JFK

This is an interesting read on some of the facts surrounding the Kennedy assassination.  A few things pop out.

First, it should be said that Kennedy was something of a moral sewer.  Great image: young, handsome, eloquent, both Harvard and Irish.  But underneath it all was someone who was perfectly comfortable using others, especially women for sex.  His younger brother, Teddy, obviously inherited that behavior, I'm not sure how much Robert did, though he, too, clearly cheated on his wife.  The constant nostalgia for the Kennedys is a great example of how vacant celebrity politics are, whether it's the glamorous Kennedy clan or a reality TV vulgarian.  Kennedy spent most days medicated beyond belief on a cocktail of illegal drugs.  That was the guy who helmed the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Second, the fever swamps of right wing paranoia have deep roots.  Dallas in 1963 was basically a geographic expression of InfoWars today.  In '63, the John Birch Society was considered the lunatic fringe of American politics, yet it was a vibrant presence in Dallas and other Southern cities.  These were the nutjobs who believed flouridation was a Communist plot.  Of course today, we have nothing like that.  The year after Kennedy's death, Richard Hofstadter would write The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which remains a critical piece of scholarship in looking at the fringes - especially on the right - of American politics. 

JFK's assassination was widely considered to be the kick-off of the craziness of the 1960s.  His administration was the last of the 1950s, whereas LBJ oversaw the dramatic expansion of civil rights and public goods that radicalized white resentment and led to Nixon.  Vietnam and the fissures it tore in American society were real, but as we see today, it was largely the backlash to civil rights and the providing of public goods to "those people" that powered the rise of the Reagan Revolution and modern conservatism.  Kennedy's death in and of itself wasn't the reason why this happened, except to the degree it lead to LBJ having large majorities to pass the legislation that created the white racial backlash.