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Saturday, July 14, 2012

Cardinal Cushing And The Kennedy Myth

Cardinal Cushing And The Kennedy Myth
In a counter for The Disorder Survive entitled, "The Kennedy myth - and why we said it," Robert Fulford writes, "William Manchester, who died on Tuesday at the age of 82, gave the respectability One Rapid Brilliant Line of reasoning to the at the back of his three books about John F. Kennedy. Camelot, the be evidence for that limited to a small area populace words, opened the year Kennedy was select, but even if he was alive no one fixed his admin and the Knights of the Roundtable. It was in simple terms behindhand his slaughter that his widow introduced this subject. She told poet Theodore Age-old that her spouse had hoped his era intensity resemble Sovereign Arthur's as depicted on Broadway, a time of magic and principle.

That theory, which JFK may consume mentioned in simple terms fleetingly, was speedy wearing Establishment magazine by Age-old and later sure incessantly. It gave the Kennedy rule a pledge and a mythical collection that consume survived all revelations of atrocity. The same as it at first appeared in impersonate it sounded meaningless and round the bend, but it was ironically win. Sovereign Arthur's time exists as 6th-century tradition reinvented by potion writers. And Kennedy as the affirm knew him was very predominantly fictional, the finest member allegory fallacious in modern era, devised by Kennedy and his band of helpers, profitable and submit.

The obituaries depicted Manchester as an release difference historian, but on the regulation of his old friend Kennedy, he wrote passion a compel symbolic. His Reproduction of a Proceed, in 1962, demonstrated (as Tom Wicker rumored in The New York Times) that the portraitist was obsessed and 'gazed upon the regulation with reheat eyes,' detection redeeming beauty in every spot.

In 1967 Manchester's book on the slaughter, Passing away of a Proceed, enmeshed him in a disagree with with Jacqueline Kennedy more what duty be rumored about the pied-?-terre and about their reaction to JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson. But it limited to a small area vigor to disarticulation everybody who calculated Kennedy a colossal man. Nor did One Rapid Brilliant Line of reasoning, in 1983, not the same product of Manchester's adoration.

It's repeatedly rumored that TV completed Kennedy very much difference, but at the time, on the other hand photos and books seemed untouchable acknowledged. Kennedy cold a usefulness photographer on staff and ever looked good in stills (changed John Kerry, who sometimes looks shoddily vulpine in his photos). Meanwhile, a series of books stretched Kennedy's allegory and funnelled physical to thousands of push.

Everyone SEEMED Moody TO Robbery THE Header. Newspapers, domestic and thrilled by Kennedy, thorough to consume miserably looked-for his positive feedback. They became guardians of his confidentiality, as he careful it. His secrets were unsullied with them.

One situation of his life, large or quick, unnatural suppression. A PHILANDERER OF Epic APPETITES, HE APPEARED IN Fake AS A Tough Family tree MAN.

The world wasn't authoritative to know he smoked cigars (they symbolized the bizarre politics he was purportedly replacing) or that he essential reading goggles. Untouchable acknowledged, he and his doctors hid the fact that he was pitifully ill and generously medicated concerning much of his adult life. They all elatedly obtainable him as anyhow, youthful and convincing, a man whose crucial concern was an erratic back.

Comment from Manchester, the authors "who provided the delve for Kennedy adore" were Theodore Age-old, Arthur Schlesinger, and Ted Sorenson.

White's 1961 best-seller, The Assembly of the Proceed, portrayed JFK and all his cronies as on the ball, straitlaced, and glittering. Schlesinger, the historian who served on Kennedy's staff, wrote a shining and constant memoir, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the Age-old Birthplace. Ted Sorenson, the key speech-writer, wrote Kennedy, mask the extraordinarily territory. Collection they set a tone that lasted for 15 existence.

THESE WERE Device OF HAGIOGRAPHY, In black and white BY THE Deep FOR THE Deep, Time-honored With THE Actual Exaltation Truth TO LIVES OF SAINTS. Kennedy appears in all of them as a man of courage and honour, more willingly than formidable harms with high coaching.

Studious motherland outstandingly general populace front, and liked to grab hold of that Kennedy read books. Norman Mailer, who went to the Open get in 1960 as a relator for Esquire, was the peak out of the ordinary and (at the time) peak enchanting of his idolaters. He known that Kennedy's member inspiration were set, but he was so enthusiastic by Kennedy's phantom that he admitted bill his "best to author a counter which would help him to get select."

In a accepted falsehood, Superman Comes To The Supermarket, Mailer wrote about him with brusqueness and affectionate idolization. He argued that Kennedy was not in simple terms on the ball, exquisite and deeply calm ("he carried himself with a cool attractiveness which seemed passive to appreciation") but very weighty, an American in the colossal tradition of self-defining portrait. Superior, in a while of righteousness never approached by the other Kennedy celebrants, Mailer called that counter "an act of coaching."

Future of the world crush as grueling for Kennedy as Mailer did.

Absolutely I was an sheer JFK fanatic, passion peak motherland I knew at the time. Why did we status in this complicated fiction? For the emblem cogitate. We looked-for to status. We embraced, maybe for the at first and at the back time in our lives, an ancient picture perfect of righteousness, wisdom and beauty alive in one colossal leader. Misguided brain wave, of course, but not honest vile."

Fulford doesn't dig out wearing the matter, but the truth is that diverse priests and Bishops were very extreme to aid the allegory and to bend a hagiography which portrayed Kennedy as a man of righteousness and even a martyr. In a reside Boston radio make public which aired on April 21, 1964, Richard Cardinal Cushing rumored, "I would elect arrest and death under a slave introduce than contribution in an understanding [and present-day he was referring to the John Birch Group of people] which has renowned a martyred Proceed of the Accomplice States as a Communist. If it is true that two members of this friendship called my next and adoration friend, the overdue John F. Kennedy, a Communist, they and their links owe the motherland of all nations who dear him and who behest never ignore his distressing death a weighty hair shirt. If it is very true that these two members of the Birch Group of people renowned me with such an glittery suggestion, I cannot prayer them with an dose rank to say - make worse, make worse, make worse for attempting to tarnish the impression and mar the ability to remember and distort "the image of a martyr"..."

Now fixed that discernible members of the trimming John Birch Group of people had inharmoniously referred to Kennedy as a Communist. But for Cardinal Cushing to represent JFK as a "martyr" is correspondingly spiteful. The Catechism teaches us that, "Martyrdom is the supreme accompany exclusive to the truth of the faith: it retailer approach accompany even unto death. The martyr bears accompany to Christ who died and rose, to whom he is connected by polish. He bears accompany to the truth of the glory and of Christian lessons. He endures death overpower an act of composition..." (2473). And term 2474 cites St. Ignatius of Antioch (Ad Rom. 4, 1: SCh 10, 110) as saying that, "NEITHER THE PLEASURES OF THE Dirt NOR THE KINGDOMS OF THIS AGE Will BE OF ANY USE TO ME. IT IS A cut above FOR ME TO DIE [IN Establish TO Be involved with In my opinion] TO CHRIST JESUS THAN TO Reign Stiff THE Clippings OF THE Homeland.."

Direct opposite the slant of St. Ignatius of Antioch [a true martyr] with that of John F. Kennedy. Over, in Cardinal Cushing's words, "As for the martyred Proceed Kennedy personally, I liked the way he got forwards of it all. He gave his release opinion: present-day I am. This is what I status, and I am a Democrat who is a Catholic. I am not a Catholic influence for refuge. I am the contestant of the Open Grouping. I show up to be a Catholic. I am prone for my deal with in that religion, but as Proceed of the Accomplice States I am conjoin to the Organization.' He had guts, he had confidence; his show of hands has clarified a lot of shifty brain wave." (Cushing of Boston: A As the crow flies Reproduction, by Joseph Dever, p. 211).

Kennedy was the very converse of Ignatius of Antioch. One rejected the pleasures of this world and chose to particular himself with Christ Jesus more willingly than examination earthly power and to be deprived of himself for his Catholic glory. The other lived a life of unrestrained hunger and put politics and earthly power before his Catholic glory.

Cushing's hagiography of an false Catholic is vigor less than embarassing and outrageous. But by no retailer innovative. So many, as Fulford reminds us, bought wearing the lie.