Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This is big news today. I’m too young to have been there, but apparently the sex-addicted son of a Neville Chamberlain sympathizer gave America the sense of national possibility it needed to get into the Vietnam War, leave a bunch of Cuban exiles for dead as part of the worst coup attempt ever, run to the brink of nuclear apocalypse, and help install the Baath party as the ruling party of Iraq. Oh, and we sent people to the moon, that was awesome.
The Kennedys certainly have some admirably progressive initiatives to their credit, particularly in the fields of social justice, immigration, and civil rights, but the continuing lionization of the family, particularly JFK, is unnerving. For a brutally honest take on the phenomenon by a progressive Catholic, I highly recommend Garry Wills’s The Kennedy Imprisonment (not my favorite of his books, that would be a tie between Nixon Agonistes and What Jesus Meant, but still, a great book). You can get a taste of it here.
