JFK was truly one of a kind
The other day, at home, I hung a photograph of John F. Kennedy on one wall. It was taken in the spring of 1960 in Chesapeake, W. Va., which is not far from the state capital of Charleston. Chesapeake is an old industrial town, one or two streets wide, sitting in a narrow valley formed by the Kanawha River.
Kennedy was at the end of a long day of campaigning when he sat on a battered lawn chair beside Sarah Hoffman in a Chesapeake backyard. Sarah was 85, thin, with wispy gray hair. It made for an arresting tableau in the following day’s Charleston Gazette: frail, thread-bare, home-bound Sarah and the well-tailored young senator from Massachusetts running for president.
The two were soon surrounded by neighborhood children. In the photograph I now have on my wall, a boy of 11 or 12 stands in back, a fascinated, slightly quizzical look on his face: He had undoubtedly heard of Kennedy, and here was the man himself leaning in to hear from old lady Hoffman in her familiar tattered sweater and homely old dress.
It is one of my favorite photographs of Kennedy, of which there are many. Truth be told, I’m a Kennedy nerd. As a high school student, I did a pretty good Kennedy imitation, by way of Vaughn Meader.
I memorized whole patches of Kennedy speeches, including his entire Inaugural Address.
I went alone on a hot summer day in 1963 to see the movie “PT-108” at the old Manos Theater in Uniontown. I was 15.
I once had a writing professor in college, after reading an atrocious essay of mine on the “new politics” (this was late 1960s), say it sounded like Kennedy for me was “the only president.” He was right then, and largely right today.
I can’t shake the man.
This is the centennial of JFK’s birthday. Celebrations are planned this week and next in Boston and Washington, D.C. For many old geezers like myself, the genuflecting has been lifelong. What is it about Kennedy that evokes such devotion, despite his now well-known personal failings?
Let’s dispose of the elephant in the room. Kennedy was a serial philanderer. While married, he pursued woman after woman. Stewardesses, actresses, the sister of his best friend’s wife, a White House summer intern, the fabled Fiddle and Faddle who worked in the presidential press office, and other categories of females. One paramour was the former girlfriend of a Chicago mobster, a fact that the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover never let him forget.
He once told the British prime minister that if he went too long without sex he got violent headaches. Harold McMillan was amused yet puzzled.
Here’s my rationale: sure, Jackie knew, but it was done discreetly, with women who evidently loved him. Not one ever had an unkind word to say about him. And he was not one to blab. Best bud Ben Bradlee didn’t know until many years after Kennedy’s death that the president had carried on an affair with his sister-in-law.
Besides, all of this was part of life’s big adventure for Kennedy, wracked with pain and other medical abnormalities, to the extent that life itself must have seemed miraculous at times. Life is short, live it to the hilt.
And he never let that part of his existence interfere with his duties as president. Proof? He sent the gangster and the jealous boyfriend of Jackie-look-alike Judith Exner, Sam Gianacana, packing off to jail, didn’t he?
As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has noted, Gianacana’s life during the Kennedy administration consisted of “round-the-clock FBI surveillance, federal indictments, and a year in jail.”
I actually feel sorry for anyone who wasn’t around to remember Kennedy. Yes, he came late to the civil rights; campaigning for president while serving in the Senate, Kennedy had two principal constituent targets, the white segregationist South and big city Northern liberals. He needed both. He got both.
Still, when he came to civil rights he came hard, presenting to Congress the landmark civil rights bill that would become law under Lyndon Johnson. The struggle for civil rights was “primarily moral” and as clear and old as the Constitution and the Bible, Kennedy said, addressing the nation.
I recall hearing from an apartment at Lemonwood Acres as I passed by early one summer night Kennedy speak these words from a blaring television set, “Yesterday a shaft of light cut into the darkness.” He was announcing an agreement with the Soviets to limit nuclear weapons testing, a treaty that came on the heels of the perilous confrontation with the Russians over nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba the previous fall.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was maybe the finest example of presidential crisis-management in the nuclear era. It may have been Kennedy’s finest hour though not his most joyous. That would have been the trip to Europe when he visited Berlin and Dublin. The greetings, televised back to America, went beyond mere enthusiasm. They crested at adoring. These were crowds that would have followed Kennedy to the ends of the earth.
Five thousand miles away, watching on black-and-white television, I was exhilarated.
Like the later generation of young people who became enamored of Reagan, myself and other of my contemporaries fell hard for Kennedy. But more about all of this next week.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.