The X marked on the asphalt marks the exact spot where President JF Kennedy was shot down in Dallas more than sixty years ago. Traffic is heavy on Elm Street and to photograph the letter you have to wait for vehicles to give you a space. You feel the weight of history on that hot July tar, even if you didn’t live through it. Kennedy was one of the first rock stars of politics. And his killer was in charge of fulfilling the rocker mandate of living fast and leaving a pretty corpse.
History is always more generous to those who die traumatically and prematurely. They have no time to tarnish their biography and are quickly converted into myths. Then there are the others. Those who have to fight for a good place in the history books. Those who need to be polished and waxed so that their flaws are not noticed in the future.
At George W. Bush’s library and museum, myth is built by lying
Without leaving Dallas, I visit the library-museum of former President George W. Bush. Not a word about the hoax of weapons of mass destruction that justified the second Gulf War. Here the myth is built by directly failing to tell the truth. The visit does show us that he did not have it easy. During his mandates, the world decided to turn upside down: it began with the attack on the Twin Towers and ended with the financial crash. A devilish palindrome.
Not a word is said about the Monica Lewinsky case in the Bill Clinton library museum in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the United States, all presidencies are immaculate, as can be seen in these spaces that vindicate the legacy of each one. In Clinton’s case, the aim is to claim the paternity of the “happy 90s” on a global scale, not just in the United States. The decade in which it seemed that the world could only get better forever. The years in which Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the end of history did not admit any contrary evidence.
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Stories of presidents. Constructed with well-chosen scraps to present them as the heroes who from the Oval Office give continuity to the nation. What part of the story do we tell ourselves? The partial answer to that question is called historical memory In the USA, in Spain and around the world.
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