Howie Carr: It’s time to cancel the Kennedys
Christopher Columbus has nothing on Camelot
If Abraham Lincoln and Christopher Columbus no longer pass woke muster in Boston, then it’s time for the Kennedys to go.
And everything with their names plastered on it — the JFK Library and JFK federal building, his statue at the State House, the Kennedy School of Government across the river, the Rose Kennedy Greenway, the Edward M. Kennedy Whatever They Call It, etc. Everything must go! Profiles in Courage? The Kennedys were more like Profiles in Caucasity, as that woke Harvard gal said this week before she too got canceled.
Let’s start with President Kennedy. Just for starters, he believed in tax cuts (“a rising tide lifts all boats”). He was a Cold Warrior (“the long twilight struggle”). He wasn’t into welfare and reparations (“Ask not what your country can do for you … .”).
He palled around with Sen. Joe McCarthy. When Nixon ran for the Senate in 1950, JFK gave him a grand in cash. His best friend in Congress was George Smathers, an arch-segregationist from Florida.
JFK didn’t hate Jews the way his father and his brother Bobby did, but wasn’t real down for the civil rights struggle.
He wouldn’t let Sammy Davis Jr. perform at his inauguration.
His top supporter in the South was Alabama Gov. John Patterson, who won his election holding up a giant photo of Arkansas cops beating blacks in Little Rock, Ark., and telling his support ers, “When I’m elected, this is what we’ll have in Alabama.”
Patterson was so incorrigibly racist that in 1960, when Jackie Robinson realized who JFK had thrown in with, he endorsed Nixon for president.
And let’s not forget — JFK tried to kill Fidel Castro, patron saint of all looters and statue-smashers. As his vice president Lyndon Baines Johnson later told CBS of the Kennedys’ efforts: “They were running a damn Murder Inc. down there in the Caribbean.”
I’m telling you, JFK couldn’t make it onto a statewide ballot in Massachusetts today — no way could he get 15% of the vote at a modern Democrat convention.
Of course Jack had his good points — he was an utter reprobate in his personal life, a drug addict, and at the end of his life he was getting into LSD with Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law. Don’t believe me? That’s in Dr. Timothy Leary’s autobiography, and if the comrades can’t trust the guy who said, “Turn on, tune in, drop out!” then who can they trust?
All this stuff is public record by the way. I compiled close to 600 pages of Kennedy-family scandal and depravity in my two “Kennedy Babylon” books. The references are all cited, and the bibliographies run page after page.
Just a couple of reading suggestions beyond my “Kennedy Babylon” books – “The Dark Side of Camelot” by Seymour Hersh. It has extended discussions of Bobby’s rabid hatred of Jews and gays, not to mention a reference to how JFK described the newly liberated African nations.
Then there was the patriarch of the clan, old man Joe. One of his granddaughters compiled a book of his letters, and you won’t believe Joe’s anti-Semitic ravings. Think “Mein Kampf.” For a different take on the same subject, check out “Mr. S.” by George Jacobs, who was
Frank Sinatra’s valet.
Jacobs, who was black, recounts old man Joe’s visits to Palm Springs, where he regaled all concerned, including the high-class hookers Sinatra imported from Hollywood for Joe’s entertainment, with jokes so vile that I can’t even hint at them here.
Through working for Sinatra, Jacobs wrote, he met all the big-time gangsters of the day. But, he said, Joe Kennedy was by far the most loathsome of them.
“And he went to Harvard!” Jacobs marveled.
Then there was Bobby. He’s got all these fellowships and such named after him, not to mention some fund that his nutty daughter was using to bail thugs out of jail in New York. Ironic, much? As attorney general, Bobby signed off on the FBI bugging of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — some civil-rights crusader, right?
RFK had his reasons, of course. J. Edgar Hoover was basically blackmailing him over his brother’s assignations with an East German spy, who was, come to think of it, a Communist. So I guess that goes onto the positive side of the family’s PC legacy ledger in this new woke America.
Forget all the hagiographies of Bobby — start with the bio of Dr. Max Jacobson, better known as “Dr. Feelgood.” He supplied drugs to the president and Jackie, and Bobby used to scream at him in the White — see if you can guess what he called Dr. Jacobson.
It’s all in the bio of Dr. Feelgood, which you can pick up on any used book site starting at two bucks.
As for Teddy, all you need is three words: Mary Jo Kopechne.
Maybe you think all this rotten behavior by the Kennedys doesn’t matter at this late date. But if the past is prologue to tearing down statues and every other damn thing, then I’d like to start a chant:
“Hey hey ho ho, all them Kennedys got to go!”