Behind The Grassy Knoll

I thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Marr's hatchet job on JFK. Hubert Humphrey would have been a much better President, and in domestic policy terms LBJ actually was one. How refreshing to hear on the BBC that Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech was three and a half years into Kennedy's Presidency, because even then a dream was still all that it was. However, if only that conference of Texan Protestant ministers had known in 1960 how much better for their own dearest causes it would have been to have had for most of the decade then beginning at President who did indeed feel the need for "the approval of the Vatican". Unlike his much younger brother - a different generation of American, of Democrat, of Catholic, of whatever you like - JFK was no liberal.

As Marr pointed out, Kennedy and Nixon had very few political differences. But there were two exceptions to that, and neither could have been more important. Kennedy had abandoned his roots in the America First Committee, other stalwarts of which had included Norman Thomas, the anti-Communist campaigner to build a Farm-Labor party, and Sargent Shriver, the still-living subsequent Peace Corps and Special Olympics founder, McGovern running mate, Kennedy brother-in-law, and robust pro-life campaigner within the Democratic Party. And, as Pat Buchanan explained to Marr, Kennedy was far less of a Civil Rights sympathiser than was Nixon, which was why his Presidency was marked by absolutely no legislation in that cause. On either point, Humphrey would have been infinitely better. On Civil Rights, Johnson actually was.