The House of Kennedy(25)
John F. Kennedy takes office in the dawn of the television age, the first occupant of the Oval Office to regularly broadcast his press conferences live.
He’d been hugely successful during the first-ever televised presidential debate against Nixon, where his image of youth and vigor dominated over the older man. It didn’t matter how ill Jack truly was—the important thing was that he looked healthy and telegenic.
Perhaps influenced by his mother’s lifelong criticisms of his sloppy appearance, Jack knows the value of presentation. “Rather vain” was Jackie’s initial impression of Jack, according to Bouvier cousin John Davis’s recollection. “She talked about how he had to have his hair done all the time, how he had to always look just right.”
Norman Mailer saw JFK as “Superman” with a “jewel of a political machine, all discipline and savvy and go-go-go.” He “had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor, and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible from a distance of 50 yards. It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time.”
Television audiences would never see that hero’s utter reliance on his valet, George E. Thomas, who called the president “John F.” Thomas not only plans the president’s wardrobe—up to four clothing changes per day—but helps him dress. Due to lingering pain from his back injuries and osteoporosis, Jack needs help getting into his back brace and shoes, and even with navigating stairs.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy sought out Dr. Max Jacobson—“Dr. Feelgood” to his patients—for relief from pain and exhaustion. Once in the White House, Kennedy’s prescription list becomes so extensive that staff maintains the crucial “Medicine Administration Record.”
True to the Kennedy ethos, one is never enough. “Doctors came and went around Kennedy,” writes biographer Richard Reeves. “In a lifetime of medical torment, Kennedy was more promiscuous with physicians and drugs than he was with women.”
But no amount of physical suffering deters him from implementing his ambitious social agenda. Plans to create the Peace Corps and attack poverty were in line with campaign promises, but not the idea that New Frontier would extend into outer space. On May 25, 1961, in a joint congressional session on “Urgent National Needs,” the president sets an astonishing benchmark, saying, “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”
But his lofty goals are quickly, and repeatedly, interrupted by Cuban crises. The flash of the new and the blindness of inexperience soon collide in the first serious crisis of the Kennedy administration. In January 1959, two years before Jack’s inauguration, General Fulgencio Batista’s American-friendly government in Cuba fell to thirty-two-year-old revolutionary Fidel Castro. The new self-appointed prime minister declares himself a Communist and signs a series of pacts with Soviet premier, Nikita Khruschev.
A CIA operation funded by Kennedy’s predecessor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, identified former Cubans exiled to Miami when Castro took power, more than fourteen hundred of whom join top-secret “Brigade 2506” in 1961 and are taken to receive extensive training from US military special forces.
The three-part plan calls for the brigade to attack Castro on a Cuban beach known as the Bay of Pigs—where Castro is known to fish—followed by an airstrike and then a combined attack. The assumption is that once Castro is out of the picture, the Cuban people will turn to a more US-friendly leader.
Democrat and foreign policy expert Dean Acheson warns the president that “this was a disastrous idea.”
It was.
The mission begins—and ends—on April 17, 1961. The brigade begins their attack, but at the last minute, Kennedy withholds US air support for fear of reprisal from the United Nations, leaving the exiles trapped at the landing site. Castro quickly activates his militia to kill more than a hundred, and imprisons the rest of Brigade 2506 for the next twenty months before releasing them in exchange for more than fifty million dollars in American food and medical supplies for Cuba—and the integrity of the Kennedy administration.
The Bay of Pigs fiasco shatters the president’s confidence. “I have had two full days of hell—I haven’t slept—this has been the most excruciating period of my life,” he tells his legal adviser Clark Clifford. “I doubt my presidency could survive another catastrophe like that.”
Indeed, international relations between the United States and Cuba and their powerful ally, the Soviet Union, only get worse from there, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kruschev establishes plans to place nuclear missiles in Cuba to defend the island.
It’s another test of the Kennedy administration, and at a tense cabinet meeting in 1962, when it appears that the United States and the Soviet Union are on the brink of nuclear war, Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay tells Kennedy, “You’re in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President,” to which Kennedy shoots back, “You’re in there with me.”
Jackie chimes in with a romantic view of these dark days, though her tender feelings weren’t made public for decades. “If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you,” Jackie told her husband, according to interviews she did with Schlesinger in 1964 (unreleased until 2011).