This is being written not long after the 50th anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy, which caused me to read a 700-page biography, which led to further research. I am not inclined to worship at the shrine of JFK—Camelot? Please!—nor do I wish to be one of his debunkers. Instead, I will take a brief and clear-eyed look at America’s 35th president.
To begin with, I can hardly relate to his life. Kennedy had the good luck to be born into an absurdly rich family. His father was Joseph P. Kennedy, who had made a fortune in banking, films, Wall Street, liquor and real estate. (I hope you will forgive a brief digression about my maternal grandmother. She was kind and generous, and almost never said a bad word about anybody. One exception was Kennedy, Sr. Grandmother seemed to think he was the wickedest man who ever lived. Maybe she knew that he became even wealthier during the Great Depression and resented it. Did she know that as Ambassador to the UK in the late 1930s, he cozied up to the Nazis? Or was she aware that he had used his money and influence to aid his son every step of the way? Maybe she gave credence to the rumors that he had effectively bought the 1960 presidential election for JFK. I wish I would have asked her.)
Kennedy had numerous health issues, including a bad back (surgery twice), Addison’s disease, ulcers, colitis and intestinal problems. He was hospitalized more than three dozen times in his life. The medicines he took included steroids, antispasmodics, codeine, methadone, testosterone, antibiotics, sleeping pills, ritalin, librium and thyroid hormones. JFK was widely portrayed as a vigorous man, but that was untrue; there are many photos of him walking on crutches, and he wore a back brace.
Rich he may have been, but not soft. Some guys wanted to avoid the military during World War II, but he fought to get in. Not only that, he insisted on being where the action was. He was named commander of a PT boat in the South Pacific that got sliced in two by a Japanese destroyer on August 1, 1943. Kennedy was no less than heroic in saving many of the men on his boat.
As a junior senator from Massachusetts in 1954, he was the only Democrat who did not vote to censure the red-baiting Joe McCarthy. Why? The Kennedys considered him one of their own, an Irish Catholic. Bobby Kennedy was on McCarthy's staff when he was finding a Commie under every rock, and JFK’s loyalty was such that he could not turn on a man who had often visited his family’s mansion at Hyannis Port. Although he would come to regret this matter, it did not keep him from reaching the White House.
What about Profiles in Courage, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957? The book gave him publicity and much-needed gravitas. Unfortunately, it was ghostwritten, and Kennedy, Sr. leaned on the Pulitzer committee to choose his boy as the winner. Needless to say, this information was suppressed until quite recently.
The only black people Kennedy knew growing up were porters, maids and servants; he was simply too far removed from their suffering and struggles to be able to understand. He was a weak and almost reluctant liberal until late in his life, by which time his reputation among black leaders was not good. Martin Luther King had little love for him. However, to his credit, Kennedy did bring about integration at the University of Mississippi (1962) and the University of Alabama (1963), given that he was dealing with some rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth racists.
Kennedy inherited the Vietnam mess from his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He struggled with events there and in Washington as the USA got sucked in further and further. In his final months, he was supposedly making plans to extricate the American military from southeast Asia. But it was contingent on waiting until after the 1964 election. As with civil rights, Kennedy always had his eye on political matters.
And so we come to his finest hour—the Cuban missile crisis. Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev had covertly installed a number of nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles off the Florida coast. U-2 reconnaissance planes detected them, leading to a very tense standoff in October 1962. The military men (Maxwell Taylor, Curtis LeMay and others) wanted to go in with guns blazing. The pressure on Kennedy was enormous, but he gave negotiations every chance to work and eventually they did. The Russkies pulled the nukes out and an enormous catastrophe was averted. Kennedy's wise leadership, even statesmanship, merits our praise even now.
Kennedy was a hot-blooded man, which is all well and good. Hey, there is nothing wrong with liking the ladies. I like ’em, too. But this guy seemed to have no self-control regarding sex. He was quite a prolific philanderer, and his 1953 wedding to the beautiful and elegant Jacqueline Bouvier did not slow him down one bit. Even when he became president, JFK was constantly on the prowl. He liked actresses, bimbos, gangsters' molls, and the daughters and wives of the men who worked under him. His 18-month “relationship” with a teenaged White House intern named Mimi Beardsley was both salacious and sad. That was an unusual case, however, since he generally preferred quickies. David Powers, one of Kennedy's main assistants, served as his pimp, arranging an endless succession of female flesh. His secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, shamelessly facilitated things. Perhaps she did so in the spirit of sisterhood. Kennedy was reckless and brazen in his pursuit of women during the last two years of his life. One of the notches in his belt, as it were, was an East German sexpot who doubled as a spy. Brother Bobby basically put her on an airplane back home for fear that the truth would be revealed and a scandal erupt.
Now, after all that tawdriness, back to the positive. In the summer of 1962, Kennedy gave a speech at Rice Stadium in Houston. He then broached the idea of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade. It seemed an unlikely and impossible quest. But as we all know, that is just what happened when Neil Armstrong stepped out of Apollo 11 onto the lunar surface in 1969. Kennedy's ability to inspire was also manifested in the Peace Corps. Had he lived—had Lee Oswald not brought his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to work that day in Dallas—Kennedy might have gone on to real greatness, but we will never know.
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