By Edwin Cooney
It’s almost impossible to imagine John Fitzgerald Kennedy being 100 years old on this day, Monday, May 29th, 2017. So, I won’t try to imagine the reality, I’ll just celebrate it!
May 29th, 1917 fell on a Tuesday. That day, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, second son of Joseph Patrick and Rosemary Fitzgerald Kennedy, was born at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was raised in comfort as the second eldest of four brothers and five sisters. All of them, from Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., to Edward Moore Kennedy (Ted) became well known to most Americans. Since space won’t permit a mini-biography, I will instead try to put him into perspective.
John Kennedy (“Jack” to his many friends) was a strikingly handsome man standing about 6 feet, one half inch tall with a mass of reddish brown hair (some called it auburn). His health was generally rather poor and he was in nearly constant pain from his injured back (the result of football and war injuries) and the effects from jaundice, the root of which was Addison’s disease.
His character was strongly influenced, both negatively and positively, by the spiritual, social and political outlook of his parents, Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Their determination that Joe Jr, Jack, Bobby, and eventually Teddy succeed in elective office was greatly influenced by the way that white Anglo-Saxon Americans had treated Irish and other Roman Catholic immigrants and citizens since the mid 19th Century. The only way that early 20th Century Roman Catholic Americans could succeed was through knowledge, education, and competition. Jack Kennedy learned early that winning was more important than anything else in both politics and state craft. His personality, which was generally affable, enhanced his tall, slender, and usually tanned figure perfectly for American television. (It was ideal for crucial TV debates with less attractive opponents!) As for his public character, the president once said that his strongest asset was curiosity and his least attractive liability was irritability.
According to the chapter on President Kennedy in William DeGregorio’s “Complete Book of Presidents,” longtime friend and aide Kenny O’Donnell said that only twice did he see Jack Kennedy completely lose control of his temper. The first time was late in 1960 when there was a maddening snafu in the campaign schedule. The second time was during his clash with the American steel companies in early April 1962.
Politically, President Kennedy considered himself to be “an idealist without illusions.” His closest friends in the Senate were Florida Senator George Smathers, Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, and Washington State Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson. He wasn’t particularly close to either Texan Lyndon Johnson or the liberal Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey. Ironically, during the 1950s he was friendly with Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Their offices were right across the hall from one another in the Senate office building. When JFk nearly died in late 1953 in the wake of infections from back surgery, Vice President Nixon wrote a very warm and affectionate letter to Jackie Kennedy which was almost tearful in its tone hoping that God would spare courageous young Jack.
As the presidential election year of 1960 approached, JFK sought to strengthen his ties to such liberals as Hubert Humphrey (even though they competed for the nomination), Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, and even Adlai Stevenson, the twice nominated and defeated Democratic presidential candidate.
I think it’s fair to say that John Kennedy was never as “saintly” as he was portrayed in the wake of his national and world-wrenching assassination, nor was he as incompetent as he’s been portrayed by recent revisionist commentaries. Critics are right to point out that he had very little success with Congress. It took his martyrdom and Lyndon Johnson to get JFK’s Medicare, tax cut, and civil rights proposals through Congress. However, he was able to get congressional appropriation for the Peace Corps and signed the executive order creating it on Wednesday, March 1st, 1961. Finally, he was successful getting the Senate to endorse the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. Still, among postwar presidents, Jack Kennedy had the least successful congressional relations.
Where Jack Kennedy stands out the most is the way he reflected the mood and style of early 1960s America. He was young and so were we. Baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1965) were just beginning to populate the colleges, universities and armed forces. After all, he was the youngest elected president, 43 years and 224 days at his January 20th, 1961 Inauguration. (Note: Theodore Roosevelt was 42 years and 322 days when he succeeded to the presidency on the assassination of President William McKinley.) Jack Kennedy was as manly as John Wayne, as much a star as Elvis Presley, and as wise and sophisticated as Adlai Stevenson. (“A Stevenson with balls” was the way many of his supporters thought of him.) He played in the fast lane as had his father and members of “the mob” (which I’m convinced was ultimately behind his assassination).
A husband and father of two young children, a girl and a boy, the youthful president appeared to be a carbon copy of millions of us, but his eloquence, his social station and his public office set him apart. According to Theodore White, author of the book “The Making Of The President 1960,” “there was that distance around him that must surround the chief.” In crisis, he was both tough and strategic. He would quarantine rather than invade Cuba in October 1962 during the Soviet Cuban nuclear missile confrontation. He would federalize the Mississippi National Guard but use them with restraint. He would stand up to Nikita Khrushchev during the Berlin and Cuban crises, but he would never humiliate him. He took responsibility for the failure at the Bay of Pigs as the “…obvious responsible officer of the government.” Beyond that he wouldn’t go.
Above all, he understood his fellow citizens as a Harvard man speaking to a Yale audience in June of 1962. In this, my favorite speech, he forecast the challenge all leaders face:
Every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. For the great enemy of the truth is—very often—not the lie: deliberate; contrived; and dishonest; but the myth: persistent; persuasive; and unrealistic.”
“Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion rather than the discomfort of thought. Mythology distracts us everywhere.”
Kennedy’s departure from us was truly traumatic and ironic. Its irony lies in the fact that the canvas back brace that assisted him to remain upright in comfort may have caused his death. He was hit by two bullets, the first entering the back of his neck and emerging from his throat just above the knot in his tie, then passing through Governor Connally sitting on the jump seat in front of him. His last words before being hit in the back upper right side of his head shattering it and covering Jackie with blood and brain matter were: “I’m hit!”
The trauma to the whole nation was that the people experienced his death. The deaths of Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield and William McKinley weren’t experienced by a nation. Thus, in a way, Jack Kennedy’s mortality was America’s mortality. It may have been, as was written on Saturday, November 23rd, 1963, the end of America’s innocence.
He demonstrated that he knew us pretty well — certainly well enough to enchant us largely to our own benefit. We only partly knew him and perhaps it was best that way. He was the last president to be loved by both dedicated Republicans and Democrats. After Jack Kennedy, presidents have received love that was largely partisan or defensive in nature.
I remember sitting in my room as Lyndon Johnson approached Washington D.C. aboard Airforce One. I knew that the President of the United States was about to address us, but it was a Texas accent, not a Harvard one I heard. I was hoping that the president would assure us that all was well in Camelot, but alas it was dark in a Camelot that never existed.
Fortunately, Jack Kennedy did exist, and in many ways our memories of his best assets still make us smile!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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