On the plus side, Rachel Maddow isn't teaching history to impressionable youth in high school or college. But it's hardly preferable that she spouts her dubious versions of it from a cable platform at MSNBC.
In the wake of President Trump's freewheeling press conference in which he excoriated the media for its persistent bias, Maddow harkened back to a simpler time she considers so much better -- the media's allegedly aggressive coverage of the Kennedy administration.
Here's Maddow teeing up the segment on her show Friday night --
MADDOW: Do you want to see a president really go off on the press? Do you want to see a president who is really, really mad at the press?
It has to be Nixon, maybe Clinton, I thought upon hearing this. Instead, what was shown next was a clip from a December 1962 interview with President John F. Kennedy looking more bored than angry --
NBC REPORTER SANDER VANOCUR: You once said that you were reading more and enjoying it less. Are you still as avid a newspaper reader, magazine -- I remember those of us who traveled with you on the campaign, a magazine wasn't safe around you ...
KENNEDY: Oh yes. No, no, no. I think it's invaluable, even though it may cause you some -- it's never pleasant to be reading things frequently that are not agreeable news but I would say that it's an invaluable arm of the presidency as a check, really, on what's going on in an administration and more things come to my attention that cause me the concern or give me information.
So, I would think that Mr. Khrushchev operating a totalitarian system which has many advantages as far as being able to move in secret and all the rest, there's a terrific disadvantage not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily to an administration.
VANOCUR: When you have ...
KENNEDY: Even though we never like it and even though we don't, we though we wished they didn't write it and even though we disapprove, there still is, there isn't any doubt that we couldn't do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.
Maddow, having just laughably claimed that Kennedy was "really, really mad" at the press during this interview, then doubles down on her demonstrably false assertion --
MADDOW: President Kennedy gave that interview in 1962 after getting a lot of bad press following the Bay of Pigs disaster. He was so mad about it that he sat down for a totally reasonable interview with NBC News and made the case that even though sometimes we wished that they did not write it, even still, we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press. You need an active press for democracy to thrive. That's what differentiates us from a totalitarian system. That sort of used to be the standard for angry president going off on the press. That standard clearly now has changed. Are we just looking at a ruder iteration of something that we've seen in the past or are we really on new ground?
An "angry president going off on the press" --- or one giving a "totally reasonable interview"? Try making up your mind on this, Maddow.
So much pablum packed into such a short segment, it's a challenge on where to begin.
I'll start with Maddow's deceitful description of the interview itself. It was not, as she implies, solely "with" NBC News. Joining NBC's Sander Vanocur for an extended session at the White House on Dec. 17, 1962 were William A. Lawrence of ABC and George E. Herman of CBS.
It's also a stretch for Maddow to suggest that the interview was held in response to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion -- which occurred more than a year and a half earlier, in April 1961. Instead, the interview as it aired on all three major networks was titled "After two years -- a conversation with the President." This was obviously a roundup at the nearly halfway mark of Kennedy's presidency -- or what would have been halfway had JFK not been murdered by a communist -- not a post-mortem on media coverage of the Cuban debacle, as suggested by Maddow.
While the Bay of Pigs received passing mention in the interview, much more attention was given to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had ended less than two months before and for which Kennedy received an avalanche of fawning coverage in the media for allegedly preventing a nuclear holocaust (a widespread belief that lingers to this day).
Then there is the awkward matter of what Kennedy actually said in his brief remarks highlighted by Maddow. Imagine that it was Trump and not Kennedy who dubbed the press "an arm of the presidency" and touted what he considered the "many advantages" of a totalitarian system -- yet more evidence of Trump's bromance with Putin! And while Maddow inexplicably sees an angry Kennedy lashing out at the press, more clear-eyed observers will see the obvious -- Kennedy stroking reporters' egos by describing them as essential to preventing the communists from taking over.
On those infrequent occasions when Kennedy did face negative coverage, he was hardly magnanimous about it. When his former Georgetown neighbor, Newsweek reporter and close chum Ben Bradlee told Look magazine that the Kennedys were thin-skinned in response to criticism by the press, Kennedy froze Bradlee out for several months. This was revealed in Bradlee's 1975 memoir, "Conversations with Kennedy." In an excerpt dated Sept. 14, 1962, Bradlee wrote --
I had been nervous about seeing him again -- after three months in the doghouse. In a strange way, I understood why he was sore ... it was hard to make new friends once those White House doors had closed behind you, and if old friends wanted to be friends and reporters, maybe the two couldn't mix. I wanted to be friends again. I missed the access, of course, but I missed the laughter and the warmth just as much. What I couldn't and wouldn't do was send a message over the stone wall, saying I had learned my lesson. Anyway, the freeze is obviously still on.
Two months later, Bradlee's self-described "exile" ended after Jackie Kennedy called Bradlee's wife Tony to play tennis "and then invited the children over for movies and supper," Bradlee revealed in "Conversations with Kennedy." For his entry dated Nov. 9, 1962, Bradlee wrote of them being invited to a dinner dance at the White House and cocktails upstairs with the Kennedys --
The president and Tony had a long session about the difficulties of being friends with someone who is always putting everything he knows into a magazine.
Everybody loves everybody again.
Needless to say, little in the way of aggressive reporting was seen from Newsweek's White House correspondent while Kennedy remained president. And nearly a year would pass before the Bradlees learned of Kennedy's extended affair with Tony's sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, which they did not discover until after she was murdered in Washington. For the rest of his life, Bradlee pleaded ignorance about Kennedy's profligate skirt-chasing that extended to his own family.
It defies belief that anyone, even someone deep in the beast that is MSNBC, actually believes Kennedy was hampered by aggressive media coverage. In reality, he was last American president who wasn't, in large part because so many in the press were utterly besotted with him and all things Camelot. It was not until Kennedy's less media-savvy successor, Lyndon Johnson, became embroiled in the Vietnam War that many reporters renounced their previous role as a public relations "arm of the presidency" envisioned by Kennedy.
More than a decade would pass after Kennedy's death before his inherently dangerous womanizing was finally reported in the media, including affairs with Mafia moll Judith Exner and suspected East German spy Ellen Rometsch. It was 20 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis before it was publicly revealed that Kennedy cut a secret deal with the Soviets to remove American missiles in Turkey and Italy in exchange for the Russians removing theirs from Cuba. Not only did Kennedy benefit from a benevolent media while in office, the favorable coverage extended long after his death.
Time and again it's not until a Republican is president that the press rediscovers its interest in investigative journalism. We're at that point in the cycle again, with President Trump. Instead of vilifying him, those covering Trump should thank him for giving renewed purpose to their work and a bounce in their step.
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