I lived in New York during the Camelot years — but only now do we know the real JFK

In lockdown I have delved into another biography of John F Kennedy. My shelves are full of them. They started after the assassination, with hagiographic, King of Camelot stuff about the lost leader. Massive tomes, often written by serious historians who should have known better.

Then came the reaction; book after book presenting a JFK who was as flaky as the day is long. Reckless, idle, sex-crazed and often semi-crippled, pumped full of drugs by the quack “Dr Feelgood”. Consorting with Mafia bosses, their groupies and their molls. And exposures of his father Joe as nothing more than a crooked financier. Not merely very rich, in today’s money he was a multi-billionaire. A dictatorial, family-obsessed patriarch with a record of isolationism, appeasement and a soft spot for Hitler. A bully who believed that his mountains of moolah could buy anything including the Presidency, if not for himself then for a son. And when the chosen one, his favourite, Joe, was killed in action, then supposedly weedy, work shy John was simply wheeled on as replacement.

Thesis, antithesis — and, finally, synthesis. Volume One of Harvard Professor Fredrik Logevall’s massive but surprisingly readable JFK: 1917-1956 (Viking £30) was published in the UK last year and is out in paperback later in 2021. It’s a grippimg and revealing piece of work which runs to 792 pages and still manages to stop well before before the young Senator started his campaign for the Presidency in 1958. Logevall  had unprecedented access to hitherto private letters and papers and has tracked down and interviewed to just about everybody still alive who knew the boy Kennedy.

So what that is new do we learn about Kennedy, the skinny kid growing up in that massive family? Well, first he was indeed seriously ill much of the time. Had the Last Rites at least once. Yet he played — ferociously — American football and the other brutally competitive family sports. When told he should never sail alone, he made himself the best lone yachtsman in the family. His school reports were mediocre. That we knew. But now we know it was only because he ruthlessly refused to do any work on subjects which bored him. Yet he studied obsessively: history, politics and the like. He read constantly and widely. Old man Joe insisted that the children gave serious dissertations during dinner. John was usually the best. Joe, surprisingly, did not impose his reactionary ideas on his children. It mattered little if they disagreed with him. He just wanted the most powerful arguments and the best presentation.

Far from being idle, Kennedy started fact-finding and globetrotting from the age of 17, when he turned up in London, enrolled for a course at the LSE, then decided that it was not for him. So he took off to visit the troublespots of 1930s Europe. This was his version of gap-year fun, and expeditions continued right through his years as Congressman and then Senator. OK, he screwed around. But everywhere he went, he also asked to see leading politicians and public figures. He kept extensive and careful notes, some of which he worked into newspaper articles. That pattern of thoughtful travel paid off during his Harvard days, which weren’t all playboy sex and sport. (Although he did make the highly competitive Harvard swimming team — rather like getting an Oxbridge Blue. It demonstrated amazing determination by a seriously handicapped student.)

His Harvard career as a budding author was helped, of course, by his father’s clout and money. When the student son of the mega-rich Ambassador to the Court of Saint James (March 1938 to October 1940), asked to interview some political giant or respected academic, his wish was generally granted. And when he needed research asistants, Jack simply hired them. He needed manifestos, speeches and documents from all manner of parties and pressure groups in England and on the Continent. So he asked – instructed – US ambassadors and embassy staffs to collect them for him and send them on to him at Harvard. They jumped to it.

Elitist and entitled, certainly, But that — plus endless hard graft once others had found him the raw material – produced his impressive history thesis. Then he sought criticism and guidance from historians and national journalists (some almost certainly were paid for their advice) before turning the thesis into a book. It became the best selling Why England Slept — a study of the appeasement years. Much the same process was followed when he produced, in 1955, Profiles in Courage — an account of the struggles of a number of Senators down the decades who had fought for their unpopular beliefs against the odds. It was claimed for years that he had paid historians and distinguished newspapermen to ghost the books that appeared under his name, and did so cynically to boost his reputation. Logevall makes a convincing case that Kennedy did no more and no less than other writers of successful but serious popular history.

From his mid-teens JFK was indeed sex-obsessed. An endless stream of prostitutes, “fast” working-class girls and nice preppy students who foolishly fell for his effortless charm and his money. They mattered little to him. Arrogant and unfeeling, he treated them appallingly and boasted about his selfish doings in tasteless letters to school and college mates. Logevall has traced dozens of them. 

Yet, at the same time, Kennedy fell head over heels in love, again and again, with serious women. Right up to the time he married Jackie. (After that it was mainly lots of casual sex, usually with “bimbos”, and often paid for.) He genuinely loved the company of women; strong, intelligent women. More, so he said, than he liked the company of men. He respected such women, listened to them and was happy to say he learned from them. This was at a time when his playboy friends liked sex with women but preferred the company of men. JFK also liked sex, but he liked the company of women. Madonna and whore complex, perhaps? A Catholic fallacy, so it is said. And in his case also a reaction to a father who screwed around, shamelessly humiliating his saintly mother? Who knows?

I lived in New York thoughout the Camelot years. I still remember the growing cult around him. In the summmer of 1962 a rousing song actually managed to top the mainstream pop and the country charts at the same time. That was a first. And it was an unprecedented  hymn of praise to a glamorous young President.

The chorus went:

“Smoke and fire upon the sea,

Everywhere he looked was the enemy.

The heathen gods of old Japan,

Thought they’d got the best of a mighty good man.

Big John. Big bad John”.

The song referred back to the war in the Pacific. In 1943, after much string-pulling, the young and inexperienced Kennedy was in placed in command of a torpedo boat, PT 109. It was one of a small group of tiny vessels with crews of only 11, carrying just two or three torpedoes. These brave men were tasked to secretly infiltrate themselves into the middle of the mighty Japanese fleet and wreak death and destruction. The PT boats were desperately vulnerable.

PT 109 was eventually rammed by a Japanese warship and sank. Jack Kennedy rallied his men. Led by him, they swam for hours in darkness with shells falling around them. Eventually they were washed up on a desert island and, after days of suffering, without food or water, and some with appalling injuries, they were rescued. That much was well known by 1945.

What Logevall has done is to dig up the full story. It turns out that Big John was indeed a mighty good man, at least on that occasion. He maintained morale and led the survivors, swimming for four hours in the darkness, until they found land. Kennedy, with damaged spine and a degenerative disease, kept up morale on that epic journey, while pulling an injured sailor behind him. Incredibly the man was towed by a rope gripped between JFK’s teeth. It was a feat of heroism, of bravery and sheer determination. 

And then he repeated the exercise. Once again he towed the injured matelot on a rope between his teeth when they all swam for many hours to a larger island, days later. From there they were rescued. So it turns out that the populist hymn of praise (much derided by sophisticates) did less – not more — than justice to its subject.

Small footnote. Old man Joe was criticised for pulling strings at his son’s request, to get him the prized but highly dangerous command of a PT boat. He replied (I paraphrase) that rich men were usually criticised for using their influence to keep their sons out of the firing line. He was the only person he knew who twisted arms to place his son in mortal peril.

So Kennedy was neither a saint nor an unmitigated sinner. He was complex, charismatic and self-indulgent. Driven by both ambition and a desire to serve. I look forward to Logevall’s account of his Presidency.

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