4 for the 4th: JFK Reads, Nixon Rages, Trump Rewrites, Reality Retreats
ICYMI: I’m now the American history columnist at the NYT book review. Head over to the NYT to read the first one on THIS hot bench summer.
1. Listen to Senator John F. Kennedy read the Declaration of Independence
On July 4, 1957, Senator Kennedy on WQXR Radio in New York. (via JFK Library.)
2. Nixon Threw the Most Chaotic July 4th Pool Party
Before Trump gave us tanks and a merch table, Nixon’s Honor America Day was the original prototype: deeply unserious about unity, aggressively curated, and allergic to dissent. Both men turned the Fourth into a mirror—not of national values, but of presidential ego.
Like Trump, Nixon needed a distraction. He was fresh off the Kent State massacre—four students dead, shot by the National Guard for daring to protest Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War—and knee-deep in the Cambodian campaign.
“I don’t want to be the one Black guy on Nixon’s float.”
—Civil rights leader Dick Gregory on why he declined Nixon’s invitation.
Nixon’s handlers called it a nonpartisan celebration. In reality, it was a meticulously stage-managed spectacle. White House advance men scoured the country for “Silent Majority” supporters, busing in crowds to ensure the right kind of patriotism showed up on camera.
The media, however, was far more interested in antiwar protesters: Black Panthers, and even the National Socialist White People’s Party—a combustible mix.
The Reflecting Pool became a protest stage: tear gas drifted over the crowd to a soundtrack that alternated between “God Bless America,” “Free Bobby Seale!” and “fuck the pigs” chants. A truck was driven into the water—though accounts differ on who drove the truck into the pool; some say protesters, others say police.
“It looks like Vietnam, doesn’t it?” Bob Hope quipped.
Nixon craved adoration as much as Trump, but not the spotlight. Unlike the current president, Nixon was far removed from this particular public failure. He phoned it in from San Clemente, California with a vague, pre-recorded saccharine message about America being a beacon of “just and orderly growth.”
They’re both “pick me” presidents. Desperate to be adored, painfully insecure, deeply unlikable, obsessed with the optics of loyalty, and forever convinced that the media, the left, and the hippies were conspiring to ruin his party. Trump brought fireworks and fighter jets. Nixon brought Billy Graham and a backup choir. But the impulse was the same: if you can’t win over the nation, at least get good coverage.
The real fireworks aren’t just in the sky. They’re in the ways presidents have tried, again and again, to turn a sacred day of independence into a personal stage, blurring the lines between unity and spectacle, democracy and distraction. That they just happened to be the worst ones from a party that has so devolved over the last 50 years? Well, that’s no coincidence.
3. Myths We Set Off Every July 4th
Every Independence Day, we rerun the greatest hits: liberty was declared, tyranny defeated, and America great forever and ever and ever.
George Washington gets to be stoic, Thomas Jefferson gets to write, and America gets to be exceptional. The story never changes because it’s not designed to inform—it’s designed to reassure.
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