Camelot
Sir: No one likes being rudely shaken into the bleak, grey world of hard reality when slumbering fast in the depths of a golden dream, so when a journalist of liberal persuasion feels the chill winds of hard fact blowing away his cosy fancies his irritation must evoke sympathy. And if, in addition, he has convinced himself that he has succeeded in making his reading public accept the same mirage, one can understand his puzzlement upon reading a book such as that by Benjamin Bradlee (Spectator, 3 April). But sympathy and understanding cannot excuse Mr Al Capp's attempt to cast aside the ('sordid') truth. Why, he worries in his review of Bradlee's book, Conversations with Kennedy, did the author write it ? After coming upon a number of dead ends, he appears finally to sniff a financial motive. Now, this is hardly an original conclusion, as a professional writer like Mr Capp will readily appreciate, but his annoyance at being shown that the late John F. Kennedy was only human after all suggests the real reason, viz, the desire by a man who actually knew the former president to lay the real facts before the public. So what, one might ask, is reprehensible about that ambition? Nothing, except that the authentic portrait Bradlee paints contrasts so sharply with the matinee identikit manufactured by many Journalists that one can hardly avoid wondering if reporters such as Mr Capp should not, after all, have their jour nalistic licences revoked, and instead write cartoons for adolescent comics! Reality has intruded, and your reviewer feels threatened—as well he might. Mr Capp's review, self-indulgently crammed with the royal pronoun 'we' and its derivatives, equates himself with the entire United States. 'The nation was under the spell of a magic family', he glowingly intones, ignoring the disagreeable facts that Kennedy just squeaked into the White House (more narrowly than Nixon was to do in 1968) and during his tenure of office was continually denounced by many journalists, politicians and members of the public for his response to the nation's problems. As his assassination demonstrated, in some quarters he was even hated. Mr Capp may have been bewitched during the Kennedy Years, but most of his fellow citizens were definitely not. Indeed, 1 strongly suspect that Mr Capp's magician and his world of sparkle only popped out of the hat in November 1963. Both exist only in the memories of ageing journalists who fondly re-create days that never actually were and a presidential super-hero who never actually was. How amused Kennedy, the realist, would be if he could only read the fantasies Mr Capp and others have woven about him! Camelot was born in November 1963, not before, and it is because Mr Bradlee's book shows this (and not ,because it is likely to make money) that your reviewer finds it not to his taste. He would prefer to slumber on in his world of make-believe! David Hicks
14 rue Condorcet, Paris IXe, France
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