The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

by Gore Vidal

  With Lucifer now rampant upon the heights, the surviving Kennedys are again at work to regain the lost paradise, which means that books must be written not only about the new incarnation of the Kennedy godhead but the old. For it is the dead hero’s magic that makes legitimate the family’s pretensions. As an Osiris-Adonis-Christ figure, JFK is already the subject of a cult that may persist, through the machinery of publicity, long after all memory of his administration has been absorbed by the golden myth now being created in a thousand books to the single end of maintaining in power our extraordinary holy family.

  The most recent batch of books about JFK, though hagiographies, at times cannot help but illuminate the three themes which dominate any telling of the sacred story: money, image-making, family. That is the trinity without which nothing. Mr. Salinger, the late president’s press secretary, is necessarily concerned with the second theme, though he touches on the other two. Paul B. Fay, Jr. (a wartime buddy of JFK and under secretary of the Navy) is interesting on every count, and since he seems not to know what he is saying, his book is the least calculated and the most lifelike of the ones so far published. Other books at hand are Richard J. Whalen’s The Founding Father (particularly good on money and family) and Evelyn Lincoln’s My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy, which in its simple way tells us a good deal about those who are drawn to the Kennedys.

  While on the clerical staff of a Georgia congressman, Mrs. Lincoln decided in 1952 that she wanted to work for “someone in Congress who seemed to have what it takes to be President” after a careful canvass, she picked the representative from the Massachusetts Eleventh District. Like the other witnesses under review, she never says why she wants to work for a future president; it is taken for granted that anyone would, an interesting commentary on all the witnesses from Schlesinger (whose A Thousand Days is the best political novel since Coningsby) to Theodore Sorensen’s dour Kennedy. Needless to say, in all the books there is not only love and awe for the fallen hero who was, in most cases, the witness’s single claim to public attention, but there are also a remarkable number of tributes to the holy family. From Jacqueline (Isis-Aphrodite-Madonna) to Bobby (Ares and perhaps Christ-to-be) the Kennedys appear at the very least as demigods, larger than life. Bobby’s hard-working staff seldom complained, as Mr. Salinger put it, “because we all knew that Bob was working just a little harder than we were.” For the same reason “we could accept without complaint [JFK’s] bristling temper, his cold sarcasm, and his demands for always higher standards of excellence because we knew he was driving himself harder than he was driving us—despite great and persistent physical pain and personal tragedy.” Mrs. Lincoln surprisingly finds the late president “humble”—doubtless since the popular wisdom requires all great men to be humble. She refers often to his “deep low voice” [sic], “his proud head held high, his eyes fixed firmly on the goals—sometimes seemingly impossible goals—he set for himself and all those around him.” Mr. Schlesinger’s moving threnody at the close of his gospel makes it plain that we will not see JFK’s like again, at least not until the administration of Kennedy II.

  Of the lot, only Mr. Fay seems not to be writing a book with an eye to holding office in the next Kennedy administration. He is garrulous and indiscreet (the Kennedys are still displeased with his memoirs even though thousands of words were cut from the manuscript on the narrow theological ground that since certain things he witnessed fail to enhance the image, they must be apocryphal). On the subject of the Kennedys and money, Mr. Fay tells a most revealing story. In December 1959, the family was assembled at Palm Beach; someone mentioned money, “causing Mr. [Joseph] Kennedy to plunge in, fire blazing from his eyes. ‘I don’t know what is going to happen to this family when I die,’ Mr. Kennedy said. ‘There is no one in the entire family, except Joan and Teddy, who is living within their means. No one appears to have the slightest concern for how much they spend.’” The tirade ended with a Kennedy sister running from the room in tears, her extravagance condemned in open family session. Characteristically, Jack deflected the progenitor’s wrath with the comment that the only “solution is to have Dad work harder.” A story which contradicts, incidentally, Mr. Salinger’s pious “Despite his great wealth and his generosity in contributing all of his salaries as Congressman, Senator and President to charities, the President was not a man to waste pennies.”

  But for all the founding father’s grumbling, the children’s attitude toward money—like so much else—is pretty much what he wanted it to be. It is now a familiar part of the sacred story of how Zeus made each of the nine Olympians individually wealthy, creating trust funds which now total some ten million dollars per god or goddess. Also at the disposal of the celestials is the great fortune itself, estimated at a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, or whatever hundred millions of dollars, administered from an office on Park Avenue, to which the Kennedys send their bills, for we are told in The Founding Father, “the childhood habit of dependence persisted in adult life. As grown men and women the younger Kennedys still look to their father’s staff of accountants to keep track of their expenditures and see to their personal finances.” There are, of course, obvious limitations to not understanding the role of money in the lives of the majority. The late president was aware of this limitation and he was forever asking his working friends how much money they made. On occasion, he was at a disadvantage because he did not understand the trader’s mentality. He missed the point to Khrushchev at Vienna and took offense at what, after all, was simply the boorishness of the marketplace. His father, an old hand in Hollywood, would have understood better the mogul’s bluffing.

  It will probably never be known how much money Joe Kennedy has spent for the political promotion of his sons. At the moment, an estimated million dollars a year is being spent on Bobby’s behalf, and this sum can be matched year after year until 1972, and longer. Needless to say, the sons are sensitive to the charge that their elections are bought. As JFK said of his 1952 election to the Senate, “People say ‘Kennedy bought the election. Kennedy could never have been elected if his father hadn’t been a millionaire.’ Well, it wasn’t the Kennedy name and the Kennedy money that won that election. I beat Lodge because I hustled for three years” (quoted in The Founding Father). But of course without the Kennedy name and the Kennedy money, he would not even have been a contender. Not only was a vast amount of money spent for his election in the usual ways, but a great deal was spent in not so usual ways. For instance, according to Richard J. Whalen, right after the pro-Lodge Boston Post unexpectedly endorsed Jack Kennedy for the Senate, Joe Kennedy loaned the paper’s publisher $500,000.

  But the most expensive legitimate item in today’s politics is the making of the image. Highly paid technicians are able to determine with alarming accuracy just what sort of characteristics the public desires at any given moment in a national figure, and with adroit handling a personable candidate can be made to seem whatever the times require. The Kennedys are not of course responsible for applying to politics the techniques of advertising (the two have always gone hand in hand), but of contemporary politicians (the Rockefellers excepted) the Kennedys alone possess the money to maintain one of the most remarkable self-publicizing machines in the history of advertising, a machine which for a time had the resources of the federal government at its disposal.

  It is in describing the activities of a chief press officer at the White House that Mr. Salinger is most interesting. A talented image maker, he was responsible, among other things, for the televised press conferences in which the president was seen at his best, responding to simple questions with careful and often charming answers. That these press conferences were not very informative was hardly the fault of Mr. Salinger or the president. If it is true that the medium is the message and television is the coolest of all media and to be cool is desirable, then the televised thirty-fifth president was positively glacial in his effectiveness. He was a natural for this time and place, largely because of his obsession w
ith the appearance of things. In fact, much of his political timidity was the result of a quite uncanny ability to sense how others would respond to what he said or did, and if he foresaw a negative response, he was apt to avoid action altogether. There were times, however, when his superb sense of occasion led him astray. In the course of a speech to the Cuban refugees in Miami, he was so overwhelmed by the drama of the situation that he practically launched on the spot a second invasion of that beleaguered island. Yet generally he was cool. He enjoyed the game of pleasing others, which is the actor’s art.

  He was also aware that vanity is perhaps the strongest of human emotions, particularly the closer one comes to the top of the slippery pole. Mrs. Kennedy once told me that the last thing Mrs. Eisenhower had done before leaving the White House was to hang a portrait of herself in the entrance hall. The first thing Mrs. Kennedy had done on moving in was to put the portrait in the basement, on aesthetic, not political grounds. Overhearing this, the president told an usher to restore the painting to its original place. “The Eisenhowers are coming to lunch tomorrow,” he explained patiently to his wife, “and that’s the first thing she’ll look for.” Mrs. Lincoln records that before the new Cabinet met, the president and Bobby were about to enter the Cabinet room when the president “said to his brother, ‘Why don’t you go through the other door?’ The President waited until the Attorney General entered the Cabinet room from the hall door, and then he walked into the room from my office.”

  In its relaxed way Mr. Fay’s book illuminates the actual man much better than the other books if only because he was a friend to the president, and not just an employee. He is particularly interesting on the early days when Jack could discuss openly the uses to which he was being put by his father’s ambition. Early in 1945 the future president told Mr. Fay how much he envied Fay his postwar life in sunny California while “I’ll be back here with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into a political advantage. I tell you, Dad is ready right now and can’t understand why Johnny boy isn’t ‘all engines full ahead.’” Yet the exploitation of son by father had begun long before the war. In 1940 a thesis written by Jack at Harvard was published under the title Why England Slept, with a foreword by longtime, balding family friend Henry Luce. The book became a best-seller and (Richard J. Whalen tells us) as Joe wrote at the time in a letter to his son, “You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come.”

  Joe was right of course and bookmaking is now an important part of the holy family’s home industry. As Mrs. Lincoln observed, when JFK’s collection of political sketches “won the Pulitzer prize for biography in 1957, the Senator’s prominence as a scholar and statesman grew. As his book continued to be a best seller, he climbed higher up on public-opinion polls and moved into a leading position among presidential possibilities for 1960.” Later Bobby would “write” a book about how he almost nailed Jimmy Hoffa; and so great was the impact of this work that many people had the impression that Bobby had indeed put an end to the career of that turbulent figure.

  Most interesting of all the mythmaking was the creation of Jack the war hero. John Hersey first described for The New Yorker how Jack’s navy boat was wrecked after colliding with a Japanese ship; in the course of a long swim, the young skipper saved the life of a crewman, an admirable thing to do. Later they were all rescued. Since the officer who survived was Ambassador Kennedy’s son, the story was deliberately told and retold as an example of heroism unequaled in war’s history. Through constant repetition the simple facts of the story merged into a blurred impression that somehow at some point a unique act of heroism had been committed by Jack Kennedy. The last telling of the story was a film starring Cliff Robertson as JFK (the president had wanted Warren Beatty for the part, but the producer thought Beatty’s image was “too mixed up”).

  So the image was created early: the high-class book that made the grade; the much-publicized heroism at war; the election to the House of Representatives in 1946. From that point on, the publicity was constant and though the congressman’s record of service was unimpressive, he himself was photogenic and appealing. Then came the Senate, the marriage, the illnesses, the second high-class book, and the rest is history. But though it was Joe Kennedy who paid the bills and to a certain extent managed the politics, the recipient of all this attention was meanwhile developing into a shrewd psychologist. Mr. Fay quotes a letter written him by the new senator in 1953. The tone is jocular (part of the charm of Mr. Fay’s book is that it captures as no one else has the preppish side to JFK’s character; he was droll, particularly about himself, in a splendid W. C. Fields way): “I gave everything a good deal of thought. I am getting married this fall. This means the end of a promising political career, as it has been based up to now almost completely on the old sex appeal.” After a few more sentences in this vein the groom-to-be comes straight to the point. “Let me know the general reaction to this in the Bay area.” He did indeed want to know, like a romantic film star, what effect marriage would have on his career. But then most of his life was governed, as Mrs. Lincoln wrote of the year 1959, “by the public-opinion polls. We were not unlike the people who check their horoscope each day before venturing out.” And when they did venture out, it was always to create an illusion. As Mrs. Lincoln remarks in her guileless way: after Senator Kennedy returned to Washington from a four-week tour of Europe, “it was obvious that his stature as a Senator had grown, for he came back as an authority on the current situation in Poland.”

  It is not to denigrate the late president or the writers of his gospel that neither he nor they ever seemed at all concerned by the bland phoniness of so much of what he did and said. Of course politicians have been pretty much the same since the beginning of history, and part of the game is creating illusion. In fact, the late president himself shortly after Cuba Two summed up what might very well have been not only his political philosophy but that of the age in which we live. When asked whether or not the Soviet’s placement of missiles in Cuba would have actually shifted the balance of world power, he indicated that he thought not. “But it would have politically changed the balance of power. It would have appeared to, and appearances contribute to reality.”

  From the beginning, the holy family has tried to make itself appear to be what it thinks people want rather than what the realities of any situation might require. Since Bobby is thought by some to be ruthless, he must therefore be photographed as often as possible with children, smiling and happy and athletic, in every way a boy’s ideal man. Politically, he must seem to be at odds with the present administration without ever actually taking any important position that President Johnson does not already hold. Bobby’s Vietnamese war dance was particularly illustrative of the technique. A step to the Left (let’s talk to the Viet Cong), followed by two steps to the Right, simultaneously giving “the beards”—as he calls them—the sense that he is for peace in Vietnam while maintaining his brother’s war policy. Characteristically, the world at large believes that if JFK were alive there would be no war in Vietnam. The mythmakers have obscured the fact that it was JFK who began our active participation in the war when, in 1961, he added to the six hundred American observers the first of a gradual buildup of American troops, which reached twenty thousand at the time of his assassination. And there is no evidence that he would not have persisted in that war, for, as he said to a friend shortly before he died, “I have to go all the way with this one.” He could not suffer a second Cuba and hope to maintain the appearance of Defender of the Free World at the ballot box in 1964.

  The authors of the latest Kennedy books are usually at their most interesting when they write about themselves. They are cautious, of course (except for the jaunty Mr. Fay), and most are thinking ahead to Kennedy II. Yet despite a hope of future preferment, Mr. Salinger’s self-portrait is a most curious one. He veers between a coarse unawareness of what it was all about (he never, for instance, exp
resses an opinion of the war in Vietnam), and a solemn bogusness that is most putting off. Like an after-dinner speaker, he characterizes everyone (“Clark Clifford, the brilliant Washington lawyer”); he pays heavy tribute to his office staff; he praises Rusk and the State Department, remarking that “JFK had more effective liaison with the State Department than any President in history,” which would have come as news to the late president. Firmly Mr. Salinger puts Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in his place, saying that he himself never heard the president express a lack of confidence in Rusk. Mr. Salinger also remarks that though Schlesinger was “a strong friend” of the president (something Mr. Salinger, incidentally, was not), “JFK occasionally was impatient with their [Schlesinger’s memoranda] length and frequency.” Mrs. Lincoln also weighs in on the subject of the historian-in-residence. Apparently JFK’s “relationship with Schlesinger was never that close. He admired Schlesinger’s brilliant mind, his enormous store of information…but Schlesinger was never more than an ally and assistant.”