Hitler!
I have to go with JFK. I don’t think anyone has bit the posthumous dust in quite so complete a fashion as JFK. Even his greatest sympathizers can’t deny what a sleaze bucket he was. Read the latest issue of The Atlantic where one of his great admirers pens an article admitting what an absolutely atrocious person he was, but she loves him nonetheless because of the way he looked lovingly at his kids!
Honestly, I was born in the mid-sixties, and JFK worship was one of the principles of my youth. But today? Christ, there isn’t an article or book written about him that doesn’t detail behaviour more sordid than the last article or book. It’s astonishing how far he’s fallen. The only other name in this thread where the person was positively idolized is Paterno, and as noted, he fell in stature before passing.
First one I thought of.
That death by accidental auto-erotic asphyxiation thing is by far the most humiliating way to be found dead.
Walter Cronkite-a prejudiced, lying creep-and cheap to boot!
Along with JFK-the entire Kennedy family-closest thing to a Mafia crime family . The odd thing-the family was revered for years-till the truth started coming out. The latest action: the family “gave” the Hyannisport House (built by Joe Kennedy) to a foundation controlled by the family. This means that:
-the family got a tremendous tax write-off for the value of the property
-the Town of Hyannis now loses $50,000/year in property taxes
-the taxpayers of MA now pay to maintain the place
-the Kennedy family gets to use it for free!
Such a generous gift!
Chris Benoit? Admittedly the pre-disgrace loving tribute didn’t last long, but I distinctly remember seeing some!
Alfred Hitchcock has been getting some pretty bad press recently due to stories Tippi Hedren has told about him.
Charles Kuralt. After he died, it came out he had a second, secret family no one knew about.
Lenin. It took a long time before the statues started coming down.
Yup. Not retconning. Much was already known about him/the family back in his day. Media still kept private life somewhat private. There was some roman a clef novel modeled on the Kennedy family and Joe’s ambitions for his descendents…
António Egas Moniz, who won the Nobel prize for developing lobotomy as a cure for mental illness. After his death in 1955, the procedure was rapidly discredited, and his reputation along with it.
He was a meglomaniac, no doubt. But the cross-dressing thing is a base canard.
Could you help me with how you formed this opinion?
Mary Wollstonecraft was a well-respected writer until her husband published a memoir of her posthumously. He was motivated by sincere affection and admiration, but the details of her rather unorthodox life (affairs, a daughter born out of wedlock, suicide attempts) ruined her reputation for a couple hundred years.
Many if not most Roman emperors.
That and he fabricated having access and interviewing Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s papers keepers have detailed records of whom he met and when, and Ambrose’s stuff does not match up. It may be that they never show any meetings/interviews as I recall.
That said, Ambrose plagarized sections, not whole chapters. He was an entertaining writer.
As for JFK being a philanderer, I could care less. I’m 50 and have known about it since the early 70s. Man cheats on wife is a failing, but not on a Joe Paterno level. And I’m sorry about how David Carradine died. It doesn’t make me think less of him, other than that it was stupid.
Right, men in power are horndogs. Big deal. JFK was one of our greatest presidents. I think the GOP has embarked on another of their disinformation campaigns here.
I don’t think David Carradine counts because the point of this thread was “someone who fell from grace after death.” In other words, you have to be highly regarded first before you can fall. If you’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel, it’s not a fall. It would be like Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, or one of the previous winners of Survivor being caught in a child molestation scandal.
Overall though, I don’t think there’s anybody who became really hated after their death (with the prerequisite of being loved during their lives) because there’s always die-hard fans who will love them forever and history tends to forget the worst of what they did.
My vote would be for Thomas Jefferson. I think having sex with your slaves is one of the worst things someone can do.
Oh, thought of more: Todd Bridges and Dana Plato, although their later actions could have been caused by childhood trauma.
I think the documented sexual orgies and affairsMartin Luther King indulged in did put a bit of tarnish on the man as a moral leader, although his civil rights legacy is paramount in his historical impact.
That’s what is called “Presentism”= judging the heroes of the past by the standards of today.