An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 Read online

  Copyright © 2003 by Robert Dallek

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  First eBook Edition: May 2003

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2828-4

  Contents

  Preface

  PART ONE: Growing Up

  CHAPTER 1: Beginnings

  CHAPTER 2: Privileged Youth

  CHAPTER 3: The Terrors of Life

  PART TWO: Public Service

  CHAPTER 4: Choosing Politics

  CHAPTER 5: The Congressman

  CHAPTER 6: The Senator

  PART THREE: Can a Catholic Become President?

  CHAPTER 7: Nomination

  CHAPTER 8: Election

  PART FOUR: The President

  CHAPTER 9: The Torch Is Passed

  CHAPTER 10: The Schooling of a President

  CHAPTER 11: A World of Troubles

  CHAPTER 12: Crisis Manager

  CHAPTER 13: Reluctant Warrior

  CHAPTER 14: The Limits of Power

  CHAPTER 15: Frustrations and “Botches”

  CHAPTER 16: To the Brink—And Back

  CHAPTER 17: New Departures: Domestic Affairs

  CHAPTER 18: New Departures: Foreign Affairs

  CHAPTER 19: An Unfinished Presidency

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Also by Robert Dallek

  Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973

  Hail to the Chief: The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents

  Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960

  The Great Republic: A History of the American People, Volume 2 (with Bernard Bailyn, David B. Davis, David H. Donald, John L. Thomas, and Gordon S. Wood)

  Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism

  The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs

  Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945

  Democrat and Diplomat: The Life of William E. Dodd

  To Len and Myra Dinnerstein, Larry Levine, and Dick Weiss—forty-seven years of fond memories— and to Jeff Kelman—my instructor in medicine

  Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends.

  — William Butler Yeats

  Preface

  Why another Kennedy book? I was asked repeatedly during the five years I worked on this biography. The availability of new materials—written contemporary documents, telephone and Oval Office tapes, and entire oral histories or parts thereof—seemed ample reason to revisit Kennedy’s personal and public lives. I also took guidance from science writer Jacob Bronowski: “Ask an impertinent question and you are on your way to a pertinent answer.” As I worked my way through the records, I was startled by how many fresh things could be said based on the combination of old and new files about the man, his family, and his political career. To cite just a few examples, new documents reveal more clearly the cause of the accident that killed Joseph Kennedy Jr. in World War II, how Bobby Kennedy became attorney general in 1960, and what JFK thought of U.S. military chiefs, their plans for an invasion of Cuba, the American press corps in Saigon, and the wisdom of an expanded war in Vietnam.

  As with all our most interesting public figures, Kennedy is an elusive character, a man who, like all politicians, worked hard to emphasize his favorable attributes and hide his limitations. He and those closest to him were extraordinarily skillful at creating positive images that continue to shape public impressions. My objective has not been to write another debunking book (these have been in ample supply in recent years) but to penetrate the veneer of glamour and charm to reconstruct the real man or as close to it as possible. The result is not a sharply negative portrait but a description of someone with virtues and defects that make him seem both exceptional and ordinary—a man of uncommon intelligence, drive, discipline, and good judgment on the one hand, and of lifelong physical suffering and emotional problems on the other. I have not emphasized one aspect over the other but have tried to bring them into balance. Learning, for example, a great deal more than any biographer has previously known about Kennedy’s medical history allowed me to see not only the extent to which he hid his infirmities from public view but also the man’s exceptional strength of character. In addition, I have tried to understand his indisputable womanizing, including previously unknown instances of his compulsive philandering. More significant, I have ventured answers to questions about whether his health problems and behavior in any way undermined his performance of presidential duties.

  I have also tried to judiciously assess the negative and positive family influences on his character, the record of his navy service, his House and Senate careers, and, most important, his presidential policies on the economy, civil rights, federal aid to education, health insurance for seniors, and poverty, and, even more consequentially, on dealings with Russia, nuclear weapons, space, Cuba, and Vietnam. I have not hesitated to say what I believe Kennedy might have done about the many ongoing problems certain to have faced him in a second term, however open to question these conclusions may be. “It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it,” said Joseph Joubert, a French philosopher of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  I believe this biography provides the most authoritative discussion to date on Kennedy the man and his political career. Nonetheless, however much it may be a significant advance in understanding, I have no illusion that I am recording the last word on John F. Kennedy. The economist Thorstein Veblen was surely right when he cautioned that “the outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where one question grew before.” Add to this the man’s almost mythical importance to Americans and hundreds of millions of people around the globe and you can be certain that future generations will be eager for renewed attention to him in the context of their own times.

  R.D.

  February 2003

  PART ONE

  Growing Up

  Every man had to test himself, and if he was courageous and lucky he found maturity. That was all the reward you could ask for, or were entitled to: growing up.

  — Ward Just, The Translator (1991)

  CHAPTER 1

  Beginnings

  George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life: . . . “I dream things that never were—and I say: Why not?”

  — John F. Kennedy before the Irish Parliament, June 28, 1963

  IN AUGUST 1947, John F. Kennedy traveled to Ireland. The trip was notable for several reasons. Kennedy was first and foremost a “good New Englander,” an American—so said the Irish ambassador to the United States—who had all but lost his connection to the old country. Indeed, recalling how often Jack Kennedy had visited England in the 1930s and early 1940s without going to Ireland, the ambassador archly described Kennedy as “an English American.” “Many people made much of his Irish ancestry,” one of Kennedy’s English friends said. But he was “a European . . . more English than Irish.” Now, at long last, he was going home. That was not, however, how his father saw it. For Joseph Patrick Kennedy, whose drive for social acceptance shadowed most of what he did, being described as an “Irishman” was cause for private rage. “Goddamn it!” he once sputtered after a Boston newspaper identified him that way. “I was born in this country! My children were b
orn in this country! What the hell does someone have to do to become an American?”

  But his son had if not formed a deep emotional attachment, at least taken his cue from his mother’s father, John F. Fitzgerald. “There seems to be some disagreement as to whether my grandfather Fitzgerald came from Wexford, Limerick or Tipperary,” Kennedy would later recall. “And it is even more confusing as to where my great[-]grandmother came from—because her son—who was the Mayor of Boston—used to claim his mother came from whichever Irish county had the most votes in the audience he was addressing at that particular time.” And indeed, when the twenty-nine-year-old had first run for Congress the year before, Irish Americans in his district had been hesitant to support Kennedy because of his lack of ethnic identification, let alone pride.

  Officially, Kennedy was on a fact-finding mission to study the potential workings of the Marshall Plan in a Europe still reeling from the devastation wrought by the Second World War. Unofficially, it was a chance to relax with Kathleen Kennedy Hartington, Jack’s favorite younger sister, who was even more “English American” than he was. Though her husband, William Cavendish Hartington, who was in line to become the next duke of Devonshire, had died in the war, Kathleen had stayed in England, where the Devonshires treated her with fond regard. They gave her free run of their several great estates, including Lismore Castle in southern Ireland’s County Waterford, a twelfth-century mansion once owned by Sir Walter Raleigh. Kathleen called it the “most perfect place” in the world.

  Kathleen asked Jack to join her for a vacation at Lismore, where she promised to bring him together with former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden; Pamela Churchill, the divorced wife of Winston’s son, Randolph; and other prominent English social and political lions. “Anthony Eden arrives today,” Kathleen wrote an American friend, “so by the end of the week he and Jack will have fixed up the state of the world.”

  Like Kathleen, Jack Kennedy had been schooled to move comfortably in privileged circles. Jack and Kathleen did not think of themselves as anything but American aristocrats. Wit, charm, and intelligence added to the cachet he carried as a congressman and the son of one of America’s wealthiest entrepreneurs who himself was a former ambassador to Britain.

  Yet those who met John Kennedy for the first time in 1947 found little assurance in his appearance. Though having passed his thirtieth birthday in the spring, he looked like “a college boy,” or at best a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in political science. He contributed to the impression with his casual attire, appearing sometimes on the House floor in khaki pants and a rumpled seersucker jacket with a shirttail dangling below his coat or in the House cafeteria line in sweater and sneakers. At six feet and only 140 pounds, his slender body, gaunt and freckled face, and full head of tousled brown hair made him seem younger than his thirty years. Even when he dressed in formal suits, which was not often, it did not make him look older or like a congressman. “He wore the most godawful suits,” Mary Davis, his secretary, said. “Horrible looking, hanging from his frame.” Unlike so many members of the House who self-consciously dressed the part, Kennedy reflected his sense of entitlement in his informal dress. But it did not encourage an impression of maturity, and it was difficult for most colleagues to take him seriously. He initially struck veteran congressmen as the son of a famous family who had inherited his office rather than earned it. Sometimes he didn’t impress them at all. “Well, how do you like that?” he asked his congressional office staff one morning. “Some people got into the elevator and asked me for the fourth floor.” During his first week in the House, a veteran congressman who mistook him for a page demanded a copy of a bill until Jack informed the astonished member that they were colleagues.

  Nevertheless, he offended almost no one. Although he conveyed a certain coolness or self-control, his radiant smile and genuine openness made him immediately likable. “The effect he has on women voters was almost naughty,” New York Times columnist James Reston later wrote. “Every woman either wants to mother him or marry him.” Another columnist saw something in his appearance that suggested “to the suggestible that he is lost, stolen or strayed—a prince in exile, perhaps, or a very wealthy orphan.”

  A visit to New Ross, a market town on the banks of the Barrow River fifty miles east of Lismore, filled some of Jack’s time in Ireland. Kathleen, who spent the day playing golf with her guests, did not join him. Instead, Pamela Churchill, whom Jack asked “rather quietly, rather apologetically,” went along. They drove for five hours in Kathleen’s huge American station wagon over rutted roads along Ireland’s scenic southeastern coast before reaching the outskirts of the town.

  New Ross was not casually chosen. As they approached, with only a letter from his aunt Loretta, his father’s sister, to guide him, Jack stopped to ask directions to the Kennedy house. (“Which Kennedys will it be that you’ll be wanting?” the man replied.) Jack tried a little white farmhouse on the edge of the village with a front yard full of chickens and geese. A lady surrounded by six kids, “looking just like all the Kennedys,” greeted him with suspicion. After sending for her husband, who was in the fields, the family invited Jack and Pamela for tea in their thatched-roof cottage with a dirt floor. Though Pamela was impressed with the family’s simple dignity, she compared the visit to a scene from Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road.

  Jack believed that he had discovered his third cousins and seemed to enjoy himself thoroughly. Asking if he could do anything for them, the cousins proposed that he “drive the children around the village in the station wagon,” which he did to their pleasure and his. For her part, Pamela clearly did not understand “the magic of the afternoon.” Neither did Kathleen, who was angry when Jack returned late for dinner. “Did they have a bathroom?” she asked snidely.

  The successful striving of her great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents—the unceasing ambition of the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys—had catapulted the family into another realm, an ocean and a century apart from the relatives left behind in Ireland. In America anything was possible—the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys were living proof. For most of the family, these Kennedys of New Ross were something foreign, something best ignored or forgotten. But not for Jack.

  JACK HAD ONLY RUDIMENTARY KNOWLEDGE about his distant ancestors. He knew that his great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy had come to East Boston during the great potato famines of the late 1840s, worked as a cooper making wagon staves and whiskey barrels, married Bridget Murphy, and fathered three daughters and a son before he died of cholera in 1858 when only thirty-five.

  Jack also knew that his great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Thomas Fitzgerald, had clung to his farm in Ireland until 1854, when the famine drove him to America as well. Initially settling in Acton, twenty-five miles west of Boston, his impoverishment as a farmer forced him to take up life in Boston’s North End Irish ghetto, a crowded slum of wooden tenements. One contemporary described it as a “dreary, dismal” desolate world in which all was “mean, nasty, inefficient [and] forbidding,” except for the Catholic Church, which provided spiritual comfort and physical beauty.

  In 1857 Thomas married Rosanna Cox, with whom he had twelve children—nine of whom reached maturity, an amazing survival rate in a time when infant mortality was a common event. Thomas, who lived until 1885, surviving Rosanna by six years, prospered first as a street peddler of household wares and then in a grocery business, which doubled as a North End tavern in the evenings. Income from tenements he bought and rented to Irish laborers made his family comfortable and opened the way to greater success for his offspring.

  The limits of Jack’s knowledge about his Irish relatives was partly the result of his parents’ upward mobility and their eagerness to replace their “Irishness” with an American identity. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jack’s mother, took pains to instill American values in the children, ignoring their Irish roots and taking them to the storied landmarks of the country’s Revolutionary past around Boston. This attitude differed little from t
hat of other ethnic groups, who tried to meet the demands of being an American by forgetting about their Old World past, but in stratified Boston it took on special meaning. Rose and Joe were understandably eager to insulate the family from the continual snubs that Irish Americans suffered at the hands of local Brahmins, well-off Protestant Americans whose roots went back to the earliest years of the Republic. Although Rose and Joe enjoyed privileged lives, their tangible sense of being outsiders in their native land remained a social reality they struggled to overcome.

  The Boston in which Joe and Rose grew up was self-consciously “American.” It was the breeding ground for the values and spirit that had given birth to the nation and the center of America’s most famous university where so many of the country’s most influential leaders had been educated. Snobbery or class consciousness was as much a part of the city’s landscape as Boston Common. Coming from the wrong side of the tracks in most American cities was no fixed impediment to individual success. But in Boston, where “the Lowells speak only to the Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God,” rising above one’s station was an enterprise for only the most ambitious.