An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (118 page)

If Kennedy had never become president, it is doubtful that biographers, historians, and the mass public would have had a lot of interest in him. His famous father, heroism in World War II, elections to the House and Senate, publication of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on political courage, failed bid for the vice presidential nomination in 1956, and presidential nomination in 1960 as only the second Catholic to hold that distinction would have made him an object of some curiosity. But his career probably would have generated little more than the limited interest most losing contenders for the presidency receive. Some defeated presidential candidates like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas, William Jennings Bryan, Charles Evans Hughes, Robert M. La Follette, Henry A. Wallace, and Barry Goldwater are remembered for their associations with larger political developments or other public service. But Kennedy’s pre-presidential career as a relatively minor political figure would have made him less interesting to historians. He left no especially notable marks as a congressman or a senator.

As matters now stand, however, no detail about the Kennedys escapes scrutiny. Jack and Jackie, Joe, Rose, and Bobby have been the particular focus of public attention, but the other members of the family are also ongoing projects for numerous journalists, biographers, and historians in America and abroad. Would Robert Kennedy’s three years as attorney general, fewer than four years as a New York senator, and assassination as a presidential candidate have netted him so much biographical and historical attention were he not a Kennedy? Would John Kennedy Jr.’s tragic death in 1999 have received such worldwide news coverage if he had not been JFK’s son? The Kennedys, with all their strengths and weaknesses, seem to fulfill an American longing for a royal family—perhaps like the one in Britain, which is the object of both reverence and criticism.

No Kennedy life has been more thoroughly probed than JFK’s. His medical history has received justifiable investigation. Since the president controls nuclear weapons and so much else, his physical and mental health have become compelling concerns. A disabled president like Wilson in 1919-20 or even one with the less severe medical ailments of an Eisenhower has become unacceptable in a post-1945 era of nuclear weapons and world power. (The Twenty-fifth Amendment, stating the means for replacing a disabled president, was added to the Constitution in 1967.) As we know now, Kennedy feared that his Addison’s disease, colitis, back troubles, and prostatitis would be used against him in the 1960 campaign. More to the point, he worried that disclosure of his repeated hospitalizations in the 1950s and his reliance on steroids to combat the debilitating effects of Addison’s disease and on antispasmodics, painkillers, testosterone, antibiotics, and sleeping pills to help him cope with collateral problems would almost certainly block him from becoming president.

Consequently, Kennedy was less than open about his medical history. And this deception continued after his death: At Bobby’s request, autopsy notes were destroyed; Dr. William Herbst, a urologist who treated JFK in the fifties, burned his files in a basement furnace after informing Bobby that the FBI had asked for them; and, James Young believes, Bobby persuaded Burkley to destroy his records. The deception was calculated to preserve JFK’s and Bobby’s reputations for honest dealings with the public. The ruse, like that practiced by Wilson about his medical condition, certainly undermines Kennedy’s historical standing as a democratic leader. Yet unlike Wilson, Kennedy successfully bet that he could function effectively as president. My reading of the most extensive collection of medical records ever available to a Kennedy biographer, combined with close study of his day-to-day performance, demonstrates that he was right. Despite almost constant stress generated by international and domestic crises, he survived a presidency that was more burdened with difficulties than most. Prescribed medicines and a program of exercises begun in the fall of 1961, combined with his intelligence, knowledge of history, and determination to manage presidential challenges, allowed him to sensibly address potentially disastrous problems. His opposition to excessive reliance on nuclear weapons and to international proliferation, his decision not to use American military power to save the invaders at the Bay of Pigs, his restrained dealings with Khrushchev over Berlin and particularly Cuba, his reluctance to expand the fighting in Vietnam, and his eventual understanding that civil rights reform had to come to the top of the domestic agenda demonstrate the rational judgments of someone undistracted by health problems. It seems fair to say that Kennedy courageously surmounted his physical suffering: His medical difficulties did not significantly undermine his performance as president on any major question.

Looking backwards from today, we can conclude that full disclosure of Kennedy’s ailments would, as he believed, have barred him from the White House. In holding back this information, Kennedy was saying to the country, “Trust me to perform effectively as president. Though I will be younger than anyone else ever elected to the office and though my religious faith is different from that of most voters and would make me the only Catholic ever to become president, a vote for me is an expression of confidence in my promise to serve the nation effectively and of the country’s genuine commitment to judging someone by their personal attributes rather than their religion, race or ethnicity.” (He would surely have come to include gender in this measuring rod.) His appeal convinced enough Americans to give the office to him rather than to Richard Nixon. It is difficult to believe that voters would want to gamble again on someone with the sort of severe health problems Kennedy suffered. But given the way Nixon performed in the White House, how many people would retrospectively offer him their vote for 1960, even knowing of Kennedy’s health problems?

One cannot speak as confidently about Kennedy’s reckless womanizing. Up to a point, Kennedy had justifiable confidence that the mainstream media was not going to publicize his affairs, as with a Mary Meyer, or more scandalous sex parties with call girls in the White House. But as the Profumo scandal in Britain made clear, trysts with women like Judith Campbell Exner and Ellen Rometsch, which made Kennedy vulnerable to charges of mob influence and national security breaches, were a dangerous indulgence. Bobby’s protective actions and J. Edgar Hoover’s cooperation in hiding the president’s behavior were not guarantees against a public scandal jeopardizing his presidency. Kennedy certainly could have spent eight years in office without public discussion of his philandering. It is also conceivable that he could have survived a scandal by effectively denying it. But the more important questions biographers confront are, Why was he so incautious? Why did he not get caught? and Did his sexual escapades affect his presidency?

The answer to the first requires speculation about personal motives that are never easy to discern. I have suggested that his father’s behavior, difficulties with his mother, anxiety about a truncated life, which Joe Jr.’s and Kathleen’s early deaths and his health concerns made all too real, and the prevailing mores of his class, time, and place helped make him a compulsive womanizer. Kennedy himself, who could not explain his need for sex with so many women, probably rationalized his behavior as a diversion comparable with what British aristocrats did, or with the golf, sailing, and fishing presidents traditionally used to ease tensions. Bruce Grant, an Australian writer who read
Profiles in Courage
after meeting Kennedy in 1960, noted that the men Jack wrote about were less “lustrous heroes” than “complex, even enigmatic American politicians. It was obvious from the tone and the content of this prize-winning book that the author was himself, not darkly troubled perhaps but full of complexities, inconsistencies and doubts.” The answer to the second question—his success in hiding his philandering—seems easier to explain; a journalistic taboo on violating a president’s privacy largely shielded Kennedy from public discussions of his sex life that could have played havoc with his presidency. And as for the third question, as far as I can tell, Kennedy’s dalliances were no impediment to his being an effective president.

The sum of Kennedy’s actions in domestic and foreign affairs should be central to any assessment of his abbreviated presidency; the overheated discussions of his private life have told us little, if anything, about his presidential performance. Most historians are willing to acknowledge that Kennedy was at the very least an above-average president. Decisive moments in the struggle over civil rights and in the Cold War gave his presidency a greater importance than that of many longer administrations. But no president can lay claim to high ratings merely for having served two terms or for having faced seminal events. Otherwise, failed presidents like James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover would stand in the front ranks of chief executives. Such rankings, as Kennedy himself complained, are a poor substitute for measuring the complexities of a presidential term. Kennedy’s presidency is better understood as a patchwork of stumbles and significant achievements.

The domestic record of Kennedy’s thousand days was distinctly limited. On civil rights, the greatest domestic issue of the early 1960s, he was a cautious leader. Despite Executive Orders and federal lawsuits opposing southern segregation, he was slow to recognize the extent of the social revolution fostered by Martin Luther King and African Americans, and he repeatedly deferred to southern sensitivities on racial matters, including appointments of segregationist judges in southern federal districts. It took crises in Mississippi and particularly in Alabama to persuade him to put a landmark civil rights bill before Congress in June 1963, and even then he was willing to weaken its provisions to win approval from an unreceptive Congress.

Kennedy’s appointment of Byron White as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in April 1962 tellingly demonstrates his mixed record on civil rights. White, who went to the Court after fifteen months as deputy attorney general and with a record of support for desegregating schools, was a less reliable voice on the Court for equal rights. Though he supported busing and a court-ordered tax increase to pay for a desegregation plan, he was the architect of an opinion requiring proponents of affirmative action to show that government policies that produced discriminatory results were intentional rather than random. His majority opinion was seen as a distinct setback for black rights.

None of Kennedy’s major reform initiatives—the tax cut, federal aid to education, Medicare, and civil rights—became law during his time in office. Yet all his significant reform proposals, including plans for a housing department and a major assault on poverty, which he had discussed in 1961 and 1963, respectively, came to fruition under Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, of course, deserves considerable credit for these reforms. Relying on the skills he had mastered as a congressman and senator, and especially as senate majority leader, he won passage of the tax cut and civil rights bills in 1964, the antipoverty, federal aid to education, Medicare, and voting rights laws in 1965, and statutes creating cabinet-level transportation and housing and urban development departments in 1966. Most of these measures came after Johnson had won his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater and two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress in the 1964 presidential and congressional elections.

Johnson’s enactment of Kennedy’s reform agenda testifies to their shared wisdom about the national well-being. Part of Kennedy’s legacy should be an understanding that he proposed major domestic reforms that have had an enduring constructive impact on the country. No one should deny Johnson credit in winning passage of so many Great Society bills, as he called his reform program. Nor should anyone discount the importance of his unprecedented margins in the 1964 campaign as opening the way to his legislative advances. Nevertheless, it is arguable that Kennedy would have made similar gains in a second term. If Kennedy had been running against Goldwater in 1964, which is more than likely, he would also have won a big victory and carried large numbers of liberal Democrats into the House and Senate with him. He would then have enjoyed the same success as Johnson in passing the major bills that were on his administration’s legislative agenda at his death in November 1963. It is doubtful that Kennedy would have been as aggressive as Johnson in expanding the reform program set before Congress in 1965 and 1966, but the major bills pending from Kennedy’s first term would all have found their way into the law books. The most important of the Great Society measures deserve to be described as Kennedy-Johnson achievements.

Foreign affairs, as Kennedy himself would have argued, were the principal concerns of his presidency. The Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, and Apollo are significant measures of his foreign policy performance. The Peace Corps and his commitment to land a man on the moon were great successes; the Alliance was an exercise in unrealized hopes. All three programs initially generated great enthusiasm, at home and abroad, where they were seen as representative of America at its best—a generous, advanced nation promoting a better life for less fortunate peoples around the globe and greater scientific understanding. The Peace Corps rose to the challenge and continues to provide a helping hand to developing countries. The moon walk, though coming after Kennedy’s presidency, will stand as a landmark in the history of space exploration. By contrast, the plan for Latin America fell victim to international conditions and traditional U.S. paternalism toward the southern republics, which Kennedy found more difficult to abandon than he had anticipated at the start of his term.

Kennedy’s focus on Cuba, relations with Soviet Russia, and actions in Vietnam are additional telling measures of his presidential effectiveness. The Bay of Pigs failure followed by repeated discussions of how to topple Castro show Kennedy at his worst—inexperienced and driven by Cold War imperatives that helped bring the world to the edge of a disastrous nuclear war. But the almost universal praise for his restraint and accommodation in the missile crisis followed by secret explorations of détente with Havana more than make up for his initial errors of judgment. Indeed, a second Kennedy term might have brought a resolution to unproductive tensions with Castro and foreclosed more than forty years of Cuban-American antagonism.