Today is the 50th anniversary of the funeral of John F. Kennedy.

Michael J. Toro goes back almost 53 years, to Kennedy’s inauguration:

On the day of John F. Kennedy‘s inauguration (January 20, 1961), the Northeast was paralyzed beneath 1-2 feet of snow. The president’s speech was carried on the heels of fierce winds and biting cold.  Most people were relatively more optimistic in those days (oftentimes against their better judgment) and somewhat more trustful of government; if anything, they were more or less respectful (however reluctantly) towards the Office of President of the United States. The beneficent visions and/ or illusions of the Kennedy era would become frozen amid the dim light of a harsher reality on November 22, 1963 and beyond. A re-imagined Camelot became a peculiarly eternal, because somehow enthusiastic, dream of yesteryear for at least two generations of Americans.

In 1961, America was fighting the Cold War: that uncertain battleground where a clouded alignment of real, imagined or contrived threats suspended reason and modified talk. Both America and Russia were acquiring stockpiles of nuclear weapons with the potential to blow the world up twenty times over. The Soviet Union’s breakthroughs in space exploration (or first-strike capability), with Sputnik and manned-orbital flight, increased the stakes.

While America’s economy had been declining for two years, Russia’s had been growing and causing us political embarrassment. The Soviet Union was also gaining increased strength with more countries (especially former Asian and African colonies) looking to it for leadership and alliance…with Cuba in the lead. The United States, for the first time since 1812, felt vulnerable to invasion. …

Because Kennedy was relatively young and dynamic-looking (actually, he was in extremely poor health), his untimely death leaves an eternal “What If?” imprinted on history and in the imagination. The character and charisma he (and certainly his wife Jackie) exuded, more than the handful of goals that JFK achieved, played a crucial part in JFK’s presidency and served as a dazzling smokescreen to his administration’s less appealing side. Yet, even more than Lincoln or FDR, Kennedy stood as the role model for aspiring political leaders. (To paraphrase critic Greil Marcus: JFK’s reputation is too much to live up to and too much to escape.) The fact that he and especially his brother, Robert, would be seen as politically conservative by today’s standards is lost in the myth and romance of JFK’s legacy.

While it’s often forgotten that the well-publicized dreams and presumed ambitions of Kennedy were, in fact, carried out by his successor Lyndon Johnson (his Great Society, ironically, a primary factor that led to his downfall), JFK’s martyrdom earned him the glory. No one remembers whether or not Kennedy balanced the budget (at best, it was stabilized) or that he was often reluctant to take a direct stand on civil rights issues.  Whether or not the war in Vietnam would have escalated if he had lived (Kennedy often acceded to war hawks) is still a matter of speculation. Indeed, the overall importance of his presidency is debatable. Unfortunately, he’s best remembered as being the tragic victim of an assassination that ranks as one of the most perplexing events in world history. …

But I, along with many of my Baby Boom contemporaries, spent the past 50 years engaged in this psycho-therapeutic nostalgia; alas, I’ll most likely spend the remainder of my life engaged in it. I wish it were otherwise, but the 50-year-old list of presidential hacks and frauds helped to make this nostalgia terribly addictive. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to recover from such a lengthy period of political sentimentality, where a once and future yesteryear glimmers ceaselessly along a hopeful horizon of possibility.

William Prochnau delivers a more sympathetic portrait and an interesting story:

Within an hour after President John F. Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963, Washington became a ghost town.

It was still early on a Friday afternoon but, except in hidden security centers, no one in this power-centric, workaholic town had any idea what to do. The phones overloaded and stopped working periodically. Almost all government stopped working, too.

I was a 26-year-old rookie reporter from Seattle. Two of the country’s most powerful senators came from my state, including Senator Henry M. Jackson, who had been Robert F. Kennedy’s choice over Lyndon B. Johnson to be his brother’s running mate in 1960.

So it was natural that I would be drawn to the Old Senate Office Building — the Old S.O.B, we called it, for the acronym and the pun but mainly because it housed the expansive empires of the senior senators of the day. Usually bustling with power-brokers, lobbyists and favor-seekers, the hallways were empty except for a cluster of staffers in front of Jackson’s office.

By the time I got to the Capitol, the Senate and House of Representatives had adjourned and most senators and congressmen had closed their offices and gone home. Jackson, however, remained. His wife, Helen, was out of town, and he dreaded going alone to their Washington apartment. So his staff stayed with him in the Old S.O.B., talking in clutches outside in the marble hallway. For me, two moments resonate as clearly today as they did in 1963.

After a few minutes Jackson emerged from his office and asked me, “Do you want to take a walk?” Of course I wanted to walk with Jackson. A Cold Warrior like Kennedy, a good friend if not a Hyannisport buddy, who had joined in his roughhouse Georgetown softball games when both were still among Washington’s most eligible bachelors, Jackson was as close to Kennedy as anyone I would find that day in the psychologically blitzed capital.

It turned out to be a peculiar walk — one that showed he was as discombobulated as the rest of us. We went to the Senate payroll office, where Jackson corrected a $6 error in his paycheck. Despite my efforts, he didn’t want to talk about the assassination or what might have been. Jackson was as spun out of his orbit as the rest of us and I was simply his foil to level life out for a few minutes.

The second moment occurred back at his office where, like everyone, Brian Corcoran, Jackson’s press secretary, tried to assess the day’s impact. “The real tragedy is that Kennedy will barely be remembered 50 years from now,” Corcoran said. “His presidency was cut too short and he didn’t have time to accomplish anything.”

To be sure, at the time of Kennedy’s death, most of his landmark New Frontier legislation, including the Civil Rights Act, was bogged down in a Congress dominated by Southerners — who did not look kindly on Kennedy or his program. He will never go down as one of America’s great presidents. …

What made the Kennedy legacy such a powerful and lasting American obsession? Theodore H. White, who wrote the classic Making of the President 1960, argued that Kennedy believed that heroes made history — and cast himself in that role.

To my generation, he was undeniably a hero, albeit a flawed one. The youngest man ever elected president (at 43), he was a phenom — modern, handsome and princely, given to heroic words and gestures. Glamorous, he was doubly so alongside his wife, Jacqueline, who turned the White House into an American version of the court at Versailles for parties honoring the literati. He was a celebrity president made for television before television itself quite knew what it was made for.

The twin pillars that keep the Kennedy saga alive — Camelot and conspiracy — were embedded in Washington’s marble within days after JFK’s death. Together, they transformed the story into a Shakespearian tragedy: a young nobleman cut down at the apex of his and his empire’s power, with his slaying forever muddled by a cast of powerful and shady characters that prevents the facts of the crime from ever truly being resolved.

Almost immediately after his death, in a remarkable and manipulative effort, Jackie Kennedy planted the-young-prince-in-Camelot imagery so deep that it has held up for a half-century, despite the onslaught of contradictions about JFK, the flawed man, that emerged in later years.

Camelot, a hit Broadway musical about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, played through most of his presidency. But it never was attached to Kennedy’s name before he died — a lesson in how legends are made.

Jackie, trying to head off assessments of her man by what she called “bitter people,” made certain it became the romantic theme of their time in the White House. Seven days after her husband was shot, she called Theodore White, journalist, historian and — most important — a friend, to Hyannisport for an exclusive four-hour interview. There she wove the myth of Camelot into the “reality” of the Kennedy years, even hovering over White to edit his story back on to the Camelot track, as he phoned it to his editors at Life magazine.

On December 6, 1963, Life published the essay with its emphasis on the Camelot years and the lyrics that Jackie said her husband played on his old Victrola almost every night before going to sleep:

“Don’t let it be forgot,

That once there was a spot

For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”

It was a heroic, if somewhat childlike, view of a president who inspired a nation with his youth and vigor. (That too was a myth because he and his troupe hid his debilitating Addison’s disease and assorted other ailments.) At the time of the assassination, Kennedy’s approval rating was 70 percent, and it remains the highest in the history of presidential polling.

He was the first and still is the most compelling of the media presidents. He simply romanced the little black-and-white tube, arguably winning office by beating Richard M. Nixon in the first televised presidential debate and keeping his critics at bay with wit and charm in regular televised press conferences. Politicians, Democrat and Republican, have learned to use the medium since, but none more effectively. Americans took Kennedy into their homes — and liked him.

The Camelot image has suffered over the years since, as serious historians examined the downsides to his presidency — he essentially began our long Vietnam nightmare. Others looked at the anti-heroism of his compulsive, almost serial womanizing. Even White corrected the story he and Jackie had created in Hyannisport. By 1978, White said he had misread history somewhat.

“The magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed,” White wrote in his book, In Search of History.

Yet there was something to the concoction — because “one brief shining moment” still stands as the metaphor for Kennedy’s brief presidency. Camelot represented optimism and possibility. Kennedy created the Peace Corps, he aspired to send a man to the moon. Government was not the enemy. Forever frozen in his prime, he harkens to a simpler time, before the events that complicated America’s place in the world after his death: the tumultuous ‘60s, the quagmire that Vietnam became, Watergate, terrorism, Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the endless, deadlocked power struggle and destructiveness that has become de rigueur in Washington political life.

Kennedy gave Americans the idea that we could do better. That we could believe in something. Robert Dallek, the presidential historian and author of the new Kennedy biography, Camelot’s Court, summed it up succinctly in the New York Times: Americans admire presidents who give them hope.

The opposing view comes from Gregory Dennis:

Fifty years later, reading and watching the rehashes of the Kennedy assassination and the tumultuous career that preceded it, we are still trying to make sense of JFK’s life and death. …

Watching the lengthy PBS profile about John Kennedy’s life leading up to the 1960 election, I was struck by how diminished the myth has become.

Kennedy essentially lived a lie. And for many years during and after his presidency, we believed that lie.

He was a courageous war hero, it’s true, and he was indisputably good looking, charming, hardworking and funny. He inspired confidence and made America believe in a new generation of leaders.

But as the numerous histories and TV shows make clear, the public was fed — and bought — a steady series of untruths about the rest of his life.

We can see now how recklessly he lived. We may never know if that recklessness led to his death. But it surely put the country in more peril.

Kennedy didn’t write most of Profiles in Courage, the book that brought him so much acclaim. He was a lazy legislator as a congressman and senator. Depicted as vigorous and the picture of health, he suffered for much of his life from colitis, a debilitating intestinal disorder. The powerful steroids used to treat the disease eroded his spine and left him in constant pain.

He also developed Addison’s disease, a life-threatening disorder of the adrenal glands. The steroids used to treat that disease further debilitated him and left his skin a darkening yellow. His handlers passed it off as a perpetual tan.

To deal with the severe back pain and fatigue, Kennedy had his own Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobsen, inject him dozens of times with a mixture reported to contain amphetamines, bone marrow, human placenta, painkillers, steroids and multivitamins. (“I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” the president was said to remark. “It works.”)

His marriage to Jackie was portrayed by the press as a storybook fable, marred only by miscarriages. But behind the Camelot curtain, he was a compulsive womanizer. He seduced White House interns and slept with a parade of other women, probably including Marilyn Monroe and definitely including Judith Campbell Exner. He used Exner to carry messages and perhaps payoffs to mobsters Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli.

It’s well beyond me and this space to summarize the JFK legacy. But I’m reminded of a line from a song Dylan wrote not long after Jack Kennedy’s death: “Don’t follow leaders.”

We need leaders, of course. But for those of us who lived through JFK’s presidency — and who have since then watched the gradual dismantling of the Camelot myth — our view of every would-be leader will always be filtered through an extra dose of skepticism.

I’m not sure I agree completely with Patrick Buchanan, but he raises interesting points:

Had there been no Dallas, there would have been no Camelot.

There would have been no John F. Kennedy as brilliant statesman cut off in his prime, had it not been for those riveting days from Dealey Plaza to Arlington and the lighting of the Eternal Flame.

Along with the unsleeping labors of an idolatrous press and the propagandists who control America’s popular culture, those four days created and sustained the Kennedy Myth.

But, over 50 years, the effect has begun to wear off.

The New York Times reports that in the ranking of presidents, Kennedy has fallen further and faster than any. Ronald Reagan has replaced him as No. 1, and JFK is a fading fourth.

Kennedy is increasingly perceived today as he was 50 years ago, before word came that shots had been fired in Dallas.

That he was popular, inspirational, charismatic, no one denied. But no one would then have called him great or near great. His report card had too many C’s, F’s and Incompletes.

His great legislative victory had been the passage of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. His tax cut bill was buried on the Hill.

His triumph had been forcing a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. But we would learn this was done by a secret deal for the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and a secret pledge not to invade Cuba.

And after the missile crisis, Bobby Kennedy pushed the CIA to eliminate Castro, eliciting a warning from Fidel that two could play this game. Lyndon Johnson said that under the Kennedys, the CIA had been running “a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”

What caused Nikita Khrushchev to think he could get away with putting rockets in Cuba? His perception that JFK was a weak president.

Kennedy had denied air cover for the Cuban patriots at the Bay of Pigs, resulting in the worst debacle of the Cold War. He was then berated and humiliated by Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit in June 1961.

In August, Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall. Kennedy sat paralyzed.

In September, Khrushchev smashed the three-year-old nuclear test-ban moratorium with a series of explosions featuring, at Novaya Zemlya, a 57-megaton “Tsar Bomba,” the largest man-made blast ever.

“Less profile, more courage,” the placards read.

In Southeast Asia, JFK had Averell Harriman negotiate a treaty for neutralizing Laos, resulting in Hanoi’s virtual annexation of the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos into South Vietnam.

Where Eisenhower had 600 advisers in Vietnam, JFK increased it to 16,000 and gave his blessing to a generals’ coup in which our ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem, was assassinated.

Then and there, Vietnam became America’s war.

Kennedy had made a famous phone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King during the 1960 campaign when her husband had been arrested. Yet, he kept his administration away from the March on Washington and directed J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap Dr. King to learn of his associations with Communists.

Since his death, Kennedy’s reputation has been ravaged by revelations of assignations and mistresses from Marilyn Monroe to Mafia molls to White House interns from Miss Porter’s School.

All of this was covered up by his courtier journalists who would collaborate in perpetuating the Kennedy myth and collude in destroying their great hate object, Richard Nixon. …

The mythologizing of JFK and demonization of Nixon tell us less about respective accomplishments than the moral character of an establishment, which, though it had lost America by ‘72, still controlled the culture, media, bureaucracy and Congress.

And as they brought down Nixon with Watergate, they would seek to bring down Reagan with Iran-Contra. But that coup failed.