Poteat: Despite flaws and failings, JFK still a hero
Robert Dallek’s biography of John Kennedy, “An Unfinished Life,” was published nearly two decades ago.
The book received rave reviews from critics and became a best seller, yet despite my predilection for political biography, I had never read the book until I borrowed it from one of the “little libraries” on the Covenant Village campus.
Two things about Dallek’s review of the 35th president’s life make it unique.
It is not a worshipful hagiography, as were produced by the score by Kennedy friends and staff members in the years immediately following his death, but neither is it a revisionist hatchet job of the sort that became popular in the 1970s and 1980s.
Secondly, Dallek had nearly unlimited access to the late president’s medical files — files that paint a starkly different portrait of JFK from his public image of youth and health and vigor.
About Kennedy’s health.
From the time he was in elementary school, Kennedy suffered one illness after another, with most of them mysterious in both cause and cure to the doctors of the the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s.
By the time he was running for president, he had full blown Addison’s Disease and the treatments for that malady had served to weaken his back which had been injured several times, including when PT-109 was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer during World War II.
Dallek’s analysis: Yes, JFK deceived the press and the public about the extent of his physical ailments and the medications he took to combat them.
But the author tempers that judgment by recognizing the stoic courage with which Kennedy faced that pain and by concluding that neither the physical issues nor the medications affected his performance as president.
Dallek is far less forgiving in his assessment of JFK’s reckless and unending sexual escapades while in the White House.
Those escapades, to which the press of the time turned a blind eye, put Kennedy at risk for blackmail and at the mercy of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who was fully aware of the ongoing shenanigans.
Dallek’s overall assessment of Kennedy is very similar to my own.
He was a leader of uncommon intelligence who possessed the ability to motivate and inspire the American people.
He was neither a liberal nor a conservative but a pragmatist, far more concerned about practical results than about ideology.
And his calm and measured leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he refused to accept the military’s judgment that an invasion was necessary, quite possibly saved the world from a nuclear Armageddon.
Had another man been president in the autumn of 1962, civilization as we know it might well have ended in a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.
I’ll conclude this column with a story that left me more than a little sad.
On an early June afternoon when I had been busy all day and had missed my lunch, I ducked into a nearly empty restaurant for an early dinner, taking the Dallek biography in with me, placing it on the table while I studied the menu.
My waitress, who was somewhere south of 40, asked, “Is that a good book?”
“Yes ma’am,” I answered it’s a very good book.”
Studying the book’s cover, which features a portrait of JFK in a rocking chair, the waitress said, “Tell me who he was.”
“He was president of the United States when I was a little boy,” I replied.
“Did he die?”
“Yes. He was assassinated in 1963.”
“Was he old?”
“No ma’am. He was only 46.”
“Was he a good president?”
I wanted to tell her about his soaring rhetoric, about his commitment to landing a man on the moon, about his establishment of the Peace Corps, about his eloquence on civil rights, about his desire to build a safe and peaceful world.
Instead I answered simply, “Yes ma’am. He was a very good president.”
Bill Poteat, who alternates between reading novels and biographies, may be reached at wlpoteat@yahoo.com.
This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Poteat: Despite flaws and failings, JFK still a hero
