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But Johnson's mythogenic capacity is limited; the Lyndon legend has not taken wing. He impresses people, but he does not touch them; he persuades them, but he does not gladden them. His creased face, with its oddly forced smile, cannot displace the memory of Kennedy's youthful radiance, and his unctuous prosiness cannot match Kennedy's eloquence. Compared with Kennedy's graceful dignity, Johnson's homely touch can be embarrassing—as when he displays his abdominal scar to the nation and the world.
Often the contest seems downright unfair. The Kennedy legend either blithely ignores the fact that he was an inveterate politician or else makes a virtue of it; when that same term is applied to Johnson, it can carry a tawdry implication. In private, John Kennedy often uttered four-letter words, which was considered part of his charm; when Johnson uses the same words he is described as vulgar. Kennedy surrounded himself in high office with family and friends; yet it is Lyndon who is accused of cronyism.
Kennedy was born to great wealth, while Johnson made his own millions; but even in this area, Harvard's David Riesman detects a certain social snobbery operating against Johnson, a "lack of sympathy with a man who, unlike many poor boys who have done well and forgotten the ladder they climbed, has tried to keep it open to others as well." By any criterion of word or deed, Johnson did more for Negro rights than Kennedy, and Negroes have shown their gratitude at the polls. But some go to extraordinary lengths to credit Kennedy's inspiration rather than Johnson's execution, as for instance Lance Squire, a Chicago civil rights leader, who blames Johnson for being concerned only with expediency and wanting "to feed the Negroes, not free them."
Kennedy remains a hero to academicians and intellectuals, who deride Johnson, although in legislative terms he has done more for education, or even for art and science, than Kennedy apparently contemplated. But when Kennedy spoke about ideas or culture, he sounded as if he really cared, while Johnson merely seems to be reading a text he neither believes nor quite understands. "I have found nothing more strange or unattractive than the way in which American intellectuals take pleasure in reviling President Johnson," British Journalist Henry Fairlie reported in Commentary. "It is not simply that they object to his policies in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. It is a feeling of strong personal revulsion. 'He is a slob,' one of them said to me when I asked him why he disliked the President so much." Intellectuals are vain, added Fairlie, and "pathetically flattered by power" when power looks glamorous. "The American intellectual, although one should be able to assume he is beyond the age of consent, was raped by President Kennedy."
Trinity & Dynasty