.