The Kennedy Myth: American Civil Religion in The Sixties

Americans have always had a special regard for their nation and its presidents, and presidential assassination has regularly caused consternation in the populace. President Kennedy was clothed in myth during his candidacy and presidency and even more after his death. The time has come not simply to accept or dismiss the Kennedy myth but to refine it. After defending myth as an indispensable means for conveying deeper meanings, to be deciphered by sociological analysis and evaluated by theological criticism, the Introduction sets forth three types of civil religion: archaic religion, which regards the state as divine; historic civil religion, which looks to a transcendent God to guide the judge the nation; and modern civil religion, which dispenses the divinity. Drawing on Paul Tillich's scheme of heteronomy, autonomy, and theonomy, my thesis is that the Kennedy myth exhibits a dangerous mix of predominate heteronomous archaism and moderate autonomous modernism with minimal theonomous historic civil religion to counterbalance it. Part I deals with Kennedy's accession to the presidency. As a candidate, his archaic cult of toughness and his modern intelligence are highlighted together with his lack of historic convictions, despite the so-called "religious issue" which focused on Kennedy's Catholic affiliation but overlooked the detachment from historic religion, Having been invested as a king with the charisma of office--including symbolic roles as high priest, representative, father, and imperator--through inauguration, Kennedy had a new authority as he repeated his archaic call to defend freedom" and to sacrifice the self to the state in his Inaugural Address. Part II deals with Kennedy's presidency. In a restoration of Camelot, the Kennedy White House became the center of and adorable family life, of arts and culture, and of intellectuals, whose modern "pragmatic" bracketing of moral questions made them ready tools of archaic purposes. As "Contemporer," Kennedy proclaimed a new era of adventure, movement, and hope, which led to misadventures, inertia, and despair. As Cosmocrator, Kennedy battled the chaos dragon in the Berlin crisis, the steel dispute, and twice over Cuba, but, finally convinced of the folly of brinkmanship, he launched historic drives for a test ban treaty and for civil rights legislation, only to remain in Vietnam for archaic reasons. Part III deals with protest, disorganization, reorganization, memorialization, and succession phases of response to the Kennedy assassination, The archaic loss of a sacred king was tremendous blow tot the social order, which led to rich ceremonialization in a funeral dominated by the religion of war and remembered sacrementally, transfiguring Kennedy into a hero and martyr, Caesar and Christ, Lincoln and light. Drawing on Kennedy's mythic charisma in posthumous obedience, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy battled for succession to his throne, one on the basis of institutional legitimacy, the other through personal ties. Inspired by an idealized view of his brother, Robert Kennedy pulled away from him in an historic identification with poor and blacks and an historic search for peace in Vietnam, only to be reunited with John Kennedy in death. Unwilling merely to accept the largely archaic American civil religion expressed in the Kennedy myth but finding a modern dismissal of it ineffective, the conclusion espouses a mediating historic American civil religion, which unites feeling and reason, embraces tragedy without being overwhelmed by it, acknowledges a mixture of good and evil in everyone, and affirms and judges presidents as limit kings in the light of transcendent ideals. The thesis leaves Kennedy himself not as an exemplary president but as one through whom we committed ourselves to ideals better than he knew, not a hero but a representative, not a myth but a man