INTRODUCTION
Kennedy Adonais
Coming to terms with John F. Kennedy is no easy matter, although it is certainly not from a lack of effort. Hundreds of books and articles have been written on the thirty-fifth president since he moved into the public spotlight in the mid-1950s. On the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination several years ago, for example, a tidal wave of volumes swept over the reading public treating various aspects of his life, death, administration, and legacy. Yet these many efforts have been strangely unsatisfying. Neither the human being nor the historical import of his endeavors has ever quite come into focus. As an article in The New York Times observed of the multiplying volumes on Kennedy, “To explore the enormous literature is to be struck not by what’s there but by what’s missing. Readers can choose from many books but surprisingly few good ones.” There remains, argued the author, a fundamental “elusive detachment” about JFK that foils the biographers and the historians and the political scientists just as “even during his lifetime, Kennedy defeated or outwitted the most powerfully analytical and intuitive minds.” Both the man and his meaning have avoided capture.1
Part of this elusiveness stems from the devastating impact of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. He has been frozen in time, in our mind’s eye forever young and vigorous, cool and witty. It is simply impossible to imagine JFK as a decrepit old man with a receded hairline, clouded vision, halting gait, and quaking voice. We can never know how his story would have ended. Thus, after the tragedy in Dallas and the images burned into the national consciousness—Walter Cronkite’s breaking voice and brimming eyes as he announced the president’s death on national television, Jackie Kennedy’s blood-splattered pink suit as she returned to Washington, D.C., with her husband’s body, three-year-old John Kennedy Jr.’s heartbreaking salute to his father’s casket as it moved by on its horse-drawn caisson, the slow parade of dignitaries and political leaders walking the broad avenues of Washington, D.C., in a mournful procession—it seemed only natural to embrace the Camelot myth. Its portrait of the heroic, idealistic young leader struck down in his prime performed the double task of all mythology: inspiration and emotional sustenance, on the one hand, obfuscation and self-delusion, on the other.
But Kennedy’s elusiveness stems not from tragedy and sentiment alone. It also flows from his profound internal contradictions. For in the storied symbolism of Camelot, ironies abounded. Kennedy’s image as a youthful advocate of vigor and physical fitness carefully screened from the public his nearly crippled condition from Addison’s disease and spinal degeneration that required a back brace and extensive drug regimen to function on a daily basis. His image as a peace advocate masked a career trajectory as a stern anti-Communist who supported Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and a fervent cold warrior who ran to the right of Richard Nixon on foreign affairs in the 1960 election. His image as a civil rights crusader concealed that he had voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act, dragged his feet for years over desegregating federal housing, and found Martin Luther King Jr.’s crusade to be an annoying distraction from foreign affairs in the early 1960s. His image as a cosmopolitan sophisticate ignored his penchant for dozing off at the ballet and the symphony and his personal preference for books such as the gossipy treatment of the English aristocracy The Young Melbourne, songs such as “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey,” romantic landscape paintings of the Old West, and cowboy movies.
But perhaps the greatest irony—it certainly has become the most controversial, and perhaps the most revealing in terms of American values—involves the image of JFK as a family man. During his rise to the presidency and his occupation of that office, millions of Americans warmed to depictions of the youthful leader, his beautiful wife, Jacqueline, and their two adorable children, Caroline and John Jr., as they encased the White House in a bright domestic glow. Photographs of the First Family became mainstays of the Camelot myth as magazines and newspapers depicted the handsome chief executive at the side of his radiant wife at social events or in the Oval Office playing with his young children as they peeked out from under his desk or romped around the room.
But as many knew at the time—and in subsequent years the confirming evidence has become mountainous—JFK womanized relentlessly with a staggering array of female acquaintances, actresses, secretaries, interns, call girls, and mistresses both before and during his term as president. This schizophrenic portrait of JFK causes deeply conflicted feelings. As one critic has admitted, each new revelation of yet another Kennedy paramour “makes me realize anew what a patsy I’ve been” about the family image “that plays on the very sentiment—an essential bourgeois regard for what is nowadays called ‘the sanctity of marriage’—for which JFK himself had such obvious contempt.” But then she sees another Camelot family photograph, and the revelations from “the aging hookers and cast-aside girlfriends” fly out the window: “JFK is more important to us than you can ever be, so you might as well keep quiet. The cause endures, sweetheart. The hope still lives. And the dream will never die.”2
So how does one resolve the contradictions and cut through the mythological underbrush to reach a fuller reckoning? Kennedy’s politics certainly offer little in the way of clues to understanding the enthusiasm he generated and the popularity he enjoyed. For the historically informed, JFK’s political position has never really been in question: he was a centrist “Cold War liberal” who endorsed the basic tenets of the New Deal on the domestic front while embracing a determined anti-Communism in foreign policy. Sometimes he tacked a bit to the right, as in his refusal to abandon Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s or in the 1960 presidential election when he denounced a fictitious “missile gap” vis-à-vis the Russians and nuclear capability; sometimes he tacked a bit to the left, as when he urged American support for the peaceful economic development of third world countries as a senator or advocated a nuclear test ban treaty as president. Despite attempts to capture him posthumously for antiwar radicalism or antigovernment conservatism by eager activists in later decades, Kennedy in his own time floated in the broad mainstream of Cold War liberalism like countless others in the Democratic Party or even in the liberal wing of the Republican Party. His politics, in other words, provided no special cause for reverence or near mania, no special foundation for immortality.3
Much greater insight into the excitement and the significance of Kennedy’s ascension in our national life comes from another strategy: approaching him from the outset as a cultural figure rather than as a political one. It seems clear that his appeal, from early in his career, was more about his image than his political ideology, more about the emotions he represented and the yearnings he fulfilled than the policies he advocated or the great ideas he embodied. As many observers have noted, Kennedy generated an enthusiasm and an allure that was more akin to a movie star or a popular singer than a candidate for office. Like theirs, his appeal was at the same time intensely personal and wildly popular, rooted both in the attractions of his personality and in the fascination of his celebrity. But even granting this, a bigger question remains unanswered: Why were Americans so attracted to Kennedy’s package of attributes in the late 1950s and early 1960s—his glamorous image, good looks, cool and elegant style, tough-minded rhetoric, sex appeal? The answer lay embedded in the realm of culture rather than ideological exhortation or electoral tactics. It requires excavation.
Some decades ago, the historian and critic Garry Wills offered a brilliant cultural analysis of JFK’s graceless, tormented opponent, Richard Nixon, in Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man. Wills contended that the Republican had instigated his own tragic demise through his devotion to a frayed American tradition of self-made success. Nixon’s loyalty to various, older market conceptions of life—the moral market of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the economic market of Adam Smith, the intellectual market of John Stuart Mill, the political market of Woodrow Wilson—made him the last gasp of this tradition that was rapidly evaporating in mid-twentieth-century America. He entered the presidential lists as a knight defending an archaic creed of liberal individualism, an impulse that made his life a constant struggle for success and for acceptance. Nixon, in Wills’s words, was “always the lone man testing himself and others in a battle for survival.” Wills chose agonistes, the ancient Greek word for “the struggler” or “the combatant,” a term John Milton had employed in his famous tragic poem Samson Agonistes, to symbolize Nixon’s anguished, never-ending battle for achievement and recognition.4
Similarly, JFK can be understood as a cultural figure, in this case one who captured the American imagination as the country moved into a new age. The youthful senator, and then president, embodied many of the modern values of his time that were rapidly replacing an older Victorian creed of self-denial and upright moral character. With the powerful development of a consumer economy after 1945, a mainstream value system based on the attractions of personality (rather than the traditional virtues of character) and expectations of self-fulfillment (rather than the old-fashioned restrictions of self-denial) emerged full blown. Kennedy, with his handsome demeanor, confident manner, and elegant style, was tailor-made for such a cultural atmosphere.5
More immediately, JFK benefited enormously from a crisis of manhood that had welled up in postwar America. By the late 1950s, according to a host of contemporary critics and observers, the American male seemed to be degenerating. Wandering through frustrating mazes of bureaucracy, drifting in endless cul-de-sacs of suburban life, physically weakened by consumer comfort, and entangled in social webs spun by newly aggressive women, many men, it was feared, had lost their identity and vitality. This resulting torpor had undermined their roles in both private and public life. Kennedy promised redemption, appearing at the forefront of a movement to revive the modern American man as youthful and individualist, cool and vigorous, masculine and urbane, tough-minded and athletic, and a sexual conquistador. Advocates eagerly juxtaposed this dynamic, manly image with an older Eisenhower-era portrait of the stodgy, unimaginative, timid, conforming, often aging “organization man.”
Thus John F. Kennedy generated a powerful “masculine mystique” that became central to his remarkable public appeal. While representing a vibrant postwar culture of personality and self-fulfillment in America, it also offered a solution to festering concerns about the weakened condition of its males. Like Wills’s agonistes with Nixon, another ancient trope captures the quintessential Kennedy appeal. The Greek legend of Adonis portrayed the god of male beauty and desire whose virile attractiveness led to great prominence, but also to jealous entanglements and a premature death. The seductive young deity became the icon of a spiritual cult celebrating his immortal, inspirational spirit. In 1821, Percy Shelley had penned Adonais, an elegy on the death of his close friend the young romantic poet John Keats. Now Kennedy Adonais, like Shelley’s portrait of Keats, appears through the mists of Camelot as a handsome, charismatic, alluring young man—“Thou wert the morning star among the living”—who survives in American memory as the stuff of legend. His relentless masculine mystique, like Nixon’s fanatical drive for self-made success, both drove him forward and hamstrung many of his best efforts.6
But this cultural crusade to regenerate masculinity, while led by JFK, involved other prominent figures in what might be called the Kennedy Circle. This does not refer to Kennedy’s team of White House advisers who interacted with him on a daily basis and helped shape his political program, men such as Ted Sorensen, McGeorge Bundy, Pierre Salinger, Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, Dave Powers, and Kenneth O’Donnell. Instead, the Kennedy Circle consisted of public figures, famous in their own right, who associated with the senator from Massachusetts, and later president, and who shared a broader set of values and impulses. It included Frank Sinatra and his Hollywood Rat Pack; the novelist and journalist Norman Mailer; the author Ian Fleming and his popular fictional character James Bond; the publisher Hugh Hefner and his magazine, Playboy; the charismatic political journalist Ben Bradlee; the military officers Maxwell Taylor and Edward Lansdale; the movie actors Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis; and the astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn.7
This group maintained an intriguing web of interconnections—they supported and identified with Kennedy, he associated with them in various ways, and they maintained ties with one another—and collectively shaped a revived masculine image that had garnered tremendous public attention by the early 1960s. This new ideal promised to liberate men from old-fashioned restraints, push them forward into new frontiers of experience, and replace a standard of sober industriousness and social conformity with one of physical vigor, individualist ethics, cool elegance, tough-minded intelligence, and sexual adventure. Symbolized by JFK and sharpened in various ways by others in the Kennedy Circle, this fresh masculine model changed how American culture viewed men and how they viewed themselves. As a result, both the attitudes and the policies of the New Frontier were shaped by an agenda of manly revitalization. And it would have a profound historical impact by importing celebrity standards into the political process, nourishing the angry rebellions of the later 1960s, and weakening traditional attachments to the family and standards of male responsibility.
Yet a focus on Kennedy’s masculine mystique demands facing up to certain complexities and limitations. Time provides one cautionary constraint. Clearly, we now know much more about the youthful president’s private life and sexual escapades than did many of his contemporaries. Given the fact that much of this personal activity was hidden from sight during his meteoric ascendancy and domination of the national landscape, one may fairly ask, how could JFK successfully promote an ethos of sexual conquest, male assertion, and antibourgeois sophistication? The answer lies in the vagaries of culture. Unlike elections, where votes can be counted, or social experience, where population trends and family structure can be gauged, or the economy, where incomes and growth statistics can be assessed, values and attitudes provide a more tenuous, slippery subject for the historian. Kennedy’s masculine mystique, in its time, was often a product of image and implication rather than public knowledge of specific actions. While his sexual adventures were more a matter of rumor than fact during his life, many journalists clearly knew about them, and these escapades influenced their shaping of his persona as the nation’s sexy leading man. Moreover, the Kennedy Circle—Sinatra, Fleming and Bond, Hefner, Mailer, and others—performed as cultural surrogates who embodied the assertive sexual derring-do that the political leader could only imply. Through standing as an icon of masculine vigor, rather than through widespread public knowledge of his private life per se, JFK established a new atmosphere, a new attitude, a new set of aspirations, that helped reshape the mind-set of early 1960s America.
Scope offers a second restraint. Clearly, Kennedy’s masculine mystique illuminates more about his popularity than about his policies. One should never forget, of course, that myriad, pragmatic calculations of strategic maneuver, political advantage, and national progress play paramount roles in any president’s formulation of policy. At the same time, however, it would be myopic to ignore the vibrant masculine mystique that informed JFK’s very approach to pressing issues. Its imprint can be seen in his decision making about Castro’s Cuba, the Cold War struggle against Communism, the physical fitness program, the space program, counterinsurgency, and even the Peace Corps, for example. Correctly seen, a cultural analysis supplements, rather than supplants, a political approach in reaching a broader understanding of John F. Kennedy’s historical significance.
Thus this analysis offers a fresh perspective based on something hiding in plain sight: a little-understood, but extremely important, set of cultural ideals focused on manhood that explains much about JFK’s meteoric rise to leadership, the nature of his programs, and the subsequent unraveling of traditional social values in the 1960s. JFK and the Masculine Mystique is not just another standard biography of the youthful president. It resituates JFK in his cultural milieu and suggests a new understanding of how and why, in concert with a supporting cadre of cultural figures, he generated such a powerful appeal. Even more, it presents a snapshot of a key moment in modern American history that lay midway between the conventions of the Eisenhower era and the angry divisions of the late 1960s. By examining Kennedy in the context of certain books, movies, social critiques, music, and cultural discussions that framed his ascendancy, we open a window on the excitement and sense of possibility, the optimism and aspirations, that accompanied the dawn of a new age in America. At the same time, such a perspective also illuminates many of the darker impulses and implications of JFK’s unfettered masculine assertion, celebrity politics, and cavalier social attitudes that undermined many vital social traditions.
What follows also attempts to overcome a striking dichotomy in the usual understanding of John F. Kennedy the human being. He often appears as almost two different people. There is the public man, challenging his countrymen to put aside selfish, mundane concerns and “pay any price, bear any burden” to promote the cause of freedom around the world, the youthful leader inspiring them to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Then there is the private man, the tireless sexual adventurer who womanized relentlessly, recklessly, and with a guilt-free conscience. For most people—this includes ordinary citizens as well as historians and biographers—the response is to focus on the first man and interpret his actions and policies and political principles while downplaying or even dismissing the second man as an irrelevant figure whose unfortunate personal peccadilloes deserve a sorrowful shake of the head and relegation to the scandal sheets. The problem with this strategy, of course, is that the public figure and the private figure were actually one and the same. The task remains: to try to grasp what bound together those two sets of impulses into a coherent human being. Kennedy’s masculine mystique, which permeated both his public and his private endeavors and attracted the loyalty of influential adherents, provides that coherence. It brings the whole man into focus.
Copyright © 2016 by Steven Watts