WHERE DID CAMELOT COME FROM?

To Orwell Today,

I'm a 15 year old doing a school assignment on the "Camelot Allusion" and I've searched and searched on the web and all I can find is just stuff on the story of Camelot. I stumbled on your website, and it seemed like you guys knew some about the allusion (i think). The questions I have to find for my paper are, ORIGIN OF ALLUSION, MEANING AND USAGE OF ALLUSION, and EXAMPLE OF ALLUSION. I was wondering if you could help me out by maybe giving me a link to a site I can find this info at, or if you know any of the questions, that would be great.

Thank you,
David

Greetings David,

If you go to the JFK Camelot section of my website you will see some basic background on the legend of Camelot and on how it came to be associated with JFK's presidency. (I have just gone there myself and made some corrections so hopefully all the links are working now, and if not, their addresses are there).

For someone like yourself - who wasn't born when President Kennedy was alive - it's hard for you to imagine how horrific his death was. It was the saddest day of the twentieth century. The whole world - except for his enemies - cried. The reason everyone cried was because JFK had touched their hearts in a way no one else had ever done. I was only thirteen years old and yet I remember it like yesterday.

In the forty years since his death the people who arranged for his murder have tried to destroy his image so that your generation won't know the truth about him. Just like they lied about his death, so too have they been lying about his life.

Jackie Kennedy was worried that such a thing could happen. That's why - just a week after her husband's death - she invited a journalist to interview her:

"The 34-year-old widow spoke to the writer, Theodore H White, for four hours, urging him to tell the world -- through LIFE magazine -- that Kennedy was truly 'a man of magic', that his presidency was truly special, that the era was, to use the words she borrowed from a Broadway musical, 'one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot'.

The interview in its entirety can be found at http://www.jfklancer.com/pdf/ (http://www.jfklancer.com/pdf/) by cursing down to the article entitled The Last Side of Camelot (http://www.jfklancer/pdf/Camelot.pdf).

Here's part of what Jackie told Theodore White:

"Jack...everything he ever quoted was Greek or Roman...no, don't protect me now...one thing kept going through my mind, the line from a musical comedy. I kept saying to Bobby, I've got to talk to somebody, I've got to see somebody. I want to say this one thing. It's been almost an obsession with me. This line from the musical comedy's been almost an obsession with me. At night before going to bed...we had an old Victrola. He'd play a couple of records. I'd get out of bed at night and play it for him when it was so cold getting out of bed. It was a song he loved, he loved 'Camelot'. It was the song he loved most at the end...on a Victrola ten years old... It's the last record. The last side of Camelot said, 'Camelot...don't let it be forgot that for one brief shining moment there was Camelot.'"

In 1974 - when she was in her eighties - JFK's mother wrote a book entitled Times to Remember. In it she said:

"Jack was a 'natural reader'. The fact that he was so often sick in bed or convalescing in the house and needed entertainment only encouraged what I think was already a strong natural bent. He gobbled books... He liked stories of adventure and chivalry... He had a strong romantic and idealistic streak. In fact, he was inclined to be somewhat of a dreamer. I often had a feeling his mind was only half occupied with the subject at hand, such as doing his arithmetic homework or picking his clothes up off the floor, and the rest of his thoughts were far away weaving daydreams. I was deeply touched but not surprised to learn years later (after his assassination) that Jackie had taken Camelot as a small, personal, private symbol of their romantic and glorious life together. I remembered him in his boyhood reading and rereading his copy of 'King Arthur and the Round Table'."

It's appropriate that you should be asking about JFK and Camelot at this particular time because this month marks the 50th anniversary of his marriage to Jackie. They were married on September 12, 1953.

The JFK Library and Museum has a 50th Wedding Anniversary exhibit on at present - http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/pr_wedding_2003.html.

Most people will tell you that Camelot didn't exist in olden times OR in modern times. But don't believe them. When President Kennedy was alive we really DID have Camelot.

~ Jackie Jura

CAMELOT AT DAWN (excerpt from Jacqueline & John Kennedy in Georgetown, May 1954). John Hopkins Magazine

JACKIE KENNEDY ONASSIS (On July 28, 1929, Jacqueline Bouvier was born in a small Southampton hospital in New York. With her birth came beauty and grace, courage and strength. The world would never be the same again...)

watch JACQUELINE KENNEDY'S WHITE HOUSE TOUR, YouTube (On Jan 13, 1962, fifty-four members of a CBS television crew set up in the White House to produce and record a unique event: the elegant First Lady, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, would conduct a personal tour of the presidential mansion for the benefit -- when the program would air that February -- of nearly 80 million Americans who would be tuned in.

Here's an excerpt from the book Robert Kennedy: His Life, by Evan Thomas, describing JFK's favourite book, Pilgrim's Way, describing the values most esteemed by the New Frontier:

"...Often bedridden with one illness after another, Jack was a voracious reader. He disappeared into a romantic world of historical fiction and derring-do...After school, he would occasionally take Bobby on walks, telling him the stories of his heroes, educated swasbucklers like T.E. Lawrence, the dashing and mystic Lawrence of Arabia."

"A favorite author was John Buchan, spinner of spy yarns like The Thirty-Nine Steps. Buchan's secret agent, Richard Hannay, was a precursor of James Bond. Together, Jack and Bobby were riveted by Hannay's intrigues in the 'queer subterranean world of the Secret Service'. The books had a lasting impact on both brothers. Buchan's autobiography, Pilgrim's Way, published in 1940 when Jack was twenty-three and Bobby was fifteen, reads like a primer for the values most esteemed by the New Frontier. Jack Kennedy called Pilgrim's Way his favorite book. He identified with Buchan, an outsider from Scotland who made his way into the Edwardian establishment, winning a peerage (as Lord Tweedsmuir) and proving himself as an intellectual-adventurer in the twilight days of empire. The Kennedys found inspiration in Lord Tweedsmuir's description of statesmen who were 'debonair and brilliant and brave'--and died young in battle--who 'held to the old cavalier grace and wherever romance called...followed with careless gallantry'. Two hours before he was shot to death in 1968, Robert Kennedy quoted Lord Tweedsmuir to a gaggle of newsmen standing outside his hotel suite in Los Angeles. 'I like politics. It's an honorable adventure,' Kennedy said. 'That was Lord Tweedsmuir. Does anybody here know who he was?' The half-dozen reporters looked back in baffled silence."

Reader needs the page reference for the Lord Tweedsmuir quote RFK used two hours before his death

Go to JFK TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS

Jackie Jura
~ an independent researcher monitoring local, national and international events ~

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