Kennedy Brothers

This is one of the most famous pictures of Barack Obama, immortalised into a poster. But why did this poster look so familiar when I first saw it? Did it remind me of anybody?




Interesting, eh?

The last of the Kennedy brothers has died. Let’s look at the other Kennedys.

Joseph Kennedy, the father
He was always an ambitious person, who wanted his sons to succeed in politics. He himself was the US ambassador to the UK until just before WWII, although he made the fatal mistake of supporting Adolf Hitler.

Joe Kennedy Jr
He was the star of the family since he was young. Always more hardworking and driven by his brothers. He was the family’s best hope to become the president of the United States. Unfortunately during WWII, he was shot down and he died.

John F Kennedy
He was a very charismatic character. Even though he was an indifferent student at Harvard, and he didn’t pass many bills when he was a congressman or senator, there was no doubting that he was very intelligent and hungry for knowledge. He ran for president against Nixon, and won a very narrow victory. As with the victory of Bush 2 40 years later, it was achieved by some voting impropriety, although this wasn’t revealed until much later.

He had his flaws, as is revealed later: he was a serial womaniser, and he also had a whole list of health problems which suggested that even if he wasn’t shot, he would have died young. The fact that he was able to conceal these flaws from the public indicates that the US presidency is very different today from what it used to be like in the past.

But at that time he was a shining hope to millions. He lived in a moment where a lot of Americans were very idealistic about the future. A big generation of baby boomers were young people then, and they identified with the president.

His performance as a president was decidedly mixed: there are people who blamed him for the failure of his attempt to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The USSR leader, Khrushchev thought he was a weakling and put up the Berlin wall. During the Cuban missile crisis, rash Soviet leaders lead the US and the USSR closer to World War III than any point before or since. But he managed to lead the US out of the crisis, and further moved to improve the relationship with the USSR.

Kennedy was known to have fought for the rights of black people, although it was Johnson who signed the Civil Rights act after the death of JFK.

It’s impossible to tell what he would have done with the Vietnam War. He was president when it could have gone any way. He promised to support the South Vietnam leader, but did not follow through enough on his promise, and the South Vietnam leader was murdered. As it turned out, Johnson, who took over for him, was instrumental in escalating the conflict into a full blown war. But some people suggest that if Kennedy had lived, he might have found some better way to deal with Vietnam.

His death is one of the great unsolved mysteries in the USA. The official explanation, that he was killed by a lone gunman operating alone, is not believed by most people. There were reports that people heard gunshots from a few different places. They caught the only gunman caught, Lee Harvey Ostwald, but soon after that, and live on national television a policeman, purportedly angry about JFK being killed, shot Lee Harvey Ostwald. They never got the chance to question Ostwald about his motives, or who, if anybody, set him up.

JFK had enemies. His brother, Robert Kennedy was the Attorney General, and a great enemy of the mafia. Even more so, since they actually enlisted the help of the mafia

There also exists great controversy about Kennedy about his attitude towards the Cold War, because there is no consensus about whether he is a hawk or a dove. There are some who said that Lee Harvey Ostwald was pro-Castro, and he was shooting JFK to pay back for the Bay of Pigs. There are others who said that JFK was making a tentative rapproachment with other countries in South America, and was planning to seek warmer ties with Castro. The CIA didn’t like that, and they got involved in a conspiracy to have JFK murdered.

The fact that there is no one convincing explanation for JFK’s murder left a sour taste in the mouths of a generation of Americans. They said that the 1960s began with a lot of hope, but for them the death of a leader they loved was the beginning of the disappointment of these hopes.

It was generally felt that Kennedy was still in the phase where he was learning how to become a good president. He did not have very clear objectives, but he had the political skill to overcome a lot of his opponents. But not a sniper’s bullet.

Robert F Kennedy
He was a very strange person. He had two sides, one of them was the angel, who was very idealistic about destroying the mafia. He was one of the toughest prosecutors around. But he was also very vengeful towards his enemies, and for some reason, one of his enemies was LBJ, the vice president and next president of the US.

I had just read the story of Bobby. There are plenty of people out there who believe that there was a conspiracy out there who murdered JFK, and in that book, Bobby was one of them. But he was going to keep quiet about his beliefs until he got elected president, and then he got all the power to do whatever he wanted to do.

He was close to being elected president. He more or less secured the nomination to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president by the time he was murdered. If he ran against Nixon, he might have defeated him, instead of Nixon defeating Humphrey. A lot of things could have been different. Nixon was president because RFK died, and Johnson was president because JFK died. Both of them were responsible, more than anybody else, for the Vietnam war being what it was.

If you believe some accounts, he was reaching out to the communist countries. He wanted to make peace with Castro, and with the Soviet Union. After all, his brother had almost stumbled onto nuclear war with the Soviets. You just wonder if the world would have been very much different, and the cold war ended very differently, if he got to be president.

Ted Kennedy
Ted Kennedy, the one who died recently, was probably somebody they thought could become a president. But there was a scandal which put an end to all that: he drove somebody home late at night, while drunk, and killed her in a road accident.

Still, he managed to be a long-serving member of the Senate, and managed to make a big impact. There were even some people who proclaimed him to be the most important of the Kennedys. I don’t know about that.

Well, that’s the end of them brothers, I suppose. It’s been a great ride.