An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963
I am a day behind, yesterday was the last Sunday in June and the last Sunday of the month I read a book about a president, and June 2024 was JFK, making last weeks book An Unfinished Life: John F Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek.
JFK was born May 29, 1917, to Joseph P Kennedy Sr and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy in Brookline, MA. Joe Sr was an up-and-coming businessman who amassed an absolute fortune. Both the Kennedy and Fitzgerald’s clans were embedded in local politics, which certainly paved the way for JFK’s future, although not as directly as you might think. See, JFK was the second born of nine children, and his older brother Joseph Kennedy Jr was the one slated by Joe Sr to be president. So, JFK grew up in his brother’s shadow.
But rich. I mean, Joe Sr was building the wealth, but he got the right to work and by the time JFK was ready for college, he had his pick. He initially picked Princeton but dropped out after a semester and transferred to Harvard, which is where he graduated from.
Part of what caused him to drop out of Princeton were ongoing health issues. JFK had not been the healthiest of kids and he would ultimately be diagnosed with colitis, prostatitis, and Addison’s disease. I think it was the corticosteroids he was prescribed, which was a new medication, that led to his back problems. One of the side effects is osteoporosis, and basically his long-term use of corticosteroids led to the degeneration of several vertebrae in his lower back. All of this happened before the outbreak of WWII, but the family kept their privacy, and his medical problems were a closely kept family secret. Since serving was the thing to do, and in all fairness to JFK, he WANTED To serve, even though his medical history would have given him an easy out, instead, he had Joe Sr pull some strings so that his medical history would be ignored, and he joined the US Navy.
Initially, he was part of the office of naval intelligence, which he found interesting; however, one of his lifelong habits, learned from Joe Sr, was a habit of promiscuity. He became involved with a journalist who had interviewed Hitler, and there was some belief she may have been a spy, so JFK was shuttled off to a do nothing posting in I think S Carolina. He quickly grew bored with his new posting, and the boredom hit its peak right about the time General MacArthur was evacuated from the Philippines via PT Boat. This made PT Boat’s the hot new posting, and Joe Sr pulled some strings again to get JFK assigned to the PT Boats.
And JFK did ok with this. He was probably not considered one of the best officers the US Navy ever had, but when his PT Boat was torpedoed, he lost two crew members immediately, but coordinated the rest for survival and was eventually rescued? Picked up by the US Navy after he managed to alert them via coconut message…like literally carved his position into a coconut and had a native islander deliver it to the US Navy.
After all of this, he was ready to leave the military, because hey, war sucks. And lucky for him, when his degenerative disc condition raised its head again, the US Navy blamed the condition on having been swimming for like 17 hours in the ocean while trying to get to safety, and he was medically discharged.
Now he had to figure out what to do with his life. Most of his family maintained that politics was not his chosen career path. Only one of his close friends believed he would have gone into politics regardless. But ultimately, the decision was made for him when older brother Joe Jr was killed on a mission over the English Channel.
And with that, JFK’s course was set. Starting with Congressman. And again, you have to admire his determination. If you’ve ever had persistent back pain, then reading about how he would literally go door to door or stand for hours outside a factory shaking hands with all the workers…. that’s admirable. I mean, don’t get me wrong, daddy’s money bought plenty of advertising, but he did the work too, put in the hours to get the votes himself. So, this was 1946, and he won his election to US House of Representatives, where he would serve three terms, before making the leap to US Senator in 1952 election year, serving 1953 until he had to resign on winning the presidency in 1960.
Now, he did not contribute to any landmark legislation. For large chunks of time while he was serving in Congress, both chambers, he was dealing with his ongoing health issues, including several surgeries to try and relieve his back pain. It was during this time he was officially diagnosed with Addison’s disease, which is an adrenal insufficiency disorder. And while he didn’t have any legislation to put forward, he knew that if he wanted to be president, he needed to make himself known outside the state of Massachusetts. To that end, he did several things.
He wrote a book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, called Profiles in Courage, which was basically a series of brief biographies on eight American’s mostly senators, and how they stood out from the crowd to embody the American ideal. He initially tried to secure the vice-president spot on Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential run, but failing that, he actively campaigned for Stevenson, giving hundreds of speeches across the nation. And while the country has had bachelor presidents before (Martin van Buren was widowed, Thomas Jefferson was widowed, James Buchanan never married, Grover Cleveland was not married when elected) …he knew that American’s were more likely to elect a married man. Enter Jacqueline Lee Bouvier. They courted for I think it said two years before marrying.
Now, JFK was, by any metric, an absolute shit husband. Jackie would be pregnant four times, miscarry twice. The first miscarriage, JFK was on a yacht in Europe, having sex with other women, and the only reason he returned to be with Jackie while she was recovering from the miscarriage, is that his friend said Hey…a divorce is unlikely to get you elected president. I mean…yikes!
JFK’s womanizing was almost an open secret. I mean, the press never called him out on it, but Jackie would call ahead to the White House to let them know she was returning, so that whoever JFK was currently diddling could put her panties back on. The only one JFK actually denied having sex with was Marilyn Monroe, but I kind of think that it was because she was so famous that he was denying it. He never denied anyone else and was caught on tape telling younger brother Bobby…like at Bobby’s wedding…that just cause he was getting married didn’t mean he had to give up sex with other women. So…yeah. He’s a peach of a man.
Anyway, he made his White house intentions known in January 1960 and began campaigning at individual state primaries, winning the primaries in the states that had them, and of course winning the democratic party nomination, picking Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. JFK’s Catholicism was an issue, but he managed to make it a non-issue and went on to win, being sworn in as president on January 20, 1961.
And he definitely had an eventful three years of presidency, starting almost immediately with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. It’s indicative of the type of politician JFK was that while he was almost entirely responsible for creating the crises in the first place, he’s given full credit for keeping it from escalating to open warfare. I mean…it never would have happened if he hadn’t authorized the CIA operation. But he gets full credit for not letting it escalate. Weird.
His talks with Kruschev in Vienna did not go well, mostly as Kruschev was more interested in debating the merits of communism over capitalism than in reaching a détente on Berlin. What Kruschev wanted was the flood of refugees from East Berlin to West Berlin to stop. He threatened just taking over all of Berlin, which Kennedy said would definitely lead to war, since the terms of the WWII peace treaties left west Berlin in the hands of western forces. Kruschev was really pushing that line, but then found his way out by building the Berlin Wall instead of invading west Berlin. It did allow everyone to back down gracefully but sucked for Germany for the next 28 years.
Kennedy’s Civil Rights record is appalling. It’s pretty evident that he paid lip service to the idea of civil rights just to get the African vote. Because when the south exploded in violence, he did almost nothing to stop it. He had Bobby, who was basically his behind-the-scenes mouthpiece, pushed through some countermeasures with various governors, and JFK made noise about the commission for equal employment opportunity and the need to hire more black people in the government, but did very little to make that a reality. Martin Luther King Jr called him out several times for his inconsistency in putting action to the words he spoke. There is some indication that he was waiting to make real moves on the Civil Rights front until his second term, because then he didn’t have to worry about re-election. Which is such a chicken shit way to lead.
The Cuban missile crises actually made me feel bad for Kruschev, who just wanted our missiles out of Turkey. It was like hey…. you don’t like missiles at your back door? Well neither do we.
And despite warnings from…well, basically EVERYONE…about what an absolute clusterfuck war in SE Asia would be, JFK still authorized military advisors to go to Vietnam, and as of November 1963, we already had 100 dead.
I will say the author’s discussion of the assassination, when it happened, or rather, when he got to the point, was simple in its discussion. And made me laugh, in a dark…VERY dark…sort of way:
“When he (Jack) showed the black-bordered ad to Jackie, the president said “We’re heading into nut country today. But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”
And then they did.
But seriously, it was the next paragraph summation: “Of course, there were security precautions that could be taken, but in protecting the president from potential threats during his trip to Texas, and Dallas in particular, the Secret Service and FBI worried too much about the ultraright and too little about a possible assassin from the radical left.”
Which is usually how the radical left ends up doing so much damage. The government, despite very clear, HISTORICAL EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY, fail to see the left as dangerous.
This book was a drag. I mean, the first three parts, about his growing up, his time in Congress, and his run up to the presidency, were excellent. It was fast paced, it kept moving forward, it was a little repetitious in regard to JFK’s health issues and womanizing, but the peat/repeat of those issues were restated in context of how the health issues were impacting Kennedy at that point in time, how his womanizing was viewed by contemporaries.
The last and longest part, which isn’t even the longest part of his life, was an absolute, head/desk pounding, soul sucking, repetition of itself. It’s like every single chapter, he had to repeat again and again that JFK was dealing with Cuba, communism, Kruschev, Civil Rights, Vietnam, all at the same time. Dallek should have broken it down into Cuba…Bay of Pigs led to Cuban Missile Crises. Kruschev…first conference in Vienna led to Berlin Wall and USSR’s supplying of missiles to Cuba. Civil Rights…. he was shaky on em, but here’s what he WANTED to do and how he did ultimately respond to X, Y, Z incidents. But the reptition….my god. The last chapter was like a hurried summary of all of the above, with the assassination being basically the two paragraphs I quoted above. 70 pages of recap, two paragraphs of oh, then he was killed.
I met with friends yesterday and one of them asked me which book I was reading, and I told her this one, that I had 40 pages left, and he still wasn’t dead yet. So yeah, the section on the actual presidency, could have been much better organized.
The book was ok, overall. But exhausting and frustrating to read as it kept circling back to information that had already been covered. I definitely got the sense that he was being paid by the word. Because why else would a book about one of the shortest presidencies be as long as a book about the absolute longest?
