Skanks Cashing In

[Bfgrn]

I'm not arguing with you there. I may understand where she was coming from and how screwed up she must have been with everything she had to deal with from JFK's screwing around to the fishbowl to the assassinations. But understanding and having some compassion isn't the same as saying she deserves sainthood. It's just more complicated than she's Mother Teresa or she's a skank, there's a whole lot in between.

Of course then the argument isn't as much fun.

Jackie may have been more put out at times, that Lem Billings, Jack's lifelong Choate friend had his own room at the White House.

American Chronicle | The Man who Loved Jack Kennedy

That's all pretty well known to anybody who's interested. And I do recognize it couldn't have been easy live her life and not get paranoid. But the fact is she did use Onassis for money and security, in a real way not much different from the women discussed earlier in the thread. The fact that her choices were hard ones doesn't give her a pass for that to any greater or lesser degree than it should for the others, some of whose choices were also not easy. That's not heartless, it's simply acknowledging the truth. Or is it her name that matters, and not her actions?

It has nothing to do with her name, and it has everything to do with HER life...

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde

 

[Bfgrn]

My grandfather was a hard man. My father said the only time he saw him cry was when they were watching the funeral procession and as the caisson rolled by, Jack jr. saluted his father.

I know this is one of the most frequently asked rhetorical questions, but I often wonder what life would be like had Kennedy not been assassinated.

As for Jackie, I don't blame her for anything she did after watching her husband being brutally murdered and then Robert too. I don't know if she acted out of fear, love, or just a "screw this" mentality, but she more than earned it.

If you really want to know...

Warrior For Peace - The Lessons of J.F.K. - TIME

Commencement Address at American University
President John F. Kennedy
Washington, D.C.
June 10, 1963
Listen to this speech

Papers reveal JFK efforts on Vietnam

Galbraith and Vietnam

The Galbraith I knew: His biographer recalls how the late economist warned JFK about Vietnam -- and faulted conservative policies for worsening inequality in America.


When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that he was relieved that the President had died quickly, fearing the destruction of his wit and intellect as the greater evil.

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I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.

I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.
President John F. Kennedy
October 26, 1963

 

[dilloduck]

So how is it in Camelot these days ?