I’m sorry to revisit the New Yorker so soon after eviscerating its Netflix tribute to itself, but David Remick, that magazine’s fatuous editor, has forced me to it. In a superbly silly piece titled “Trump Dishonors the Kennedy Center,” Remnick argues that because JFK was an artsy sophisticate and Trump is an unlettered philistine, the former deserves to have the nation’s official performance center named after him and Trump doesn’t.
[W]hy doesn’t Remnick … try to make a cause célèbre out of reversing the preposterous 2008 rechristening of the Triborough Bridge as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge?
Remnick’s opening example of Kennedy’s literary and artistic refinement is that a month before his assassination he delivered a high-minded speech at Amherst honoring the recently deceased Robert Frost and eulogizing poetry generally. Remnick quotes from it approvingly: “When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.” Just wondering what moment in any of their lives did old Joseph P. Kennedy, or any of his sons, turn to poetry in order to become less arrogant? More from the speech: “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” Really? What’s cleansing about Osip Mandelbaum’s “Ode to Stalin”? Or Guo Moruo’s poems in celebration of Mao? Or Ezra Pound’s antisemitic “Canto XLV” and T.S. Eliot’s antisemitic “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”?
Then there’s this: “For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.” What does this even mean? It’s ersatz uplift — a stupid generalization of the sort that cynical politicians serve up on such occasions. Even Remnick acknowledges that the speech wasn’t written by JFK himself — that purported poetry lover — but by one of his courtiers, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
As if it supported his argument for JFK’s sophistication, Remnick lists some of the artists who performed at the White House during his presidency: Pablo Casals, the American Ballet Theater, the Paul Winter Sextet. Yes, and Nixon hosted Duke Ellington and Van Cliburn, Carter hosted Vladimir Horowitz, Leontyne Price, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Reagan hosted Pinchas Zuckerman and Jessye Norman, and George H. W. Bush hosted Mstislav Rostropovic, Itzhak Perlman, and Isaac Stern. So what?
Yes, after the Eisenhowers there was indeed a new emphasis on culture at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But it wasn’t JFK’s doing. It was Jackie’s.
Nor did JFK have anything to do with the idea for the Kennedy Center. Remnick himself admits that it was the Eisenhower administration that came up with the idea of a national performance space; after JFK’s assassination, his name was tacked onto it. As Philip Terzian commented on X the other day, in reply to a rant about the name change by Jack’s niece Maria Shriver: “It should never have been named for your Uncle Jack in the first place. The whole project was President Eisenhower’s; ‘Kennedy’ was imposed in the spasm of name changes after his assassination.”
Indeed: JFK wasn’t from New York, but on December 24, 1963, Idlewild Airport was turned into Kennedy Airport; JFK wasn’t from Florida, but on November 29, 1963, Cape Canaveral became Cape Kennedy. (The cape reverted to its original name in 1973.) As f or the naming of the Kennedy Center, Remnick puts it this way: “LBJ renamed the center as a living memorial to JFK.” Hey, it’s the least you can do when you’ve had a guy killed. (Yes, I tend to buy Roger Stone’s theory about what happened in Dallas.)
Before the Kennedy Center clamor began, Remnick and his ilk were kicking up a fuss about Trump’s ballroom, calling it a defilement of the White House. Never mind that a long list of earlier presidents had made major adjustments in the Executive Mansion; it was FDR, notably, who added the East Wing, which the ballroom will replace. Remnick didn’t mention in his paean to JFK that during those brief shining days of Camelot, JFK defiled the White House constantly by sneaking his mistresses into it, among them Mafia boss Sam Giancana’s moll, Judith Campbell Exner. Speaking of defilement: in recent years, left-wing activists have razed statues of Washington, Jefferson, Grant, and other great Americans. Has Remnick, in his passion for the preservation of tributes to American heroes, ever denounced any of this?
Repeatedly in his Kennedy Center article, Remnick takes unfair shots at Trump. He describes the renaming of the Kennedy Center as the product of “the egocentric exertions of the current President and his obedient underlings and friends.” What president hasn’t been egocentric? And who ever had a more obedient army of underlings than JFK — including not only Schlesinger, who wrote that Amherst speech, but also Ted Sorensen, who wrote While England Slept, for which JFK (thanks to his rich, powerful father’s behind-the-scenes exertions) was awarded a Pulitzer? As for having devoted friends, it was JFK’s pal Frank Sinatra who was sent to Chicago to fix the 1960 Illinois vote with the above-mentioned Giancana.
Remnick actually sneers that Trump has had “some heavy-lidded meetings in the White House (Wake up, Mr. President!)” — this about a man who may be the most energetic and productive president ever, and whose famously drowsy immediate predecessor spent four years napping on the beach while autopen-wielding staffers ran the country — a scandal of historic proportions that Remnick’s magazine has never dared touch.
Similarly, Remnick gloats about a supposed drop in Trump’s popularity, but neglects to mention that support for the Democratic Party is at a record low. He maintains that Trump “simply cannot tolerate the degree of freedom and independence that art and artists require” — when in fact it was Obama, and then Biden, under whom the canceling of conservative comedians and other creative types reached its zenith.
Remnick’s article ends where it began — namely, with absurd, pretentious overgeneralizations: “art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.” Really? Ever heard of Clifford Odets, a master of theatrical agitprop? Or Arthur Miller, ditto? Or Oliver Stone, who has directed documentaries celebrating Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Hugo Chávez? On my bookshelves is a 2003 anthology entitled Poets against the War, containing over 200 highly propagandistic poems condemning George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. (After Obama inherited the war, incidentally, most of these poets became strangely silent.)
“In free society,” writes Remnick, “art is not a weapon, and it does not belong to the sphere of polemics and ideology.” This from an editor whose magazine, under his watch, has devoted itself to polemical articles, to glowing reviews of movies, books, and other artworks that push the progressive narrative, and to putdowns of artworks that go against the leftist grain.
Needless to say, Remnick has been far from alone in condemning the Kennedy Center name change. Along with Maria Shriver, several other members of the Kennedy family also joined in, parroting Remnick’s portrayal of JFK as high-culture maven and of Trump as a bum. It took Richard Grenell, the center’s president, to point out that its infrastructure, finances, and programming were a disaster for years; now Trump has fixed those problems, and the place, thanks to him, is back on track — in fact, it’s better than ever. If all those Kennedys love the center so much, why didn’t they try to address those challenges years ago?
The answer to that one is easy: the Kennedys, like so many Democrats, are too often about the high-flowing rhetoric, not the nuts and bolts — the poetic, you might say, not the practical. When they want to show that JFK was a great man, they don’t point to his record but quote lines from his speeches, notably his inaugural address (also written by Sorensen). For there aren’t really many accomplishments to point to: just as Obama’s perceived weakness made Putin feel he could take Crimea with impunity — ditto Biden in regard to the Donbas — the major event of JFK’s presidency, which occurred because Khrushchev saw him as a feeble customer after eight years of Ike, was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost ended in a nuclear holocaust.
In closing, here’s an idea: instead of getting worked up about Trump renaming the Kennedy Center, why doesn’t Remnick — whose magazine is, after all, supposed to be focused on New York, not Washington, D.C. — try to make a cause célèbre out of reversing the preposterous 2008 rechristening of the Triborough Bridge as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge — as if there weren’t an actual New Yorker who deserved that honor? Not that I really care much about the bridge. It’s just that it would be nice, after all these years, to finally start winding down the Kennedy-worship. Besides, if the Kennedys want a bridge named after a member of their family, there’s one on Chappaquiddick Island that’s the perfect candidate for such an honor.
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