An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
IN THE FORTY YEARS since Kennedy’s assassination, family, friends and the whole country have struggled to come to terms with his senseless murder. What could possibly explain the sudden violent end to the life of someone as young, attractive, and politically powerful as John F. Kennedy? Is there some way to give constructive meaning to his death?
Jacqueline Kennedy, the most directly affected by JFK’s death, struggled to maintain her rationality. White House physician Dr. James M. Young, who saw her in Washington and Hyannis Port two or three times a day during the ten days after the assassination, remembers her as “emotionally distraught” but generally composed and self-contained. She “did not break down and cry,” and with the help of sleeping medication “she did well.” There were occasional expressions of anger at the failings of the Secret Service and at Kennedy’s doctors. She called Janet Travell a “Madame Nhu,” George Burkley, who would pass patients off to other physicians, a “communist,” and Eugene Cohen, who was at odds with Travell, a “psychopath.”
Her husband’s tragic death seemed to have dissolved her anger toward him for his womanizing. At least she said nothing to Dr. Young about the problem, but to the contrary, spoke only lovingly of Jack, remembering the scars on his back as a symbol of his fortitude in dealing with his physical pain, the hard mattress he needed, and the pleasure of being with him in bed.
She seemed to find purpose and solace in preserving JFK’s memory. Only thirty-four years old, deprived of decades of life with her husband, faced with raising her six-year-old and three-year-old children without their father—whom they would never know—Jackie kept her balance—indeed sanity—by focusing on Kennedy’s legacy. She understood that no one was going to forget him; rather, her concern was how the world would remember him.
She began with his funeral. Although some members of the family wished to bury the president in Brookline, Massachusetts, JFK’s birthplace, Jackie insisted on Arlington Cemetery. An eternal flame, like one in Paris at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier built after World War I at the base of the Arc de Triomphe, was to mark the grave. She also asked that the ceremony resemble Lincoln’s, the most revered of the country’s martyred presidents. A procession from the White House to the Roman Catholic St. Matthew’s Cathedral, eight blocks away, consisted of Jackie, Bobby, Ted, President and Mrs. Johnson, principal Kennedy associates, and representatives of ninety-two nations, including de Gaulle and Anastas Mikoyan, Khrushchev’s first deputy. The international contingent and fears that assassins associated with Oswald or incited by his example might try to kill some of the dignitaries made the ceremony a more portentous occasion than that of Franklin Roosevelt’s passing.
It may be that Jackie, as one writer said, “needed the myth of her fallen husband to secure her own brittle identity,” but a more generous analysis should admit that her effort to lionize Kennedy must have provided a therapeutic shield against immobilizing grief. A few days after his funeral, she granted an interview to Theodore White, whose book on the 1960 election had drawn a flattering portrait of her husband. Describing Kennedy’s death as marking the end of Camelot, a romanticized association with King Arthur’s court that White faithfully recorded in a Life magazine article on December 6, Jackie helped create an idyllic portrait that Schlesinger has said “would have provoked John Kennedy to profane disclaimer.”
Their son’s death staggered Joe and Rose. Still immobilized by his 1961 stroke, Joe did not attend the funeral. He was either too incapacitated or too shocked to comprehend the awful news. The family shielded him from the reports on television until the next morning, when Teddy and Eunice told him. Rose could not bear to be in the room when they did. “We have told him, but we don’t think that he understands it,” Rose said.
The news temporarily shook Rose’s faith. She “walked and walked and walked” in the yard of the Hyannis Port house and on the beach and “prayed and prayed and prayed, and wondered why it happened to Jack. He had everything to live for. . . . Everything—the culmination of all his efforts, abilities, dedication to good and to the future—lay boundlessly before him. Everything was gone and I wondered why.” Rose was so upset that she could not walk with the procession to the cathedral for fear that she might collapse.
But no one among the Kennedys suffered more acutely than Bobby. Though a man of unquestioning faith, he could not find any sense or meaning in his brother’s death. “Why, God?” he asked as he sobbed in the privacy of the Lincoln bedroom the night of November 22. “The innocent suffer—how can that be possible and God be just?” he asked himself in the days after the assassination. LeMoyne Billings remembered him as devastated. He had so fully devoted himself to his brother’s career that the president’s death left him bewildered. “He didn’t know where he was. . . . Everything was just pulled out from under him.” In the weeks and months after the tragedy, Bobby took to reading Greek classics by Aeschylus, Euripides, Herodotus, and Sophocles and works by the modern existentialists, especially Albert Camus, to help understand the agony and suffering in every life. They gave him the solace needed to sustain a public career, now more than ever in behalf of those most vulnerable to personal and social problems.
The depths of Bobby’s anguish may partly have sprung from guilt. John McCone believed that Bobby was either directly or indirectly involved in Castro assassination plots, which Bobby suspected had led Castro agents to kill his brother. Biographer Evan Thomas concluded that Bobby “gave lip service to the single-gunman explanation” in the government’s official report on the assassination, but “he never quieted his own doubts.” Bobby, according to Thomas, thought the killing might have been the work of the CIA or mobster Sam Giancana or Castro or Jimmy Hoffa or the Cuban exiles.
Lyndon Johnson shared the conviction that an undetected conspiracy was behind Kennedy’s assassination. He initially believed that the president’s death was in revenge for Diem’s killing. In time, he concluded that Castro supporters were responsible. “President Kennedy tried to get Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first,” he told Joseph Califano, his domestic affairs chief. Kennedy’s death came a year after Castro’s government foiled a CIA-assassination plot in Havana. “We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” Johnson told a journalist.
Johnson saw the country’s initial reaction to the assassination as “troubled, puzzled, and outraged.” But after Jack Ruby, an unsavory Dallas nightclub operator, killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the prime suspect in the assassination, in the garage of a Dallas police station on his way to a court hearing, the country concluded that Kennedy’s death was the work of more than just one man. Although the Warren Commission, the government’s inquiry into the assassination headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, described Oswald in its September 1964 report as the lone killer, a majority of Americans never accepted that conclusion. To be sure, the commission’s failure to ferret out and disclose CIA assassination plots against Castro or to reveal and condemn the FBI for inattentiveness to Oswald raised questions later about the reliability of its evidence and judgment. But in December 1963, even before the commission published its findings, 52 percent of the country saw “some group or element” behind the assassination. By January 1967, the belief in a conspiracy had risen to 64 percent.
Despite an authoritative 1993 book, Case Closed, by attorney Gerald Posner refuting numerous conspiracy theories, the public, inflamed by a popular 1991 Oliver Stone film, JFK, believed otherwise. In 1992, fewer than one-third of Americans accepted the Warren Commission’s findings as persuasive. In February of that year, the New York Times Book Review listed as bestsellers one hardcover and three paperback books describing Kennedy assassination theories. To this day, a substantial majority in America assumes that an aggrieved group rather than just Oswald was behind Kennedy’s killing. The prime suspects are pro- or anti-Castro Cubans, Vietnamese retaliating for Diem’s death, “the mob” or labor bosses hurt by Kennedy, and the CIA, military chiefs, and Lyndon Johnson opposed to détente with Moscow.
The fact that none of the conspiracy theorists have been able to offer convincing evidence of their suspicions does not seem to trouble many people. The plausibility of a conspiracy is less important to them than the implausibility of someone as inconsequential as Oswald having the wherewithal to kill someone as consequential—as powerful and well guarded—as Kennedy. To accept that an act of random violence by an obscure malcontent could bring down a president of the United States is to acknowledge a chaotic, disorderly world that frightens most Americans. Believing that Oswald killed Kennedy is to concede, as New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis said, “that in this life there is often tragedy without reason.”
Despite his own suspicions of a conspiracy, Johnson was eager to reassure the country that only Oswald was involved. He feared that speculation about Cuban or Soviet responsibility might provoke a nuclear war. As he told Earl Warren when convincing him to head the commission, rumors that either Castro or Khrushchev was part of a conspiracy “might even catapult us into a nuclear war if it got a head start.” To overcome Georgia senator Richard Russell’s resistance to joining the commission, Johnson warned him that forty million Americans might lose their lives in a nuclear conflict if accusations about Castro and Khrushchev were not refuted.
Kennedy’s assassination provoked not only conspiracy theories but also an extraordinary public attachment to his memory. Forty years after his death, Americans consistently rate Kennedy as one of the five greatest presidents in U.S. history. Fifty-two percent of respondents in a 1975 Gallup poll ranking presidents put Kennedy first, ahead of Lincoln and FDR; ten years later, he remained number one, with 56 percent backing. A poll released on Presidents Day in February 1999 declared Lincoln the greatest of our presidents, with Washington, JFK, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton tied for second. In 2000, Kennedy topped the list, followed by Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. Stories about Reagan’s ninetieth birthday in 2001 propelled him to the top spot, with Kennedy second and Lincoln third.
How can one explain Kennedy’s enduring hold on the public’s imagination? His thousand-day presidency—the sixth-briefest in the country’s history—hardly measures up to the administrations of Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, our most notable presidents. Nor are professional historians persuaded that Kennedy deserves such high standing. The want of landmark legislation, an overly cautious response to black pressure for equal treatment under the law, and a mixed record in foreign affairs, where success in the missile crisis and with the test ban treaty are balanced against unresolved Cuban problems and deeper involvement in Vietnam, have persuaded scholars that Kennedy was not a truly distinguished president.
Moreover, revelations about Kennedy’s womanizing and health have raised questions about whether he could have made it through a second term. In his 1991 book, A Question of Character, historian Thomas C. Reeves concluded, “Had Kennedy lived to see a second term, the realities of his lechery and dealings with [mobster] Sam Giancana might have leaked out while he was still in office, gravely damaging the presidency. . . . Impeachment might well have followed such public disclosure.” In his 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, Seymour Hersh asserted that JFK’s tawdry behavior during his presidency put him “just one news story away from cataclysmic political scandal.”
In 1982, two thousand scholars asked to categorize American presidents as great, near great, above average, average, below average, and failure, ranked Kennedy as number thirteen, in the middle of the above-average group. In 1988, seventy-five historians and journalists described JFK as “the most overrated public figure in American history.” An October 2000 survey of seventy-eight scholars in history, politics, and law, which gave considerable weight to length of presidential service, ranked Kennedy number eighteen, at the bottom of the above-average category.
But the public has other yardsticks for measuring presidential greatness. The muckraking about Kennedy’s private life has had no significant impact on public admiration for his presidential record. Most Americans set his health problems, sexual escapades, and dealings with Giancana down as unproven gossip that had no demonstrable effect on his official duties. Despite a voyeuristic interest that makes bestsellers out of books offering sensational revelations, Kennedy’s personal magnetism has had more enduring appeal than allegations of deceitfulness and immoral behavior. Substantial public interest in White House tapes and a Hollywood film demonstrating Kennedy’s effectiveness during the missile crisis, as well as long lines of people in New York, Boston, and Washington eager to view an exhibit of Jackie Kennedy’s personal wardrobe and effects as First Lady, are fresh demonstrations of the Kennedys’ continuing popularity.
The assassination and Kennedy’s martyrdom no doubt remain the most important factors in perpetuating high public regard for his leadership and importance as a president. But this alone cannot explain his popularity. In 1941, forty years after William McKinley, who had been among the small number of presidents elected twice, was assassinated, he was an all but forgotten chief. The advent of television, which captured Kennedy’s youthful appearance, good looks, charm, wit, and rhetorical idealism and hope, also contributed to his ongoing appeal. The public’s faith in Kennedy’s sincerity is an additional element in his continuing hold on the country. In an era of public cynicism about politicians as poseurs who are stage-managed and often insincere, Kennedy’s remembered forthrightness strengthens his current appeal. These attributes have encouraged a belief that had he lived, the United States would have avoided many of the problems it suffered under Johnson and Nixon during the 1960s and 1970s.
Public attachment to Kennedy also rests on the conviction that his election reduced religious and ethnic tests for the presidency. True, no other Catholic has become president since Kennedy, but Ronald Reagan, though not a practicing Catholic, had a Catholic father. Moreover, the vice presidential candidacies of Geraldine Ferraro, a Catholic, in 1984, and of Joseph Lieberman, a Jew, in 2000, demonstrate that JFK’s presidency significantly reduced religion as a barrier to the White House. It also helped make the election of a woman to the presidency conceivable. For millions of ethnic Americans, Kennedy remains more than a bright, promising young president whose life and time in office were prematurely snuffed out. He is an enduring demonstration that ethnics and minorities, who, despite rhetoric to the contrary, did not feel fully accepted in America before 1960, have come into their own as first-class citizens. Kennedy’s identification with a rich and famous family, Harvard degree, heroism in World War II, and election to the House, Senate, and White House have been enough to make him a great president in the eyes of hyphenated Americans. Then and now, they share dreams realized by the Kennedys of becoming American aristocrats.
KENNEDY’S DEATH WAS initially a triumph of the worst in human relations over the promise of better times. But, as Warren anticipated, the grief over his loss became a compelling drive for the enactment of legislative and international gains that remain living memorials to his vision of a fairer, more prosperous, and peaceful world. The “idealist without illusions,” as Kennedy described himself, would have taken satisfaction from the advances that his senseless death helped bring to life. But it was limited compensation to those who believed that another five years in the White House and a postpresidential career might have allowed Kennedy to shield the country from losses and defeats, avoiding the doubts and cynicism flowing from the assassination and the Vietnam War and bringing benefits that would have served countless millions at home and abroad.
Epilogue
ALL THE MYTHMAKING—positive and negative—about Kennedy would not have interested him as much as a fair-minded assessment of his public career. He would probably have been less than happy that biographers had unearthed so much of the truth about his private life. Nor would he have had any illusions that historians would be of one mind about his policies and actions. He understood that history, as the great Dutch historian Peter Geyl asserted, is an argument without end. (In October 1961, he told scholars editing the John
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.