JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” ―Aeschylus

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fredrik Logevall goes on to pardon “our hero,” as he chummily refers to JFK, for some marital truancy. Jackie Kennedy, to her credit, had already paid JFK back for his womanizing. After hurriedly losing her virginity to the novelist John P Marquand in a lift that had stalled between floors, she flitted off for a refresher fling with him just before her marriage. “Say what one will about Joseph P. Kennedy,” Logevall writes, “it’s not every multimillionaire father who takes such broad interest in his children and who, together with his wife, instills in them, from a young age, a firm commitment to public service.” At one of his shiftiest moments, JFK hesitated about openly attacking the commie-baiting charlatan Joe McCarthy. But his evasive dodges only sharpen the contrast between his nimble ingenuity and the crude belligerence of McCarthy, whose foul-mouthed enforcer Roy Cohn became Donald Trump’s tutor in villainy and vengeance. As it happens, Logevall’s scornful characterisation of McCarthy and Cohn reads like a glance ahead to America’s present moral morass: Trump has inherited their thuggish bigotry, while JFK serves as a reminder that politics is not necessarily the preserve of cynical self-publicists and can be, as he said, a “most honourable adventure”, fit calling for a modern Lancelot. We know how it will end, as the Lincoln convertible passes the Dallas Book Depository, turns beside the hump of a grassy knoll and approaches a doomy-looking traffic tunnel – not quite the Arthurian cavalcade evoked by Steinbeck’s elegy, but the story of how JFK reached what he called his “rendezvous with death”. Source: www.theguardian.com

John F. Kennedy came of age in a second world war, then rose all the way to the presidency, only to be cut down at forty-six while leading a United States that stood at the zenith of its power. Through his magnetic leadership and inspirational rhetoric, he elevated Americans’ belief in the capacity of politics to solve big problems and speak to society’s highest aspirations, while in foreign affairs he showed it was possible to move from bitter hostility toward the Soviet Union to coexistence. By the middle of 1963, close to 60 percent of Americans claimed that they had voted for Kennedy in 1960, although only although only 49.7 percent had actually done so. After his death, his landslide grew to 65 percent. Kennedy’s average approval rating of 70 percent while in office puts him at the top among post-1945 American presidents, and later generations would rate his performance higher still. The more we understand Kennedy and his coming of age, in short, the more we understand the United States in the middle decades of the century. I am struck by historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s remark, in his memoirs, A Life in the 20th Century: “For my generation, four dates remain indelibly scarred on memory: Pearl Harbor, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the death of John Kennedy, and the landing of men on the moon.” 

JFK was, from the start, a man of the world, deeply inquisitive about other political systems and cultures, comfortable with competing conceptions of national interest. This was partly an outgrowth of his Irish heritage and the sensibility of his parents, who looked outward, beyond the nation’s shores. Partly, too, it resulted from his expansive reading as a bedridden child and teenager, which tilted toward European history and statecraft. Most of all, the internationalist ethos emerged from Kennedy’s travels during and after his college years—in addition to his grand excursion in 1939, there were substantial trips in 1937, 1938, and 1941. These trips broadened his horizons, as did his subsequent combat experience in the South Pacific. Herein lies a third theme: on matters of politics and policy, JFK was always his own master. He was the daydreamer, the introspective son, the one who relished words and their meaning, who liked poetry. Alone among the older kids, he had a romantic imagination, a feel for the things of the spirit, for the intangibles in human affairs. Source: www.nytimes.com

Joseph McBride: I find it highly suspicious that March 31 1968, LBJ announces he will not seek a second term and then immediately thereafter we have MLK (4/4/68) assassinated and RFK assassinated (6/5/68). To me this was some sort of cabal at the height of their power flexing. Later on, in 1983, the USSR was convinced that the United States was going to carry out a nuclear first-strike on them. In TV programs about this people always say "it's boggling that they believed we would do that" but if you look at it a certain way you can see why they would definitely believe that. Assuming JFK, RFK, and MLK were all assassinated as the result of a conspiracy and foisted upon the public and the world, you can see how the Russians would view us as irrational and violent and certainly capable of doing a first strike. Surely the Soviets knew the truth about these assassinations and the coup, and so it's with these things in mind that we have to consider their suspicions in 1983. Peter Dale Scott writes in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, “In each case an incumbent President was removed from office, after a build-up of suspicion and resentment inside his administration because of his announced plans and/or negotiations for disengagement from Vietnam.” In fact, as I was beginning to recognize at the time of Nixon’s resignation in 1974, three presidents in a row -- Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon -- had been removed from office. 

It was becoming hard not to notice how the political system had changed with the Coup of ’63 and the coverup that followed. The calamitous turn in the Vietnam War when the Vietcong mounted the Tet Offensive in January 1968 led to President Johnson’s forced withdrawal from that year’s presidential race at the behest of his senior advisers, “The Wise Men.” That group was largely drawn from the leadership of the eastern establishment and including Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. Henry Brandon, the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, reports in his autobiography, Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent’s Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan (1988), about a conversation he had with President Johnson in 1968, after that decision was made: “LBJ, aware by then of his public repudiation, seemed to drag a burden of anguish in his wake when he spoke his own epitaph during a flight to visit President Truman in Independence, Missouri. ‘The only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and mine is that mine was a little more torturing.’” Carl Oglesby in The Yankee and Cowboy War interprets what he calls Johnson’s forced “abdication” as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men to “break off from the Cowboys a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson’s Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means.” Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com

In the summer of 1988, JFK Jr. poured his inner anguish on his friend Sasha Chermayeff: “You know, you never get over it,” (reflecting on his father's assassination). There was an impenetrable core of John to which no tragedy, no sadness seemed to have ever broken him up. But John explained to her: “When I was growing up, I learned a person only reaches a total perspective after he's suffered. I realized I had to be broken to be whole.” When his wife Carolyn had gone several weeks without leaving their Tribeca apartment, John asked Sasha to talk with his wife. Carolyn was in bad shape when Sasha arrived. John could philosophically shrug the unrequited attention off, but Carolyn was different. He was anguished at the way she flinched under the pressure, recoiling back. On one occasion on the Cape he became so enraged at a photographer that he rushed at the man and broke his camera. “Fuck with me, but leave my wife alone!” he yelled, furious. John was so upset at the paparazzi that he talked to the district attorney’s office about getting them out of there, but that was legally impossible. Jackie had visited Istanbul, Turkey in 1985 and had told John that if he ever married, it was an ideal place to honeymoon. Traveling as “Mr. and Mrs. Hyannis,” Mr. and Mrs. John F. Kennedy Jr. arrived in Istanbul and checked into their penthouse suite atop the five-star Ciragan Palace Hotel, a former palazzo on the shores of the Bosporus.

Christiane Amanpour said: “I knew the manager, so I called him and expressed the need for privacy.” Upon arriving, the couple hired a cabdriver to give them a guided tour, visiting the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia Church, and the Grand Bazaar, where John bought Carolyn jewelry. That evening they dined on the patio at the Tugra, one of several chic restaurants owned by the Ciragan Palace. The next day, they stopped at a café for honey cake and cups of Turkish coffee. At lunchtime they dropped into a local McDonald’s for a taste of home. Looking like typical American tourists, they went largely unnoticed and unrecognized except by other American tourists. That afternoon, while Carolyn napped, JFK Jr. lounged next to the hotel’s outdoor swimming pool when he saw a familiar face. The Globe had dispatched New York photographer Russell Turiak to Turkey in search of the newlyweds.

Despite her commitment to psychological therapy, Carolyn hadn’t yet become immune to the constant scrutiny exerted by the press, a process that obviously took time. “Carolyn used to hang out at her sister Lauren’s house in Tribeca and complain about the invasion of her privacy,” said mutual friend William Peter Owen. “She’d stay until late some nights. John would return to 20 North Moore Street, and she wouldn’t be there for him. This happened on several occasions. Carolyn feared he might abandon his magazine and enter politics overnight. As I understood it, he planned on a political career, and she intended to support him. She'd had a similar block against having children. I’d say that had they lived the next year or two, she’d have been both a mother and the wife of a senator.” Another charge levied against Carolyn by author Edward Klein in The Kennedy Curse, was cocaine use. The stories that periodically had surfaced—and later in Klein’s book—were, according to Littell, “wildly exaggerated. Carolyn may have done an occasional line of cocaine, but I saw no evidence that she had an addiction. I never saw her intoxicated from alcohol or incapacitated from drugs, and I’m certain John would have told me if there had been a problem, or if she’d done hard drugs like heroin or crack.” None of John’s other friends, including Richard Wiese, Chris Overbeck, John Hare, or John Perry Barlow, ever encountered Carolyn on a drug binge. Carole Radziwill, one of Carolyn’s closest companions, dismissed Edward Klein’s “unscrupulous” conjectures as “sheer nonsense.” Carole wondered: “Who is this group of anonymous friends of John and Carolyn’s who were so helpful in writing Klein’s book? No one in the Bessette or Kennedy family spoke to him, and I have spoken to many of Carolyn’s closest friends—none of us were asked to cooperate. Klein’s assertion of ‘hard drug’ abuse on Carolyn’s part is ludicrous. In the ten years that I knew Carolyn, I never once saw her use drugs. She was as much a ‘cokehead’ as Klein is a biographer. Some columns whispered they weren’t having sex any longer; that was the most ridiculous part, since no matter how their fights began, they ended in only one way. ”

Caroline Kennedy proved herself to be influential in rousing his brother's desire to eventually enter the political arena. In private John told friends and colleagues that the prospect interested him, that sooner or later he intended to make the transition from magazine editor to political candidate. Carolyn Maloney, New York Democratic congresswoman for the 14th District, heard that when John learned of Hillary Clinton’s interest in entering the senatorial race in New York in 2000, he polled for Maloney’s seat. He considered several other possibilities as well, among them the race for governor of New York. When Ted Kennedy suggested he consider running for office in Rhode Island, John responded, “That’ll put me in the same boat as Hillary—I’ll be regarded as a carpetbagger.” “Don’t be silly,” said Ted Kennedy. “Bobby was accused of being a carpetbagger when he ran for the Senate in New York in the mid-1960s. It didn’t stop him from winning.” John obviously also feared he would end up like his uncle Bobby if he ran for the Senate. On April 22 1998, John fulfilled the requirements for a private pilot’s license and purchased his first plane, the Cessna 182. Caroline Kennedy warned his brother by insisting that he took flights with extreme caution. “After all,” a family friend overheard Caroline say to him, “you’re no longer alone—you have a wife to worry about.” Caroline recognized that his brother was crazy about Carolyn. “‘Whenever she’s around,’ said once Caroline, ‘he’s got that goofy, fool-in-love expression on his face.’” —The Day John Died (2007) by Christopher Andersen