The total collapse of Camelot and the Kennedy aura

There used to be a powerful magnetism to the Kennedy name, not just in politics but when it came to being a beacon of goodness and justice. In the past few months, we have seen that image collapse

By Ray Hanania

FREE/Politics JFK RFK Kennedy Clan/Wednesday Jan. 29, 2025

It is hard to imagine American politics without the influence of the most influential purveyors of the industry, the Irish. But it is even harder to fathom how politics has changed so dramatically in America until you carefully look at the growing personal viciousness that is consuming one of the nation’s most cherished families, the Kennedys.

That viciousness took center stage when Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy, left the confines of her buttoned-up life to viciously assault her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., accusing him of being a “predator” who is “addicted to power.”

Caroline’s father and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s father must both be rolling in their graves. But the Kennedy family feud has shattered what little is left of the Kennedy aura, exposing the Camelot myth as a lie and rolling into the gutter of today’s polarized and vicious American political wars.

There is no middle ground in today’s America, and Caroline Kennedy helped widen that dark and ugly abyss by wading into the gutter of politics to undermine her cousin who appeared before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday in his bid to become Trump’s health secretary and before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee, the panel his uncle, Ted Kennedy, once chaired.

Tapestry shows King Arthur as one of the Nine Worthies, wearing a coat of arms often attributed to him, from 1385. The image of the Camelot Myth that became the foundation of the Kennedy Mystique

The Kennedys were American royalty. They conveyed in a powerful way the image that Camelot wasn’t just PR spin but a hoped-for vision of what could be for America. And I can’t help but blame the polarization that has divided this nation, pitting the Left against the Right. It’s so ugly and it is destroying America. It burst the Kennedy Camelot bubble and God knows what else this polarization plague will take down.

Camelot was the fictional court of King Arthur, a savvy and inspirational medieval folk hero to the common people, and the Kennedy family was the modern-day incarnation that gave the public hope for a better society.

Let’s be honest, though. Americans are driven by a love for the beautiful and the inspiring fiction, rather than for the ugly reality. They want to believe the dream and they are willing to embrace their faith rather than see the world for the ugliness that it often is.

The attractiveness of the Camelot myth inspired many voters and helped elect John F. Kennedy as president. JFK’s image reflected the core values of America and inspired speeches by a carefully managed perception, and many great speeches. He was a Harvard graduate, a World War II PT Boat commander, and a war hero when his PT-109 sunk in the Pacific. JFK went to Congress, then the Senate, and while there wrote the inspiring book “Profiles in Courage,” which won a Pulitzer Prize.

JFK overshadowed his powerful father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who mastered politics by exploiting a friendship that evolved with Franklin Delano Roosevelt while working as an assistant manager at U.S. Steel during World War I. Joe Kennedy had a dark side in later years, with ties to organized crime. Mobster Frank Costello had boasted his “family” worked with Joe Kennedy in mysterious bootlegging operations during Prohibition. It reinforced speculation that the mob had stolen votes in Chicago to get JFK elected president in 1960 over Republican Richard M. Nixon.

We did learn many years later that JFK was having multiple affairs with women, an infidelity that media did not write about but today is often the foundation of political profiles for many politicians like Donald Trump on the Right and Bill Clinton on the Left.

Had JFK not been assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, the Camelot fiction and JFK’s mystique might have collapsed quickly. But it all held firm for six decades until President Trump announced his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a powerful cabinet position overseeing health. Kennedy is an anti-vaxxer, a term that ignites hostilities in any polite societal discussions, dividing families and friends.

When Trump announced the release of all the remaining secretive documents related to the Kennedy Assassination, it appeared that maybe we might be able to move forward away from the debate over the assassination conspiracies by seeing who the sealed documents were seeking to protect from public exposure more than 60 years after the JFK murder.

But that has been tarnished irreparably. The ugliness of the Caroline Kennedy-Robert F. Kennedy Jr., public brawl has wiped away the glow of our enlightenment.

The whole desire to know the truth behind the JFK assassination has been washed away by a putrid brine of slime.

I hope we never hear from the Kennedy Family again. They don’t deserve our adulation.

The price we are paying for today’s petulant politics has far outweighed the trauma of six decades of wondering who assassinated JFK.

I guess it no longer matters.