It’s hard to know how the Civil Rights Act would have gone without the assassination. Kennedy was the one who proposed it and sent the legislation to Congress, where it was strangled by the Senate Rules Committee.
No question that in 1964 Johnson had the Senate smarts and the good will of the public in ways that Kennedy didn’t in 1963. And he just barely got the Bill through after historic fillibustering and a weakened compromise measure. The final votes were almost pure North/South splits.
If the Bill had failed under Kennedy, it would still have been a major campaign issue because that was *the *issue of the times. Kennedy could have run against the South either way; that was the wining hand since the bulk of the electoral votes was in the North. Rockefeller would have a hard time defending the opposition, as Goldwater did, so it would have deprived him of a major issue. Goldwater was out of step with the majority and ran an “agin” campaign. Those never work and it’s hard to see how 1964 could have been the exception.
We’ll never know. I keep insisting, though, that it takes extraordinary circumstances to defeat a sitting president. In any ordinary world, Kennedy would have been re-elected.
This is mildly off-topic, perhaps but one thing I’ve never understood is how Kennedy could be such a womanizer if, according to BrainGlutton’s link, he suffered from so many debilitating conditions that he experienced daily agony. Yes, there are any number of situations where he could have been the passive partner; but really, a guy who can’t even reach across his desk to get a piece of paper due to pain probably isn’t spending a lot of time trying to get a piece of ass. I’ve often wondered if JFK’s womanizing was purposely exaggerated/fabricated to hide how severe his health problems were.
My history teacher was an old retired Army officer (served c. 1948-1968). He once remarked that everyone in the officer corps knew Kennedy was a notorious womanizer, and - in this man’s words - “Jack favored blow jobs because his bad back didn’t permit him to have normal sex.” Who knows how accurate the claim was, but it was a heck of a lecture.
And I never did ask the old guy what constituted “normal sex.”
He was a notorious womanizer before his marriage. It’s clear that he drove a huge wedge between him and Jackie from his dalliances while a Senator. We have convincing testimony from his partners of his sexual prowling while in the White House. Recent histories of Hoover claim that he had a huge file on Kennedy’s affairs. Him and Marilyn Monroe? Maybe, maybe not. But even the most favorable biographies talk a lot about sex.
Yes, you can wonder how he found the energy. But the serious answer is that he had good days and bad days. He seemed to spend all his good days thinking about sex. Nor did he have to go chasing women. He had what we would today call a posse who would steer women to him. He didn’t need a lot of time for this. Part of an hour, maybe. If you reduce it to that, you can explain a lot.
Health issues and affairs are two different tracks of media blindness.
FDR and Kennedy’s physical conditions were down played in the press because it was considered disrespectful and rude to address such issues. This still holds in the modern media, though to a much lesser extent than in times past (possibly the public health care debate combined with attack dog tactics may have ended even that altogether). In fact, these medical problems were fairly open secrets, but not considered news by the mainstream media.
Sexual scandals were not reported in the days of FDR and Kennedy partly because such matters were not considered suitable for public discussion, but mostly because so many people lived in glass houses. The Clinton scandal resulted in a lot of broken glass all around Washington. More recent events show that the media no longer considers this forbidden territory.
Probably because it attracts public attention better than a President’s physical impairments, even if, as in Kennedy’s case, the impairment was caused in combat, when an enemy ship collided with his PT Boat and injured him (and he still rescued two other wounded sailors). And FDR had polio; when I was a child we were taught to sympathize with polio victims; I know FDR endured so much invective directed at him by Republicans sore at him for defeating their candidates but he was man enough to ignore it. It’s a pity his opponents were not man ernough not to use it. I consider it unthinkable to jeer or belittle a man in a wheelchair.
And sticking to the issues doesn’t sell newspapers or keep TV viewers tuned in for commercials. :mad: