A hero defined so largely by his style required an appropriate antithesis, and Kennedy's eulogists found one made to order in the person of Lee Harvey Oswald. A misfit, a nobody, a pathetic mouse of a man, Oswald had exactly the right qualities for the role history had evidently assigned him. A kind of aesthetic satisfaction crept into accounts of his role as Kennedy's nemesis. "So hate triumphed," wrote Ralph McGill with a suggestion of its inevitability, at the end of an article deploring political "extremism." Schlesinger closed his post-assassination tribute to Kennedy on a similar cadence. Kennedy had been the "most civilized President we have had since Jefferson," Schlesinger wrote. "And so a crazed political fanatic shot him down." Kennedy's admirers, themselves fascinated by the "majesty and burdens of the Presidency," as Newsweek put it, attributed the same fascination to Kennedy's alleged assassin. Like the assassins of Garfield, Lincoln, and McKinley, Oswald was a "lonely psychopath," in the words of a report in Time, seeking an "hour of mad glory." The prototype of the little man in his loser's envy of the Kennedy glamour, Oswald reinforced doubts about the common man's ability to rise to the challenge of the modern world. Those who admired Kennedy's patrician disdain for conventional political gestures found in Oswald a perfect outlet for their fear of the mass mind. He represented the worst in American life, just as Kennedy represented the best and brightest.

Speculation about the assassination thus came to hinge not on the question of whether Oswald could have murdered Kennedy unassisted but on the seemingly much larger, momentous question of what his action revealed about the national psyche. The question so often raised in the hours following the assassination—"What have we come to?"—prompted

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view Mrs. Kennedy attributed to Kennedy himself—need to cultivate the ability to distinguish heroism from imposture, the prophet from the false prophet, the "speaker" from the "babbler," in Carlyle's terms. Those who idolized Kennedy, deceived by the glamour of the White House, confused heroism with celebrity. Their infatuation with Kennedy blinded them to the presence of an authentic hero in their midst. It was not until many years later (as Garry Wills notes in a review of Taylor Branch's history of the civil rights movement) that Americans began to recognize the fifties and sixties not as the age of John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson but as the age of Martin Luther King.

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