In 1976, Jimmy Carter’s campaign portrait was lit to make him look like John F. Kennedy. In 1980, when Teddy did run, a handsome young senator from Delaware supported the incumbent instead. All the same, Joe Biden made himself out to be Camelot’s proper successor, not JFK’s youngest brother: “If you’re looking for an Irish Catholic Democrat to support,” he said in a lukewarm speech for Carter during the Pennsylvania primary, “wait until 1984 and one of us will be back.”
The actual Kennedyesque contender that year was Gary Hart, but by 1988 Biden did run, vying with Hart for the vaunted sobriquet. In 1992, a picture of a 16-year-old Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK, destiny written in his eyes, helped manufacture the legend of the first president born of the new generation of Americans, to whom Kennedy famously passed the torch.
No such luck in 2004 for John Forbes Kerry, who a prep school classmate recalled “signed his papers JFK,” as a way of “telling people that he’s going to be president.”
Sixteen years later, the baby boomers of the Democratic establishment were still at it, backing Joseph Kennedy III for Senate in Massachusetts, even though a perfectly competent Democrat already held the seat. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee even broke its cardinal rule to protect incumbents, but was unsuccessful. A Kennedy served in every Congress from 1947 to 2021 except one; Ed Markey’s defeat of Joe III in Massachusetts broke the cycle.
This is a cult, and it is bipartisan. Even now, JFK is the only former president with an approval rating almost as high among Republicans—89 percent—as among Democrats. Kennedy worship encompasses High Church Republicanism (silly arguments that if only time had stood still, people would properly understand that JFK was a conservative) to Low Church Republicans (the QAnon faith that JFK Jr. faked his plane crash in 1999 and is secretly Donald Trump’s right-hand man). Dead Kennedys even spoke during the 1988 vice-presidential debate. Forty-one-year-old Sen. Dan Quayle, questioned about his experience, said he had just as much as JFK when he ran for president. Lloyd Bentsen, famously, shot him down: “Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
By 2024, however, I presumed the cult had lost its magic. I was wrong. And thereby hangs a tale.