The Kennedy Inauguration: Why is it featured in VANITY FAIR's February issue

Before he died JFK's speechwriter Ted Sorenson often would be a guest speaker at various speechwriters's organizations.  That made me scratch my head.  After all, rhetoric had changed so much since the eloquence, with its triplicates, of Kennedy's time.  I tried to connect the dots and only came up with the rationale of nostalgia.  Perhaps the speechwriting profession, one in which I was a full-time player, longed for the days when our role was such an important one.

Last night when I read Todd Purdum's feature article in the February issue of VANITY FAIR I also scratched my head. The subject in it was the Kennedy inauguration.  Most of the people mentioned were either dead or in their 80s and 90s.  From a nostalgia point of view I could have been interested.  However, I wasn't.  I had been through too much, especially in the past seven years [Download Geezerguts], to care much about Camelot. 

I wonder: Did Generation Y find the article on the Kennedy inauguration compelling?  Don't they have other obsessions such as making a living and connecting with their own friends?

VANITY FAIR uses top talent.  I only wish it would assign that talent more relevant subject matter.

Comments

[Cadmium77]

Funny, I just read this article and was overwhelmed by the same feeling. I'm 57, and I grew up dazzled by the glamor of America in the late 50's and early 60's. Normally I lap this kind of stuff up, but I immediately felt queasy reading this. I don't share the author's rosy tinted vision of those events anymore. The events depicted made me midly queasy, and not just because of the assassination or the scabrous Republican slanders of JFK or the suspicious death of his son. The article in typical Vanity Fair style luxuriates in the stylistic details of the era, but really that stuff is irrelevant now. There's no democracy, not even the sham of it. Was there ever? It's all just huge forces of megamoney shifting its weight around and the rest of us little insects hoping we don't get crushed when they move. There's no glamor in it now. It's just an ugly story with a sad ending.