It seems late in the day for Kennedy hagiography and Johnson bashing but Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter in both administrations, makes his belated entry in the sweepstakes of sycophancy. Apparently oblivious of the damaging disclosures about the Kennedys in the past twenty years (one of the most damaging appearing in a forthcoming book called Hidden Illness in the White House by Kenneth Crispell and Carlos Gomez), he not only whitewashes the Kennedys, but his depiction of Johnson as a near-lunatic is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Soviet comic-strip propaganda of the 1960s. A voice from the sixties indeed, and this is the eighties.
