What exactly was the whole ‘Camelot’ comparison with JFK about?
In an interview with a journalist a few weeks after the assassination, Jackie Kennedy mentioned that JFK was a huge fan of the musical Camelot, and played the soundtrack album seemingly every night.
Journalists took to referring to the Kennedy Administration as Camelot because of the symbolism; Camelot (in most telling of the Arthurian legends) is a hopeful, shining example of how government is intended to work, but lasts for far too short a time.
Right. The important point is that the image arose after JFK’s assassination, when all doubts and criticisms were cast aside and he was transformed into a martyred mythic hero leaving behind a young beautiful wife and small children.
Arthur Schlesinger, partisan defender of the Kennedy Administration, was heavily responsible for creating the Camelot myth.
A worthwhile counterpoint to Schlesinger’s hero worship is Seymour Hersh’s “The Dark Side of Camelot”.
It is worth noting how closely the show’s run on Broadway matched JFK’s tenure as president: Wikipedia says:
Camelot opened on Broadway at the Majestic Theatre on December 3, 1960, and closed on January 5, 1963
It’s just a model…
I guess I’m an old fart who remembers what it was like then. From January 1960 to December 1963 it never rained until after sundown and by 8 AM the morning fog had flown. Don’t let it be forgot that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment…
… except that it DID rain after sundown, and there was fog quite often. What made that era special was that the media played nice and shielded us from seeing any of the bad stuff.
If anyone wants to discuss whether things are better nowadays, when the media are so eager to show us the bad stuff whether it is true or not, take it to Great Debates. My point is many Americans were indeed enamored of Kennedy as their leader, and the Camelot metaphor was very appropriate (until we started taking a microscope to it).
Agreed. I still admire JFK, for all his faults, and recommend Arthur Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days and Theodore Sorensen’s Kennedy for very interesting accounts of those years.
You can hear a bit of the title song from the musical in this trailer for Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as, well, you know: Jackie Official Trailer - Teaser (2016) - Natalie Portman Movie - YouTube.
SwissMan wrote:
Jackie Kennedy mentioned that JFK was a huge fan of the musical Camelot, and played the soundtrack album seemingly every night.
Tiny correction: The movie didn’t come out until 1967. He probably played the “original cast” album.
Minor correction: Surely you meant January 1961, when JFK was inaugurated. And you probably mean November 63, unless perhaps Camelot continued a while, while the nation mourned.
We also listened to it incessantly, with Richard Burton and Julie Andrews in the original cast. Of course we also listened to the First Family albums, with Vaugn Meader. I still remember many of the punch lines from those albums. After Nov. 22, 1963 we never listened again until about 5 years had passed and it was OK to poke fun at JFK, LBJ, Jackie, and the kids again.
We took more than 7 days to wind down from Camelot. There was that pesky Jack Ruby/Lee Harvey Oswald thing too.
As another old fart, I’d like to share some thoughts that might be better placed in MPSIMS, but it’s on-topic, so here goes.
As a life-long science fiction fan, I often daydreamed of going back in time to November 21st (yes, the twenty-first) to warn my parents that they shouldn’t make plans for the weekend. I was too young to follow politics at the time, but the three-day shutdown of television (from the assassination until the funeral) impressed upon me how serious the situation was.
That memory was with me for almost 40 years, until tv shut down for two weeks in September 2001. And now we have the coronavirus. It hasn’t shut down the television, but it has disrupted our lives in ways we wouldn’t even have dreamt of beforehand. And that’s the story I tell my grandchildren to help them get my perspective on these things.
Let’s not go to Camelot, it’s a silly place.
That took place two days after the assassination.
You may like Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63, in which a Maine teacher from the present day goes back in time to try to prevent the President’s assassination. A great read and pretty accurate in its depiction of what otherwise happened in Dallas that fateful November, from all I’ve read since.
Yes, it was great. A wonderful example of how books can go into more detail than movies can. Besides all the JFK stuff, he masterfully showed so many little things about life 60 years ago - his descriptions of the flavorful soda, the traffic on the street, and so on.
I wish the movie (on Hulu) had shown more of the Yellow Card Man, but otherwise a decent condensation of the book.
I do remember the Camelot parallel before the assassination.
Maybe it was that we were near Broadway, so we were more aware of the shows. I’d figure someone in the Midwest, south, or Pacific Coast was not as aware of the show.