STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE 25.3

April 2003 | 25.3

Linda Czuba Brigance

In an editorial entitled “The 72 Hours and What They Can Teach Us,” Life magazine raises some provocative issues about the whole phenomenon that we have come to think of as the Kennedy mystique: “Even now the myths are forming in the American mind. And from the chaotic jumble of grotesque violence, pathos, stupidity, grandeur, pageant and tragedy, what we select to remember could have as great an influence on our political future as did the martyrdom of Lincoln. What then are the right things to remember? What ingredients will make the truest myth?” (4). The questions are significant because to many in the United States and around the world, John F. Kennedy’s administration marked the beginning of a new post‑World War II era. The image created by his boyish exuberance, attractive wife, and young family was in marked contrast to that of the previous administration. President Dwight D. Eisenhower represented a victory in war; Kennedy represented the hope for peace. Ike’s military‑hero persona forever linked him with the past; Kennedy’s youth pointed the nation forward. In the days after Kennedy’s assassination, therefore, the nation mourned more than the loss of their head of state. They also mourned the loss of a promised new world of global peace and prosperity.

Amid the shock and confusion that followed the President’s death, distraught Americans searched for ways to make sense of the tragedy. One solution came just seventeen days after Kennedy’s assassination in a published interview with the President’s widow. Journalist and Kennedy family friend Theodore White was called by Jacqueline Kennedy, who related a story to him that would become what Life magazine characterized as “a signature for the whole Kennedy Era”: “At night before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved the most came at the end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot’. . . there’ll be great Presidents again. . .but there’ll never be another Camelot.... This was Camelot... Let’s not forget.”

After the publication of White’s interview with Mrs. Kennedy, the popular media and the general public seized upon Camelot to represent the Kennedy era, even though the values associated with the myth are incompatible with the reality of Kennedy’s life. Ralph Martin summed up the sentiments of many Kennedy critics as well as supporters when he said, “Camelot mythology didn’t quite fit the Kennedy’s. The oath of the knights to lead lives ‘in purest chastity. . . to love one only and cleave to her’ was hardly a Kennedy tenet” (593). Whether Camelot was ever an accurate representation of the Kennedy experience is not at issue here, however. In this media savvy age, charges that a politician’s legacy was strategically constructed and managed would come as a surprise to few people. More interesting than debates about the validity of Kennedy’s heroic image are the reasons for the public’s eager acceptance of the Camelot myth as an organizing framework for collective memory.

According to Barbie Zelizer, collective memory is “pieced together like a mosaic” (224). What guides collective decision-making about what is remembered, how it is remembered, and what is forgotten? Iwona Irwin-Zarecka suggests that “certain ways of remembering (and forgetting) are seen as appropriate and others are not. . . Yes, we do. . . liberally mix facts and fictions, if not invention altogether. But no, collective memory is not a terrain where anything goes” (133). As Gronbeck explains, it is the present that determines the composition of collective memory: “the past is not simply constructed or appropriated. . . [it] is evoked. Some present need or concern is examined by calling up a past, shaping it into a useful memory that an audience can find relevant to the present” (57). Thus, images and ideas about the past are included in our collective memory, not because they reflect a historical reality, but because they meet the needs of those doing the remembering. This analysis adds to the understanding of an important period in American cultural life and the process of collective memory construction by identifying how and why the American popular mind chose to remember the Kennedy era in terms of Camelot.

In early 1960s America, Camelot was not the Camelot of English literary or folkloric traditions; rather, it was Alan J. Lerner’s and Frederick Loewe’s Camelot. Because the Broadway romantic musical debuted in December, 196O, between Kennedy’s election and inauguration, the dream-like tale already was an integral part of the popular consciousness by the time the American people embraced it to frame their memories of the president.

Camelot is the story of the benevolent King Arthur who reigned over a utopian kingdom. He decreed perfect weather and banned warfare between knights in return for trial by jury and equality among the noblemen in an effort to make life better for all of Camelot’s citizens. In the end, the king’s experiment with perfection failed and the short‑lived fantasy kingdom was destroyed by infidelity and greed. The last glimpse of Arthur is as a proud sovereign, certain of the inevitable end of his dream.

The extent to which the Camelot myth has come to embody the Kennedy era is illustrated most succinctly by an entry in E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, which defines Camelot as a reference to “the administration of President John F. Kennedy” (310). In fact, the American people’s appropriation of the myth of Camelot as a framework for remembering Kennedy is so embedded in the collective consciousness that the vast majority of references to the term include little explanation of the association. The authors of a number of popular culture writings rightly assume the correlation between Camelot and Kennedy is understood by all. For example, in Morrison’s and Morrison’s From Camelot to Kent State, a retrospective of the 1960s, the authors make only one reference to Camelot other than the title. Despite the lack of any explanation of the term, readers are clear that the beginning point of the book is the Kennedy years. “Camelot Censored,” a Newsweek account of the management of Kennedy’s image by his family and friends, also makes no mention of Camelot other than in the title. Phillip Kunhardt’s, Life in Camelot: The JFK Years is a coffee table photographic essay published by Life magazine in commemoration of the twenty‑fifth anniversary of the assassination. This book contains several references to the myth that would mean little to someone unfamiliar with its role in the collective memory. For example, Kunhardt compares the bitter cold weather on the day of Kennedy’s inauguration to the lyrics of Lerner and Loewe’s title song, “Camelot”: “It was a far cry from Camelot, where ‘the snow may never slush upon the hillside/By nine p. m. the moonlight must appear’” (159). The list of references to the myth goes on and on: One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering Kennedy (Manchester); “Camelot’s Credibility” (Crawford); “Camelot in Retrospect” (Clarke); “Camelot Keeps Fading” (Pett); American Politics Appraised: The Enchantment of Camelot (Adrian and Press); Rethinking Camelot: JFK, The Viet Nam War, and U. S. Political Culture (Chomsky); The Dark Side of Camelot (Hersh); Designing Camelot (Abbot and Rice); Jackie. Ethel. Joan: Women of Camelot (Taraborrelli); Camelot at Dawn: Jackie and John Kennedy in Georgetown, May 1954 (Suero and Garside); Black Camelot (Van Deburg), an examination of African‑American icons who emerged during the Kennedy era; and, the Time magazine cover that declared, “Camelot Lives.”

Within the first few hours after the assault on President Kennedy’s motorcade, the country feared domestic and international chaos. Vice President Johnson’s presence triggered concerns of a far‑reaching assassination plot attributed to conspirators ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Cuban government. According to Lloyd Bitzer, Americans felt a “queasy apprehension for the future.” In an attempt to quell public anxiety and “assur[e] that the transfer of government to new hands would be orderly” (388) government officials and the news media educated the public on the legalities of the process of presidential succession. Nevertheless, fears of civil disorder and anarchy flourished. Something more powerful than the recitation of legal processes was necessary to see the American public through this crisis.

What was needed was a myth that would assure a frightened public. According to Elizabeth W. Mechling, myth “provides cultures with formula responses to [stressful] situations. . . and [provides] social scripts for playing out social drama” (168). The Camelot myth and its identification with Old World notions of royal lineage had just the script Americans needed. By adopting the Camelot myth and focusing on the notion of the Kennedy’s as a royal dynasty, concerns about social order could be diminished. There was no reason to fear civil chaos, nor mourn the permanent passing of an idyllic state, as long as there was an heir waiting to serve the country. The Kennedy clan was immediately cast as America’s royal family.

In the years immediately following the president’s assassination, Robert Kennedy was routinely characterized as possessing what Jacques Lowe and Wilfred Sheed call the “divine right” (181) to succeed his brother as president. A Newsweek article about Robert Kennedy’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 borrowed its title from an accompanying photograph depicting supporters holding placards with the message, “We Want Camelot Again!” When Robert himself was killed in 1968, Vincent L. Toscano’s report of the younger Kennedy’s assassination borrowed from T. H. White’s 1939 version of the story of King Arthur: “On the wall. . . perhaps five feet from where Kennedy had fallen, five words were scrawled in crayon. . .’the once and future king’” (65).

The Camelot myth continued to provide a sense of social order even following the death of the president’s heir apparent. After Robert Kennedy’s assassination, brother Edward inherited the role of royal successor. According to Edward Kennedy’s biographer, James Burnes, when the youngest Kennedy brother contemplated a run for the presidency in 1972, advisors suggested a campaign button reading, “Camelot in ’72" and ad copy stating “If you’ve never forgotten Camelot. . . and you still dream of what might have been . . . then let us pick up the dream where we left it” (277). After Robert Kennedy’s death and Edward Kennedy’s failed presidential bids, the Camelot myth pointed the American public toward the next generation of Kennedy’s for political leadership. Newsweek magazine addressed the early political careers of Joseph Kennedy II and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in an article entitled “Camelot (Continued).” Reporter Colleen O’Connor explained the young Kennedys’ claims as heirs to Camelot in this way: “[T]he Kennedy name is to politics what Rocky is to the movies . . . always building to another sequel” (29). The cover of the 13 August 2001 issue of Time proclaimed “Camelot Lives!” and the feature article examined how “a third generation struggles with the legacy of Camelot” (26).

The president’s widow, too, is remembered within the framework of the Camelot myth that she promoted days after her husband’s assassination. A 1993 Chicago Sun Times article entitled “Onassis Remains a ‘Royal’ Figure for Americans” succinctly captured how popular culture regularly portrayed the former First Lady. In this article, commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, Anemona Hartocollis stated, “[I]t is Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the stoic widow in a black veil, who keeps alive the myth of Camelot. She is the enduring icon of an era of shattered hopes and lost illusions. . . . She’s the closest thing we have to American royalty” (9). As a picture in People magazine illustrates, Camelot defined Jackie until the end of her life. In the article “A Moment Called Camelot,” a mourner is seen outside of the former First Lady’s New York apartment holds a hand-written sign that says, “Camelot will be reunited in heaven” (45).

The President and First Lady’s two children did not escape the Camelot myth. Teenage Caroline was the subject of a McCall’s magazine article entitled “Caroline at 17: Coming of Age in the Shadow of Camelot.” When her brother died in 1999, Caroline was declared “the sole surviving member of Camelot’s First Family” by Jill Smolowe (102) and “The Last Child of Camelot” by Barbara Krantrowitz (35). The power of the Camelot myth in America’s collective memory is perhaps best illustrated by ABC’s Forty‑Eight Hours special following the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who had been variously characterized as “Prince Charming” (by Wendy Leigh and Stephen Karten), “Camelot’s dream child,” and “America’s prince,” (in the book JFK, Jr.: American Prince) and the “Camelot heir” (by Larry McShane). On the verge of tears, veteran television journalist Dan Rather read the lyrics of the Lerner and Lowe song “Camelot” to a mourning nation, just as Jackie had thirty‑six years earlier after the death of the President (Saunders 24A).

With so many possible heirs, the future of Camelot would appear to be secure. However, at the end of Lerner’s and Loewe’s musical, so much a part of 1960s American popular culture, the audience comes to accept that Camelot was destined to be impermanent; it was an ideal that could not remain a reality for long. Its existence was to be celebrated, its loss memorialized; however, despite a yearning for the idyllic days of Camelot, few really expected its return. This paradoxical combination of romantic yearning and fatalistic inevitability, which is at the center of the Camelot story, set the stage for the political cynicism and civic disengagement that characterized post-assassination America.

As previously discussed, by adopting the Camelot myth as a framework for collective memory about John F. Kennedy, American’s were assured that social order would be maintained. However, there is a dark side to the Camelot myth: the smoking ruins of a kingdom that existed for only “one brief shining moment.” Like Camelot, post-assassination America was without its heroic king, and this loss seemed to mark the beginning of a different attitude toward civic life. Bruce Miroff explains it this way: “Kennedy’s death came to organize popular understanding of modern American history. Before his death, in this understanding, America was on the ascendant. After his assassination, the nation found itself spiraling downward, into race riots, overseas catastrophes, and economic stagnation. When Americans treasure the grace and glamour in stories or visual images of Kennedy, they treasure an imagined time when America, too, was suffused with grace and glamour. Nostalgia for Kennedy is nostalgia for an American dream that the decade of the1960s first magnified and then exploded” (306). In the post-assassination period, the Camelot myth continued to function as an interpretative framework for collective memory in several ways. First, as we have seen, the idealism and romance of the Kennedy years became exaggerated and each new generation of Kennedys was promoted as the heirs of Camelot. Second, the understanding of Camelot as a “brief shining moment,” rather than a lasting state of the Union, provided a narrative structure that accounted for the premature end of the Kennedy administration and, therefore, the end of the promise of peace and prosperity that Kennedy represented. Finally, the theme of royal succession justified a growing attitude of cynicism toward politics and the civic disengagement that accompanied it.

A number of scholars have examined Americans’ post-1960s cynicism and disengagement and each offers his or her own explanation. Robert Putnam, for example, places the blame with two-career families, too tired to do anything at the end of the day, except watch television. S. Ansolabehere and S. Iyengar fault negative political campaign rhetoric. David Mathews blames feelings of powerlessness due to the perceived clout of special interest groups, while E.J. Dionne, Jr., condemns ideological gridlock created by combative liberals and conservatives. The answer probably lies in a combination of all of these explanations. However, if, as Craig Smith states, myth is an essential and fundamental way to “explain the past, make sense of the present and give mission to a future” (20), understanding the myths we adopt can provide insight into the attitudes and behaviors these scholars have identified.

For forty years, the Camelot myth has organized our understanding of the public sphere and our role in it in a way that justifies the turn toward civic disengagement and cynicism. It tells us that our involvement is unnecessary: we did not create Camelot, we did not cause its demise, and we cannot facilitate its return. After embracing the story of Camelot and its theme of royal succession to explain the Kennedy era, it makes no sense to view the post-assassination world as one where ordinary citizens would answer Kennedy’s inaugural challenge to “ask what you can do for your country,” because the royal heirs, alone, are charged with restoring the idyllic kingdom. Freed from this daunting civic responsibility, post-Camelot Americans began an inevitable course toward disengagement from the political system and each other. As Norman Gershon wrote in a letter to Time, the adoption of the Camelot myth “was the last thing we did as a whole” (5).

As Gronbeck explains it, collective memory is the site where the past, present and future exist in a symbiotic relationship. He says, “the past can guide the present, but the present also is reconfiguring the past; therefore, through evocation of collective memories, past and present live in constant dialogue, even in a hermeneutic circle where neither can be comprehended without the other”(57). Thus, once Camelot was adopted as a narrative structure for our collective memory, it did more than explain the past. It continues to influence and reflect our perceptions and actions in the present and future. Because the past, present, and future are so intricately intertwined, our collective memory of the Kennedy era includes both romantic idealism and cynical realism. We recall hope and hopelessness, empowerment and powerlessness, and engagement and disengagement. Only the story of Camelot, a royal kingdom destined to last for only “one brief shining moment,” can construct a collective memory that accommodates such conflicting sentiments.

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