Magazines: Assailing a Legend

In his long career as a British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, 61, one time editor of Punch, has more than earned his reputation as an incorrigible professional iconoclast. Muggeridge is never happier than when assaulting the Establishment — any Establishment. “A royal soap opera,” was his considered judgment, in the Saturday Evening Post, of Britain’s royal family. Last week, in the lively New York Review of Books, Critic Muggeridge opened fire on a transatlantic target: the John F. Kennedy legend.

“I have just pushed aside, I confess with mounting distaste, a pile of Kennedyana on which I had been browsing, Graveyard, or memorial, prose is among the least edifying and least pleasing forms of human composition. There is a prevailing flavor of syrupy insincerity, an affectation of wholehearted truthfulness, amounting to the worst kind of deception, which sickens as it surfeits.”

Muggeridge came to this conclusion after reading seven books, ranging from Young John Kennedy, by Gene Schoor. to Of Poetry and Power, a collection of verse commemorating the deeds and the person of the late President. “A good deal of this grisly material,” Muggeridge wrote, “had already been published before the Dallas tragedy, and to a jaundiced eye bears unmistakable signs of external direction. Certain episodes recur, narrated in almost identical words, in a manner which irresistibly suggests the existence of a cyclostyled* master-version. Anyone acquainted with the late President, or even with one or other of his intimates, knows perfectly well that the legendary image of him so assiduously propagated bears little or no relation to his true self.

“I can only say with all possible respect that if the late President really was as he is here presented—so dedicated a public servant, so faithful a husband and devoted a father, so witty, learned, and profound an orator, writer, and thinker, so genial a friend, prayerful a Christian, and enlightened a statesman—he is better off in Heaven, where, according to an electoral oration in Ohio by Vice President-elect Hubert Humphrey, we may now confidently assume him to be.”

* Run off from a stencil.