This is going to be a tough diary to write because it will border on breaking the rules of introducing conspiracy theories into the assassination of JFK but that is clearly not my intention.
I am a huge scholar of everything that has to do with the Kennedy killing not because I want to come out on one side or other of the issue but because of the passion and intrigue it brings out in the debate. There are compelling arguments on both sides of the issue. What I love about the research though is it gives us this extremely chilling look into the characters that inhabit the dark corridors of power and the huge potential they exhibit to resort to lethal methods to push their ideology.
I am certain that people on all sides of the theories of that horrible day in Dallas can agree on one thing. There were numerous groups and individuals that had not only the motivation but the means to carry out an assassination of the most powerful man in the world and Kennedy clearly had to know the risks. My contention is that Obama's eyes are being opened daily to those risks as well and what we're seeing in policy decisions may be a result of the calculations of how best to deal with that terrible weight.
Kennedy came into office in an ideological whirlwind similar to the atmosphere surrounding Obama. He was young and articulate, ready to take on the establishment and put his own spin on things. He stumbled quickly and got a two by four to the head with the Bay of Pigs mess. He appointed his brother as Attorney General and proceeded to go after the Mob with furor despite having close family ties to many of the individuals he'd be targeting and having received political assistance from them for his election. Kennedy began making sweeping changes to the CIA and his enemies list grew by leaps and bounds.
In hindsight he was absolutely on the right side ethically in all of these choices but I'm also certain that the people charged with keeping him safe were at wits end. They had to have seen the risk he was accumulating with all the fronts he was opening and, if they weren't advising him to the dangers, they were severely negligent in their duties.
Very few of us can imagine what it's like to have so many people out there with evil intent to you and/or your family but there must be a debilitating side to it. Any normal human would be hurt physically and mentally by that weight.
Barrack Obama came into office with a larger enemy list than Jack Kennedy began with. Kennedy's initial detractors were primarily ultra-conservatives and anti-Catholics. Obama has those basic groups (except the anti-Catholic group would just be it's polar opposite) and adds on a huge scary racist element along with the idiots that still think him a Muslim. I'm certain the Secret Service is working harder today than they ever have.
Kennedy chose to ignore the threats and go full steam against the powerful. Had he been alive today I have no doubt he'd have his brother investigating the warrantless wiretapping program and have every intent to have heads roll within the intelligence community for their role in domestic spying and torture. I also am sure Obama shares that same desire to clean up that mess.
Kennedy proved however that he had a huge fatalism and a major propensity to live on the edge. Just his history of infidelity with very public women proves that. It was almost as if the man was daring people to go after him. There was an element of his personality that enjoyed walking up to tigers and poking them in the eye.
Regardless of who fired the fatal shot on that day in Dallas, the fact remains that Kennedy's actions in the Oval Office and his rashness in taking bold actions (no matter how warranted) gave us a huge list of people that could easily have had their finger on that trigger.
So here's my challenge to all the people judging Obama for not immediately going for prosecutions in torture cases and Constitutional abuses of the prior administration. I think we can agree that investigations in these areas are going to put the spotlight on some very dangerous characters within our intelligence community and, while these folks definitely have it coming, they can be lethal when pushed into a corner.
But is this the time for our President to add that many additional names to the list of people that want to do him harm? Is it maybe possible that the Secret Service and other Washington sages have privately confided to Obama that there becomes a point where the list becomes so overwhelming that they can no longer keep track of every survivalist, lone skinhead, mobster, etc. that is acting suspiciously?
It seems to me we imagine our guy to be Harrison Ford creeping through the belly of Air Force One dispatching the terrorists one by one but that is so far from reality that it's laughable.
From how I see it, I don't want another Jack Kennedy in office because the bottom line is that no matter how good it felt looking at history and seeing a President that faced down the bad guys in the street and dared them to draw first, we have never recovered from watching him go down. No matter how tough a person may be, when they enter a fight with even a lesser opponent, anything can happen and a lucky punch or kick can cause the results to favor the evil and less talented side.
If, at the end of Obama's reign at President, he has not eroded significantly the Constitutional abuses we observed during Republican rule, then his legacy will indeed be hugely disappointing and I'll be eating my words. I believe though from watching this man's entire life history that he certainly must be just as enraged at where we've gone as any of his loudest detractors and that somewhere within all the mess he's been left to clean up there's a plan to slowly chip away at the evil. Maybe I'm delusional in that regard and as guilty of looking only for the good in people as someone attributing Harrison Ford-like powers to the President but, without that hope, life is not very compelling.
Barrack Obama to me has shown he's indeed smarter than Kennedy. Like a triage nurse he's taking the list of challenges we face and putting them on a priority list conscious of the fact that there are patients in front of him that, if they are elevated to the top too fast, will consume resources that can be better spent on ones that are truly at death's door.
Note:
Please don't make this diary into a debate about who killed Kennedy. I will not respond to any post that deals with that and those comments might even be worthy of hide ratings. If you have passion in that area, DKos is not the place for that discussion. There are numerous sites and forums out there pushing one theory or the other and it's more fascinating to me than many fiction novels but the discussion is cancer in this context.