This explains, to my mind, what made the Kennedys Nixon’s mortal enemies; in every battle, they played Bugs Bunny to his Elmer Fudd, Jesus to his Judas. His poker winnings in the back lines were no match for JFK’s real heroism on PT 109, yet while JFK could downplay his record, Nixon had to inflate his.   As a result, Nixon’s self-destructive Kennedy Derangement Syndrome played a pivotal role in his political downfall, as he obsessively fumed about their pedigree, education, and seeming untouchability politically.  When Jack Kennedy said that Nixon had “no class,” Tricky Dick knew all too well he was right, and spent the rest of his life seething; envying and fearing the Kennedy magic in equal measure.  Nixon also lavishly promoted, investigated, and repeated ad nauseam the wildest theories on the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, and just like his Southern Strategy, it became an evergreen club for the right to bash the man, not his ideas, since they were utterly unequipped to do that.  As Marc Antony warned us in his funeral oration, the evil men do lives long after the good is interred with their bones, and Nixon is a sobering reminder of how true that is.  Worse, in the age of Glenn Beck and Fox News, even those theories have conveniently been embellished just a little.  A Righty caller on Ed Schultz’s radio show today confidently asserted that Kopechne was Kennedy’s mistress, bearing his unborn child, and that’s why he had to kill her.  Nice way to bring the Randall Terry crowd into the fold for a new generation of wingnuts, but honestly.  The great Chicago columnist Mike Royko once denounced the “grave dancers,” who inappropriately early and loudly denounced the flaws of the freshly, but nonetheless deserving, dead, falling over themselves to toss the first stone at the “sinner” every time.  Such people invariably call themselves Christians, natch.

But that reaction is in itself revealing: none of the leaders of the modern right can make any such claim to the service of their country, militarily and politically, nor could they make any such claims of moral superiority, much less selflessness, before giants like the Kennedys, who lived their lives in service of the least among us.  The Kennedys were big, and they are small, in every sense of the word, and it drives them just as crazy in death as in life.

They don’t have any heroes to lose.