Thirtieth anniversary of Kennedy assassination - 26 November 1993

I've always thought of anniversary, the turn of the year or literally the return of the year, I've always thought of it as a happy word, but there have been one or two anniversaries lately that considerably bruise the idea of an anniversary as a festive time.

I'd say that 10 years ago, less, most Americans asked to respond offhand to the prospect of 1992, the anniversary of Christopher Columbus limping ashore at San Salvador would have looked forward to it as an all-American fiesta, but in the meantime, a literature of disillusion had been spawned and when October 1992 arrived, there were very few fireworks and from one end of the Americas to the other many memorial parades, many trooping Indian tribes observing the 12 October as a day of mourning. What they were mourning was their experience, the native experience of the conquistadores, the conquistadors, the very name says conquest. And in the 15th century, the conquest by any European nation of a native society meant subjection, enslavement, rape, often torture and suppression of the native religion. It took about four centuries for intending conquerors – the French and the British are the best examples – to have the sense to let the subject peoples keep many of their mores and all of their religions.

The sudden revelation of all this last year in books and magazines and newspaper pieces can only mean that for a couple of centuries or so, the white man's settlement, conquest of the Americas must have been very badly taught in the schools. The truths revealed last year were always true, but had been quietly relegated to the shadows while the big spotlight was turned on the European, the white few of Columbus, as a master sailor an extremely courageous explorer, a remarkable commander, a visionary and a devout Catholic, all of which he was.

However, once the brutal side of the Spanish conquests became common knowledge, became in the past two years something of a publishing industry, it was not possible to say "well, too bad, let's forget that part and on the great October day, let's enjoy as John Adams recommended for 4 July – fireworks, parades, bands and general rejoicing". In fact, when that Columbus Day was over, the governors and the mayors not to mention members of Congress furnished sighs of relief that the few riots and eruptions of violence happened in only two or three countries and they were in Central and South America.

Well now, I have to say I believe very many Americans young and old will be greatly relieved that 22 November is over, not from any fear this time of protest, marches or riots, but relief from the sheer din of morbid nostalgia – 22 November, 30 years ago, 1963, was as everyone knows the assassination of President Kennedy. If disillusion with Columbus was a publishing industry, two industries based in the life of John Kennedy have flourished and overwhelmed us this past month or two. One is what you might call the Camelot industry, the perpetuation and embroidering of the beautiful myth taken from the Tennyson poem of an ideal small nation whose shining hour was the time it was presided over by a brave young king. The other a growth industry that gives no sign of stopping growing is the Kennedy conspiracy industry and to say much about it, would only massage the sales representatives of that feverish speciality.

Let me just say, I have no peculiar or privilege knowledge of the affair, I have fairly credible credentials: I was there at the time, I practically wrote the next days issue of the English newspaper for which I was at the time the chief American correspondent. I read every word of the Warren Commission's report, which by the way was a commission of able, inquisitive and honourable men, none of them so far as I know crippled by a hobbyhorse. Subsequently, I read the early books and a summary of the, was it 1974, House committee's renewed enquiry and of course like everybody who was at the time a senescent adult, I have paid attention to most of the following reports and theories and revised versions and I will say "I do not believe that the president was killed on the orders of the Kremlin, Fidel Castro, Lyndon B Johnson, J Edgar Hoover, Mao Tse-tung, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Carrie Nation or Dr Crippin.

I lean to the belief that a very forlorn agitated lonely psychopath named Lee Harvey Oswald did it without help or coaching and as for the maze of motives that the conspiracy boys and girls would have you thread through, it seems to me that the likeliest is one small enough to seem trivial to the big apocalyptic revisionists but big enough to have inspired some of the world's greatest literature, including Othello and Madame Bovary namely Oswald's false suspicion, which his widow says, playing him at the time, that she adored Kennedy and was at the same time sleeping with an FBI agent. So far as I'm concerned there's no more to say.

About the, about the mythical kingdom of Camelot, which during the run of the fanciful musical with the same name came to be merged with the fact of the Kennedy presidency, we can only say now it must show that nations like individuals have a constant yearning for leaders who are largely more heroic than life and John Kennedy and his wife arrived as something quite new in the history of the presidency, a beautiful young couple. I don't know of any other president's wife who was beautiful and if we have to indulge a prejudice in favour of say Martha Washington and/or Grace Coolidge we can say for sure that neither of their husbands could be called handsome, so what was wrong about having a handsome young president with a beautiful wife? Nothing except we went on from there to romanticise their public life, the private life seemed blissfully right, a delusion that was not shared by the White House press corps, but in those days one of the taboos that was observed and never talked about was a taboo against writing about the sexual peccadilloes of the president, if any.

A White House butler who wrote, ooh 50 years ago, a memoir of the presidents he'd served described President Harding as a lady's man, but only in the opposite sense to his characterisation of Teddy Roosevelt as a man's man. Fortunately for John Kennedy, the taboo against writing about or publicly disclosing the sexual habits of public men were still in force. If it had not been so, I doubt he'd ever have been able to run for public office.

As it was after the grim years of the Second War and the unexpectedly bitter ordeal of the Korean War and a stretch of government by late middle-aged men, it was a tonic thing to see a young handsome president up there on his brilliant frosty inauguration day saying the torch has been passed to a younger generation, even though all the equals he had to deal with were the old men of the recent wars. We readily embraced the glitter and charm and promise of a kind of chivalry in the presidency. This romantic hunger was so strong that when the ill conceived and wretchedly executed the invasion of Cuba failed miserably and Kennedy said he was sorry for it, his popular standing in the polls went soaring.

A journalist I know wrote movingly the other day about his boyhood view of Kennedy as a magical little guy on a black and white television set who, although he was a rich politician from Boston, I believed represented me and understood me. This boy enjoyed chanting over what he called the sing-song atheisms of Ted Sorenson, he was the author of the Kennedy inaugural speech "ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country".

Well, my journalist – now I guess crowding 50 or so – wrote on this 22 November: Kennedy was the first great fraud of the post-modern era. He was the surprised and grateful object of a massed illusion, he came from a state where electing Irish politicians by fraud was an art form; his father was a bandit and a profiteer; JFK never won a majority in a national election; it seems likely that the election of 1960 was stolen for him by the Daley machine in Chicago – that is I think almost certainly true, but as for the other judgements, they are too brutal, they are the cynical outcries of a disappointed sentimentalist.

We should not now blame Kennedy for our misplaced romanticism, he brought to the presidency the energy of an optimistic spirit. On the initiative of the suggestion of a congressman from Wisconsin he invented the Peace Corps, he got us deeply involved in Vietnam, in the early assertion of the civil rights of blacks, he did use the national guard with as he would have said vigour where Eisenhower had used it with a reluctance. He had wit and a low-key gift of Irish blarney, he was disorganised and acted too often on impulse, he had no gift for cajoling and nudging and arm twisting the Congress, he once called Congress the enemy.

When he died, there was something like 90 bills that were dead or dying. Luckily, he was succeeded by Lyndon Johnson, no charmer but the best con man who ever converted a political enemy, who got more than two thirds of those bills through the Congress in the following six months. It's been remarked that when an American president dies a halo descends on him and stays there with his memory. This is not true of McKinley, it's very true of Lincoln and Kennedy the debates about their true worth still go on or perhaps only about Kennedy. Lincoln has almost been sanctified and the bad and arbitrary things about him are buried in his grave, let it be so once for all with John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

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