The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  In recent years, my fond early memories of President Kennedy—and his inaugural address—have remained with me and may account in some ways for my decision to be supportive of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, where I serve as chairman of the board of trustees.

  So, what author of a book about President Kennedy would share my deep interest in him and would be best to interview for the Congressional Dialogues series?

  Unfortunately, many of President Kennedy’s best-known biographers have passed away, including Sorensen and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., author of A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. However, there remain a number of talented Kennedy biographers.

  One of them is Richard Reeves, a well-respected newspaper journalist and biographer. He published his book on President Kennedy in 1993, and thus had the benefit of writing it after information about the White House recordings of the president’s conversations and about his health problems had come into the public domain. (That was not the case with many of the earlier biographies.)

  For many in my generation, President Kennedy still holds a fascination, a magical allure that transcends the actual legislative or foreign policy achievements of an administration that lasted less than three years. And that allure—the Camelot factor, perhaps—exists despite the revelations in recent years of the precarious nature of the president’s health and, at times, the incautious nature of his personal behavior.

  In Reeves’s view, that allure is due in part to Kennedy’s ability to bring out and to appeal to the best in our human instincts, and in part to the tragic nature of Kennedy’s death as a young man, with so much of his promising future ahead of him. There is no doubt that when charismatic young leaders in any field die young, they tend to be remembered forever as young and vibrant. There will never be pictures of these individuals with gray hair or wrinkles, with physical ailments or in wheelchairs.

  Perhaps the perpetual image of a young President Kennedy, sailing or throwing a football or playing with his very young children, is part of his continuing appeal. But Reeves does justice in the interview to Kennedy’s more tangible accomplishments, the most significant of which is the brilliant negotiation that led to the peaceful ending of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  Those who lived through that crisis no doubt remember thinking a nuclear war was imminent. (My ninth-grade teacher, I remember vividly, said there was no point in assigning homework that week, for we would not likely be around in a few days.)

  Kennedy’s youth, vigor, charm, and tragic assassination are what those in that era most vividly recall about our thirty-fifth president. But they, and future generations, should most remember the skill he used to peacefully end a thirteen-day stalemate with the Soviet Union that had brought the world closer to a nuclear confrontation than it had ever been before.

  * * *

  MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Why is it that, fifty years later, so many people remember President Kennedy’s death—where they were when it happened—and why do we have such a high view of his presidency? He passed not a single major bill as president of the United States. He had the Bay of Pigs invasion, had problems in Laos and Vietnam. Why is President Kennedy still so idealized and so popular?

  MR. RICHARD REEVES (RR): He was an athlete dying young, not unlike James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe. That’s why, I think. The whole future was ahead of us, we thought.

  A great test of a president, it seems to me, is whether he brings out the best or the worst in the American people. Kennedy brought out the best. That’s part of it.

  DR: How long did it take you to write your book?

  RR: Ten years. You can do it in five years now with Google.

  DR: All right, but it took you ten years. After ten years of research and writing, did you admire him more or less than when you started?

  RR: Much more.

  DR: Why?

  RR: In the first place, I didn’t pick Kennedy because I was a Kennedyphile. Congressman Steve Solarz gave me a copy of a book called The Emperor by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński. He said, “You should read this. It’s really good.” [Published in 1983, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat chronicles the final years of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, drawing on accounts by his servants and courtiers.]

  What we often do in journalism is study the men near the center of power—in this case, in Addis Ababa rather than Washington. I read The Emperor and admired it greatly. Then I thought, “I could do this about an American president.”

  With a president, everything—almost everything—is on paper. There are always witnesses. Meeting or working for the president was the high point of anyone’s life. I thought I could reconstruct Kennedy’s presidency based on that.

  Historians write knowing the ending, but I thought I could write it forward as narrative history—write about what Kennedy knew and when he knew it, and what was on his desk when he made decisions.

  DR: You never met President Kennedy?

  RR: No. I was in school.

  DR: If you had the chance to meet him now and you could ask him one or two questions, what would you ask him after having studied him for ten years?

  RR: I would ask him first to show me the paper trails to two incidents in his presidency. One was the Berlin Wall, which he knew about in advance and for which he was practically a co-contractor. [Built by the Communist German Democratic Republic with Soviet backing in August 1961, the Wall shut democratic West Berlin off from Communist East Berlin.]

  It was a desperate time, really, in human history. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had a problem. More than two thousand people a day were leaving East Germany through East Berlin, and they were the best. They were the doctors, the lawyers. The elite were running, and Khrushchev had to do something about that.

  On the other hand, from Kennedy’s viewpoint, we had fifteen thousand men in Berlin at that time, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers in East Germany and Eastern Europe. If it came to a military action, they could have driven us out of Germany in two weeks and probably out of Europe in a month. The only thing that Kennedy could have done was use nuclear weapons, which was the thing he and other presidents have least wanted to do.

  DR: So one thing you’d like to know is whether he in effect consented to the building of the Berlin Wall?

  RR: I’d like to see it on paper. I think I showed pretty well that he did, but I never found documents.

  DR: What else would you like to ask him?

  RR: I wouldn’t ask him about his personal life. We didn’t do that so much in those days.

  I’d like to get him to admit that he was behind assassination attempts on Cuban president Fidel Castro and the assassination of Rafael Trujillo. [Trujillo was the dictator who ran the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his death in 1961.]

  I’ve done books on three presidents—Ronald Reagan, Richard M. Nixon, and Kennedy—and my conclusion from all of that is the president knew. The president always knows.

  DR: But he had deniability.

  RR: Right. He’s protected by, in this case, his brother Robert Kennedy. [He served as JFK’s attorney general and close advisor.]

  DR: Your book was published in 1993, but many of the books written about President Kennedy were written in the sixties and seventies and eighties. So when you were writing your book, you had the advantage of knowing two things about Kennedy that the world didn’t really know when the other books were written. One was about his health. How ill was he? Did he really have Addison’s disease? Would he have lived through a second term?

  RR: He probably would have lived through a second term. He was in pain every day of his life because of his back. He was a very, very sick man.

  One of the things that helped me in writing the book was that, if people remember who Max Jacobson was, “Dr. Feelgood”—he supplied the Kennedys with amphetamines and coc
aine—he kept a journal, and his wife gave it to me.

  In the first place, Kennedy never took a physical to go into the navy. His sense was that you would not be able to succeed in this country if you weren’t part of the war. The Civil War was like that.

  All our presidents for decades were Civil War officers. So Kennedy wanted that uniform. His father had friends and enough influence to get his son in the military without a medical.

  A bad back left Kennedy in pain much of the time. Here he leaves the hospital with his wife, Jackie, following spinal surgery on December 21, 1954.

  DR: He also had Addison’s disease but denied he had it, is that right?

  RR: It was denied again and again, including on election eve in 1960.

  DR: But the medication for that was cortisone, which made his face and his hair thicker. What other side effects does cortisone have?

  RR: Well, it increases your sex drive. You feel pretty good about most things.

  Kennedy collapsed in a hotel room in London while he was with Pamela Harriman, then Pamela Churchill. He collapsed. Pamela called her father-in-law, Winston Churchill, and his doctor came to the hotel, the Connaught, and did an examination.

  The doctor asked Pamela to come outside. He said, “Your young friend has only a year to live. He has Addison’s.” A fatal disease at that time.

  But in Chicago, an American doctor in the public health service—a guy making maybe $25,000 a year—figured out how to make synthetic cortisone. Before that, the only available (and expensive) cortisone came from live sheep. Kennedy’s father had put cortisone in safety deposit boxes around the world.

  Three times his son got the last rites of the Catholic Church. One time he was saved while traveling in the Pacific with his brother, because they got the cortisone in time.

  It was a terminal disease he had and knew that he had. It is no longer a terminal disease.

  DR: The back pain that he often suffered from, to the point that he couldn’t walk, came from the cortisone weakening his bones more than from a war injury?

  RR: I don’t think a war injury had anything to do with it at all. It was from birth. The amount of drugs he was taking every day, and the fact that his doctor, Janet Travell, was a total fool, almost killed him.

  DR: He had three doctors, in effect, when he was president. He had the navy doctor, who was a regular doctor. He had Janet Travell for his back. And then Dr. Jacobson—Dr. Feelgood—would come down and give him shots.

  RR: And would travel with him. He shot him up before the summit in Vienna with Khrushchev.

  I want to say something about Travell and what she did. All she was doing was shooting him up with novocaine. So he felt better but his back was getting worse and worse and worse. Ironically, at the time of his death, with exercise replacing novocaine, John Kennedy was probably in the best health of his life.

  DR: The other thing that’s come out in the last few years is more information about his personal life. Without going through all the details of it, was he not worried that it would be discovered? And why did the press corps never comment on it?

  RR: A lot of people exaggerate now what they knew then. To make a long story short, rich people have long driveways. You don’t know who comes in, who goes out, how long they’re there.

  Then there’s the fact that Kennedy was a great generational figure. The symbolism of going from having the supreme commander of the Allied forces, Dwight D. Eisenhower, as president, to a lieutenant in the navy—Kennedy’s first political slogan was “The new generation offers a leader.” The press was part of that new generation. Men related to each other at that time by what they had done in the war.

  In those days, men bragged to each other, often without any substance, about what they were doing and whatnot. With the combination of that and the fact that he had hundreds of paid liars working for him, he got away with it.

  I had lunch with one of the presidents of the United States who succeeded him. He had read the book. When his wife left the table to go on to greater things, as soon as she left he said, “How did he get away with it?”

  DR: He didn’t have a physical, but he served in World War II. His PT-109 boat was split by a collision with a Japanese destroyer. He heroically saved his crew, and they were rescued. He came back and was in the hospital for a while.

  His brother Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was killed in the war. Joseph was more outgoing and was the one many people thought would be running for office. After he was killed, did their father pressure John Kennedy to run?

  RR: He did pressure him. But in the end, I think history would have been the same even if he hadn’t. John Kennedy, who always thought he would die young because of all the illnesses he had, lived life as a race against boredom. He was a man who would not wait his turn. He invented the idea of a self-selected presidency because he thought he would be a dead man before he was fifty.

  DR: He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946, the same year as Richard Nixon. Why, after just a few years in the House, did Kennedy think he was qualified to run for the Senate against a Republican incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., in 1952? Eisenhower was probably going to run for election as the Republican presidential candidate and win that year. Why did Kennedy take that chance?

  RR: One of his great friends was Charles Bartlett, who was the Washington correspondent for the Chattanooga Times. They’d served together in the war. Bartlett said, “Why don’t you wait to run?” Kennedy said, “I can’t wait. They won’t remember me.”

  In 1956, in a very short campaign, he tried unsuccessfully to be Adlai Stevenson’s vice-presidential nominee, and he was surprised by how easy it was to get national recognition and credibility. He had always planned to run for vice president first. Janet Travell asked him, “Are you sad about this?” He said, “No. I’ve learned I have to be a complete politician, and I will run from this day to the day I’m elected or die.”

  DR: When he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1952, he had a back injury. He was in the hospital awhile to have surgery, and wrote a book called Profiles in Courage then. How did he, when he was in the hospital, manage to write a book that won the Pulitzer Prize?

  RR: Well, it didn’t deserve a Pulitzer Prize. It’s really a fairly simple little book. It was his idea and his notes, which then went to Ted Sorensen. [Sorensen was the senator’s chief legislative aide at the time.] Ted did a draft, and then Kennedy, who could write and had been a journalist briefly, edited it. Sorensen rewrote it, Kennedy edited it again. But Ted Sorensen wasn’t the author of that book; John Kennedy was.

  DR: In those years he was in the Senate, there was a resolution against Joe McCarthy to condemn him for some of the things he had said and done during his hunt for suspected Communists. Senator Kennedy did not vote for that resolution. Why not?

  RR: One, he was in the hospital after his back operation. Two, McCarthy was a friend, particularly of his father’s. Kennedy stayed in the hospital to avoid that vote.

  When we talk about Kennedy’s health, by the way, journalism wasn’t as good in those days. Neither was negative research. Anything anyone wanted to know about John Kennedy’s health, including the fact that he had a terminal disease, was in the Journal of the American Medical Association, because he was the first Addisonian ever to survive major surgery.

  Because of that, the AMA covered this in depth—although his name was never used. He was referred to as the “thirty-seven-year-old man.” Any journalist today would have figured it out.

  DR: So he was in the Senate and didn’t vote against McCarthy. He didn’t actually pass a lot of legislation. Why did he think he was qualified to be president of the United States?

  RR: Every president I’ve ever talked to—and I’ve talked to a lot—would point to whoever was in the field at the moment and say, “If they can, why not me?”

  DR: He decided to run in 1960. How many primaries did he run?

  Then senator John F. Kennedy, shown campaigning in Yonkers, decided to s
eek the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960.

  RR: Three.

  DR: There were only three primaries?

  RR: Right. He totally changed American politics. He was the first self-selected president.

  During the four years that Kennedy was never around the Senate, Lyndon Johnson thought he was going to be the Democratic nominee. Kennedy was either campaigning all the time or in the hospital.

  But the press had become his constituency, and he had that nomination won before the 1960 convention. He used the primaries as leverage. Again, it was generational. The convention was over before he got there.

  DR: The 1960 convention was held in Los Angeles. Johnson went out there and thought he had a chance of getting the nomination, but you say he didn’t really. In the end, he was offered, by John Kennedy, the vice-presidential nomination. Then Robert Kennedy went to take it back. Did John Kennedy authorize that? Why did they offer it to Johnson in the first place?

  RR: They offered it because it was the only way they could win. [The Democrats needed the southern money and votes that Johnson, with his deep Texas ties, could deliver.] John Kennedy knew, months before that convention, where he would go with the vice presidency, and so he lied to his brother—a thing he did more than once.

  His brother was against it all the time, even at the last moment in Los Angeles, in the hotel, where Bobby went down and tried to talk Johnson into withdrawing. But John Kennedy would not have been president if he had a different vice-presidential candidate.