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Kennedy started or foreshadowed Johnson's program, including the tax cut, the war on poverty, medicare, federal aid to education, the civil rights bill. It can also be argued that Johnson won the huge congressional majority that made his legislative triumphs possible at least in part because of the emotional aftermath of Kennedy's assassination. With all this conceded, Johnson's legislative record still stands as an immense achievement. Even with Johnson's majority, it is doubtful that Kennedy could have mustered the painstaking, patient but relentless manner in which Johnson cultivates, pressures or pleads with members of Congress to get what he wants. Jack Kennedy simply was not built that way, and Congress was always suspicious of him.
Yet the Kennedy legend glows and grows. "I think it will live on," says Historian Henry Steele Commager. "Kennedy will continue to mean youth, hope, gaiety, wit and charm, and everybody's image of the gallant young man." Since his death, more than 90 books about him have been published. Aside from the Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen volumes, they range from The Kennedy Wit (and its sequel, More Kennedy Wit), The Wisdom of JFK, Kennedy Courage to John F. Kennedy and the Latvian People.
Kennedy himself would cringe at some of the fulsome prose, for if he appreciated the value of legend, he also knew when it became tasteless. And he would have applauded a passage in a beautifully done book, John Fitzgerald Kennedy . . . As We Remember Him (Atheneum) to which his family and many friends contributed: "The months following his tragic death were made doubly intolerable by the immediate gush of books, articles, poems, records, songs, photos, olios, burnt-wood plaques, figurines, medals, scrolls, postcards—some of these sincere and touching, many of them opportunistic and bathetic. It was to be feared that the onslaught of this kind of attention might, at the least, obfuscate the truth." As We Remember Him makes eminently clear that Kennedy needs no embroidery. He had the touch, whether as a little boy who got ants in his pants during a family picnic, or as the young Senator telling his tough old father to "keep out of my politics," or as President slopping shaving soap over an intelligence report or reading The Adventures of Reddy Fox for his amusement.
Snobbery & Sympathy Rape
Lyndon Johnson, who must live with the Kennedy legend, has of course sought to create a legend of his own. He authorized the publication of his mother's Family Album, in which Rebekah Baines Johnson noted that a "light came in from the east" at the instant of Lyndon's birth. The peroration to almost every Johnson speech begins with words approximating these: "I still dream of my boyhood back on the poor, dry soil along the banks of the Pedernales, and . . ." He does not discourage his aides from awarding him unusual powers. Jack Valenti grants him "extra glands" to account for his fantastic energies. Even sober-sided Bill Moyers thinks that Johnson has a special set of "antennae" that enable him to "divine the pulse of the American people."