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JFK: the man behind the myths
00:44:15
Historian Mark White unpacks JFK’s life and presidency, from his bold leadership in foreign policy to his reckless private behaviour
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Few American presidents have captivated the public imagination quite like John F. Kennedy. From his glamorous image to his status as a figurehead for liberal politics, his life and untimely death have been much mythologised. And on today's podcast, historian Mark White joins us to offer a 21st century view of Kennedy, explaining how, in his recent biography of the president, icon libertine leader, he attempts to balance the contradictions In Kennedy's character, from his bold leadership in foreign policy to his reckless private behavior. Mark was speaking to Eleanor Evans.
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Eleanor Evans
I hoped I could start hearing from you on the various schools of thought on Kennedy, on his character and leadership since his assassination in 1963, and where your book Icon, Liberty Leader sits in this story of his historical reputation.
- [03:09]
Mark White
His historical reputation in terms of how he's viewed by the American people has always been very high. I mean, if you look at poll ratings today, where the American people are asked to compare all the presidents, he's consistently judged to be one of the very greatest presidents in American history, you know, up there with Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and I think sometimes he's even viewed as the greatest president in American history. So in terms of his popularity with the American people, it's always been high and it's been sustained. In terms of his historical reputation with scholars, that's different. Basically, for the first decade after his assassination in Downtown Dallas in November 1963, the general view was that he'd been the great precedent. One week after the assassination, the grieving widow, Jacqueline Kennedy granted an interview to the journalist Theodore White for Life magazine, which had a circulation of millions. It was exactly seven days after the assassination. And during that interview, she mentioned, and this wasn't an accident, it was deliberate and strategic. She mentioned that on evening, she and her late husband, John Kennedy, liked to listen to a record of a then hit Broadway musical, Camelot, about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. White, Theodore White, was a skilled journalist, and he wrote up the lead, emphasizing the Camelot theme and the implication of that metaphor. This is why she'd used it. Jackie Kennedy, was that JFK had been so great as a president, it was appropriate to think of him in mythical terms, in terms of the Arthurian legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. He had embodied the same type of graceful, chivalric leadership. And that had an influence on the first wave of scholarship, which is known as the Camelot school. And the two most important writers there are Theodore Sorensen, JFK's great speechwriter, and Arthur Schlesinger, who had been a great historian, but both worked in the Kennedy White House. In 1965, they published books, A Thousand Days by Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy by Ted Sorensen, which portrayed him as a great president who'd fought valiantly for peace overseas, had stood up to the Russians when necessary, for example, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but fought for civil rights at home and so on. Then in this, basically, in the 1970s, and into the 1980s. But beginning in the 1970s, a whole slew of revelations emerged, a lot to do with his personal life. And it became clear that he'd been a philanderer of spectacular proportions and had affairs with lots of people. But Also, by the mid-1970s, the Vietnam War had clearly been a disaster and the US had lost the first war it had lost in its history. And as JFK had escalated US involvement there, he hadn't deployed combat troops, but he'd sent more military personnel there. He seemed to bear some responsibility for that. And all of that had an impact on the scholarship. And so by the time you get to the 80s and 90s, the dominance school is far more negative. It doesn't really have an official term, but I use the term counter Camelot, or you could say revisionist Counter Camelot school. And in the 80s and 90s, the three most influential books that came out were Garry Wills, the Kennedy Imprisonment in the early 80s, then Thomas Reeves, A Question of Character in the early 90s, and then Seymour Hersh, the Dark side of Camelot in the late 1990s. They were all savage attacks on Kennedy. And they basically criticized him for two things. One was for being an aggressive Cold warrior who'd made the international situation more dangerous and tense than it would be otherwise. So they pointed out that he'd massively increased US military spending, he'd escalated US involvement in Vietnam, he'd made this concerted effort to overthrow, throw Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, even assassinate him. The second thing was his character in private life, which they portrayed as highly flawed. And Thomas Reeves, the historian I mentioned, who wrote Question of character in 1991, he made the argument that the foundation of all exceptional leadership is a strong sense of character, moral compass on the part of a leader, and that JFK just didn't have that. And you can see that in his private life there was some move towards a sort of more moderate middle position. A couple of books came out in the 80s and 90s by Herbert Palmett and James Gigl, notable historians. I'd say since 2000, there's less clear cut. There've been important books written by Robert dallek and on JFK's early years by Frederick Loganville, Fine books. But the debate is now less clear cut in terms of where I stand in the debate. You know, I've been thinking about Kennedy for many years, reflecting on him, and my view now is definitely more positive than negative. And I think he was a fine president on the whole. And. But I feel that the More and more I compare him to other modern American presidents. He looks better and better.
- [07:53]
Eleanor Evans
Can you take us into some of those positives, then? Where do you land in your position on Kennedy?
- [07:58]
Mark White
The thing I credit him for in terms of policy is his ability to change and grow. So basically, at the start of his presidency, he was a pretty tough Cold Warrior. He did increase military spending. He did try to overthrow Castro, for example, at the Bay of Pigs. And he did not take a strong stance on civil rights, which was the major domestic issue in America at that time. However, he handles the Cuban Missile Crisis very well in October 1962. So this was his response to the Russian deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. And it really enhances his concerns about the Cold War and the dangers of the nuclear age, and it changes him. And so in 1963, he gives this incredible speech at American University in Washington, D.C. where he called on the American people to change their attitude towards the Russian people, the Cold War. And he went on to sign the Nuclear Test Ban treaty later in 1963, limiting nuclear testing. So a landmark agreement in the Cold War to reduce international tensions in terms of domestic policies and civil rights. In particular, a crisis in Birmingham, Alabama, which Martin Luther King had described as the most racially segregated city in the American South. Crisis there in the spring of 63 changes him. This is when Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders organize peaceful protests in Birmingham. Those peaceful protesters included a lot of children were brutally assaulted by the local police force. And it was front page news. And Kennedy said he'd been sickened by what he'd seen. And it leads to him giving a speech on 11 June 1963, which I think is the great speech of his life, rather than, say, his famous inauguration. And in that speech, for the first time in the 20th century, a president defined civil rights as a moral issue, not just a legal issue, not just a political issue, but a moral issue. And he went on to introduce the Civil Rights Bill to end racial segregation in the South. It would pass after his death as the Civil Rights act of 1964. So on policy, I credit him for change and growth.
- [09:56]
Eleanor Evans
What about the questions of his character then?
- [09:59]
Mark White
I make the argument that the sort of counter Camelot school had been right to highlight his character in private life because it was so extraordinary. It is like looking at the life of an early Roman emperor. Just quite unbelievable. Just to give you two examples of affairs that had a clear significance. One was he had an affair from 1960-62 with a woman called Judith Campbell at The same time that he was having the affair with her, she was seeing on a regular basis Sam Giancarner, the head of the Chicago Mafia. That is obviously a real concern. That was a major misjudgment on his part. Also in 1963, he had a sexual relationship with a woman called Ellen Romish, who seemed to be from West Germany, married to a West German official, and she was a prostitute. What he didn't know when he was sleeping with her was that she was originally not from West Germany, but from East Germany, Communist East Germany. Now, sexual compromise blackmail is a standard espionage technique. And she wasn't a spy, but she could have been. They showed the sort of risks. So, you know, they've been right to emphasize that. I mean, the argument that I make is that the problem with the Counter Camelot school is they define character too narrowly. They just equate it in terms of sexual conduct. But, you know, character is a complex thing comprising a multiplicity of traits. So when you look at Kennedy in the round, you also can see that he was courageous. You could see this with his conduct in World War II, that he was stoical with the way that he dealt with all the illnesses in his life. He had the capacity to change and grow, as I've explained in terms of policy. And also the argument I would make is that certain policy issues, not all, and probably not even most, but certain policy issues, have a clear moral significance, civil rights being one. Do you believe people are equal or not? And are you prepared to do something about it? And so the kind of very strong stance he takes on civil rights in the final year of his life is impressive, especially because he knew what would happen, which is that he would lose support for doing that amongst some white Southerners. And that's exactly what happens. If you look at his poll ratings, they were always very high. They plummet in the south in the last five months of his life. And he does that one year out from a presidential election campaign. He's going to run for reelection as president in 64. So even though he knows knows his stance on civil rights will damage his prospects of being re elected, he still does it because he thinks it's, I think, morally the right thing to do. So I think the whole issue of character is much more complex. And his character comprises many impressive traits as well as his sort of sexual waywardness. The other argument that I make in terms of where I stand in relation to what previous historians have said is I don't think there's been enough attention paid to His Hollywood style image. He had this incredibly glamorous image, and it wasn't an accident. He worked at it. And what's of note here is that his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, as well as making a fortune on the unregulated stock market of the 1920s, was also a Hollywood producer. And so the Kennedys, and John Kennedy just grew up with this understanding of the importance of image and how you come across. There's this fascinating anecdote, you know, where just after World War II, 1946, he goes and visits a friend in California, and he's hanging out in Hollywood, and his friend remembers him just studying actors, big Hollywood stars, and just thinking, what is it about them when they enter the room? But you can't take your eyes off them. What is it about the way they move, the way they sound, the way they dress? And so he studied all of this assiduously. And I think he develops the most powerful, seductive, kind of mesmerizing image of any leader in a Western Democratic context. I can't think of any other leader who had that kind of glamorous image. And I see that as not being of trivial significance, but of being of fundamental significance, because you can't understand why he's elected president without reference to that image. Because if you look at the 1960 presidential campaign, when he's running against Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, he is behind in the polls. It's close, but he's behind in the polls. Until that first television debate with Nixon, this famous iconic debate where, you know, the people who listened on radio thought it was probably a tie. The overwhelming majority of people who watched on television thought Kennedy hammered Nixon, which tells you everything about the importance of the visual image. And the first poll after that first television debate with Nixon, Kennedy moves ahead, stays ahead, and wins the election. So without that incredibly powerful image, he may well not have become president in the first place. Secondly, he has the highest average poll ratings of any president in modern recorded history. So if you go back to World War II, talking, what, more than three quarters of a century now, no president has poll ratings as high as his. He averaged 70% approval ratings. Presidents in the last decade or so would love to have had that in a single week during their presidency, he averaged that. And you can say that in part reflects the American people's response to his policy effectiveness, but I think it definitely also reflects that powerful, seductive image. So, for example, the biggest policy disaster of his presidency is the Bay of Pigs invasion where he tries to topple Fidel Castro. This is in April 1961, huge foreign policy embarrassment. In the first public opinion poll taken after that calamity, the American people give him an approval rating of 80%. So that's clearly not a response to his policy effectiveness at that juncture. So you can't understand why he's elected president without reference to his image. So yeah, that's the significance of my book in relation to what's been written on him in the past.
- [15:27]
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- [16:29]
Eleanor Evans
Thank you, Mark. That's great context to have. As we move forwards and touching on a few more of these complexities of character and leadership that you're exploring in this book, can we broaden that a bit more to his liberal stance more generally? Because I think maybe some people can think of him as, you know, this icon for liberalism and this idea. But actually your book shows quite a different picture. How would you characterise that?
- [16:53]
Mark White
It's a really important issue, actually, and a fascinating one. And yeah, I mean, I think since the assassination of John Kennedy in 63, he has generally been seen certainly by the public as a kind of another liberal hero in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. It's not how he regarded himself for most of his political career. He once said, this is before the presidency, you know, but after he'd got into politics. I'm not a liberal, I never have been. I don't trust those people. He viewed liberals like Adlai Stevenson, who was the Democratic candidate for president in 1952 and 56, and other leading liberals. He viewed them as basically being politically naive, that if you were to win an election, for example, you needed to be moderate and occupy the political center. You wouldn't generally be able to win an election from the left wing of the Democratic Party. And the fact that Stevenson was trounced twice by the Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, 1956 in presidential elections for JFK showed that to be the case. Also, I think he thought liberals tended to be sort of sanctimonious and yeah, politically naive. And you know, he did have, for much of his political career, he did have fairly hardline views on foreign policy. He believed that the US should always increase military spending so it could deal with the Soviet Union from a position of strength and be tough in any kind of Cold War crises. And yeah, on domestic policy, he's not naturally a liberal, but he does come to adopt some liberal positions, especially as you get towards the 1960 election, because if he wants to be president, he's going to need to win an election in November 1960. Before that, he needs to win the Democratic presidential nomination. And to do that, he needs to win support from liberals in the party. So he does support some positions that liberals would like. So, yeah, I think he sees himself as a kind of moderate centrist Democrat, kind of the way that Bill Clinton viewed himself in the 90s or Tony Blair in this country viewed himself in terms of labor party politics. But I think he does change and I think it's to his credit that he remains open minded. Because my take on this is that Presidents are like anyone else. They're like you and me. They're affected by their experiences, their life experiences, including their experiences in the White House, or at least they should be. At least they should be sufficiently open minded to take on board presidential experiences. So in the case of jfk, the Cuban Missile Crisis changes him. He understands at a deep level the dangers of the nuclear age, that nuclear war is not just a theoretical abstraction. It could happen, and it nearly did happen during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so, yeah, he comes much more committed to reducing Cold War tensions, signs the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and then on civil rights, he strongly support it in the final year of his life. So in effect, from that point of view, he does move somewhat to the left. He does come to adopt more liberal progressive positions during the final year of his presidency. So he does change, but prior to that, for much of his political career, I think he viewed himself as a centrist Democrat. Just one other issue that should be mentioned in reference to all of that, particularly in terms of how he's perceived by other Democrats, is what happens in the early 1950s. And really this is the biggest political crisis in his pre presidential life. Which is in the early 1950s. The big issue in American politics is McCarthyism is the Red Scare, because Joseph McCarthy is Republican senator from Wisconsin, gets up in February 1950 and claims that the US government, the state Department, is infiltrated by traitors, by communists, and it becomes a massive issue. And when McCarthy, half a decade later, is finally censured by the US Senate for unethical conduct, Kennedy is the only Democratic senator not to vote in favor of McCarthy's censure or to what they call pair in favor of his censure. And part of that was to do with the fact that McCarthy was a family friend. He knew the Kennedys. They socialized together. You might Also brother Bobby, JFK's brother Bobby, Robert F. Kennedy, also worked for McCarthy. So JFK felt it would be hard to take a stand against him from that point of view. But. But, you know, to liberals in the party, this was shocking. And someone like Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt's wife, who's still around, she doesn't die until the early 1960s. She was appalled at JFK's lack of a stance on McCarthyism. So, in fact, he often had this kind of tense relationship with leading liberals in his party, including Eleanor Roosevelt, including Adlai Stevenson.
- [21:37]
Eleanor Evans
So if this stance towards McCarthy is something that can be considered a flaw or a failing potentially, there's another element of character that you've already brought up, which is his philandering. And it is, you know, both carried out and covered up in, you know, staggering proportions. Really. Can you take us into this aspect of his character a little bit more where you sort of stand on it in terms of his reputation and I guess, the impact on his legacy as well?
- [22:05]
Mark White
Yeah, well, in terms of the roots of it, it is partly paternal example. His father was a playboy and encouraged them, John Kennedy and his brothers, to be the same way. It's partly that, I think, in terms of the origins of his private conduct. I think it's also partly to do with the fact that he is, in a medical sense, one of the sickest presidents in American history. He had appalling health his whole life. And in the 30s, 40s and 50s, he has a major problem with colitis. He gets Addison's disease. That's where your adrenal gland doesn't work properly, doesn't produce enough adrenaline. It was often fatal when he was diagnosed with it. And then he had chronic spinal problems. And so he had major spinal surgery in 1954, and the operation went badly. Initially, he was read the last rites on more than one occasion. And I think there was part of him that just felt, well, you know, I'm not going to be around very long, so I might as well enjoy myself as much as I can, whilst I can. So I think this kind of heightened sense of his own mortality, that he had promoted a certain hedonism in terms of his private conduct. And then, I mean, I'm not a psycho historian, but. But could it be the case that a sort of frosty relationship with his mother, lack of respect for his mother, translated into a lack of respect for women in his adult life? You know, one could speculate on that. So, yeah, I mean, he was a Flanderer. His whole life it was unchanged by marriage. He met Jacqueline Bouvier, married her in 1953. It was the society wedding of the year. It was front page news and absolutely had no impact on his private conduct at all. We have an account of him meeting a Swedish aristocrat a few weeks before the wedding and beginning an affair with her, which was resumed after his marriage to Jackie Kennedy. So, yeah, and this continues through the rest of his life and through his presidency. So in his presidency he has an affair with Judith Campbell, who was close to Sam Giancana, the head of the Chicago Mafia. In terms of sort of depth of feeling, the most important affair he has is with a woman called Mary Meyer. M E Y E R she was a sort of bohemian artist who's from the same social set as JFK. He'd known her back since the 1930s. And it does seem like there was a real depth of feeling in terms of his relationship with her. That's a kind of an extraordinary ending to that part of the story because about. I think it's about a year after JFK's assassination. She's walking by a canal in Washington and she's gunned down and shot herself. And it seemed like a very clinical professional shooting. And she was divorced when she was having the affair with jfk, but when she was married it was to a CIA official. So, you know, one could speculate about involvement of the Secret State in all of this. What did she know about jfk? He was very close with her. He confided in her. So he had an affair with Mary Meyer. Most famous one is with Marilyn Monroe. Some biographies disagree on this in terms of timing and so on, but it seems pretty clear he had an affair with her, probably 61, 1962. Ellen Romish. There were at least four women in the White House who worked there regularly, administrators, secretaries and so on, that he was sleeping with throughout his time in the White House. If you put it in the context of the modern presidency, the behavior in itself isn't totally sui generis. It's not totally unique. We know Warren Harding had affairs, Franklin Roosevelt had affairs, Dwight Eisenhower prior to his presidency, Lyndon Johnson, a lot of affairs. George Bush Sr. Bill Clinton, certainly. So in terms of that, one thing that strikes me is how much attention is paid to it. I mean, Lyndon Johnson boasted about how many affairs he had with women, and he certainly was a huge philanderer. One person who's written on presidential sexual lives said that apart from jfk, he had the most active extramarital sexual life. And yet, you know, you read books on Lyndon Johnson, major biographies, and there's not a lot of attention paid to it, really. Yet with jfk, there's a huge amount of attention. And I wonder, this is partly to do with his glamour, you know, paradoxically, that it's a sort of posthumous liability and that people are more drawn to that side of JFK's behavior because of his perceived glamour. So, yeah, it's a major part of his life. It's a feature of his life, including his presidential life. But as I say, he's hardly any president to indulge in this sort of behavior. But there were a couple of really serious misjudgments and the relationship with Judith Campbell. So this woman who was also seeing Sam Giancarna, head of the Chicago Mafia, was a terrible misjudgment. And also the relationship with Ellen Romish, the German prostitute, was a terrible misjudgment. And nothing terrible followed on from that. You know, his presidency wasn't damaged, but those were risks he should never have taken. I think the one other point that just needs to be made is the context of his affairs in terms of media culture. I think this is quite different from what happened in the 1990s, say, with Bill Clinton. There's a very gifted politician which is, you know, Bill Clinton had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, knowing that if the press found out, this would be a massive news story. John Kennedy understood that the media culture of that day, the early 1960s, meant that responsible journalists didn't report on, generally speaking, on politicians, private lives, and especially presidential private lives. And we have a quote from where he said, you know, they can't get me whilst I'm alive. They can't report on this whilst I'm alive, and when I'm dead, it's not something I'm really bothered about. He wasn't taking a political risk in the same way. That Bill Clinton was in the 1990s because he knew that journalists wouldn't report on this. So politically it's not really so significant, but there's still really significant ethical issues. Yeah. So my take on it is you can't ignore it. You could make the argument, well, this is a presidential private life. We should just be concerned about his policies. I think some of what he does involves such serious risk taking. I think one does have to consider it. Just the other point I'd make about it is I don't really think it has any impact on his presidency in terms of his policies. And in fact, what strikes me is the difference between his behavior in his private life and his behavior as president. Because in terms of his private life, he is an incredible risk taker and there's a machismo there. But in terms of his policy making as president, I mean, this is the argument I make is, you know, if he's that macho and reckless, why doesn't he send in U.S. troops to overthrow Castro when the Bay of Pigs fails? He could have done that. Some of his advisors would want him to do that. If he was that macho and reckless, why did he always refuse to send combat troops into South Vietnam? Number of his advisors wanted him to do that at various times. If he was that macho and reckless, why didn't he bomb Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Most of his advisors at the start of the missile crisis wanted him to do that. So he's cautious and careful in his policy making as president, even though he is very reckless in his private life.
- [29:02]
Eleanor Evans
Key to maintaining that divide is this idea of image. You already touched on how he really crafted this Hollywood style image and really aimed to emulate the Hollywood stars of the time. I wanted to ask particularly about his wife Jackie in bolstering this image and what he was trying to portra project in the family arena.
- [29:21]
Mark White
It's an issue I'm fascinated by and I just think not just with John Kennedy, but with other modern presidents, and I think of contemporary British politicians as well, just in terms of how they're perceived. I just think image is so important. It's not a superficial issue. I think it's an essential part of political craft these days. Are you able to develop an image that appeals to people and that they can relate to? And for me, what changes everything is what happens more broadly in American culture in the 1950s. In 1950, about 10% of Americans had television. By 1960, the year John Kennedy runs for the presidency, it's around 90% so suddenly how you look, the visual image really matters. And image had always been important historically. You go back to the Roman emperors, go back to Elizabeth I in England, they were really concerned about image. But once television comes in, it changes everything, really. And what would be ideal is if you had a leader with a Hollywood style image. And that's what John Kennedy has. I think one issue is understanding exactly why is it so powerful. I think it's partly to do with its multifacetedness. And he develops this image before his presidency. So he becomes known as a literary figure because he publishes books. He becomes known as a war hero because of his service in World War II. When he runs for Congress in 1946, he also becomes seen as a symbol of the family because there were just so many Kennedys out on the campaign trail campaigning for him. He seems the representative of a dynasty. And also he's seen as a sex symbol. And I used to think that was just due to the fact that he was an attractive man who becomes president. But no, no. If you go back and read accounts of the first time he runs for political office in 46, there's a lot of attention to his physical attractiveness and his appeal to women. So I think part of the image partly comes from the multifacetedness. Literary figure, war hero, sex symbol, symbol of the family. During the 1960 campaign, initially, one big issue was this Catholicism. You know, it's just sheer prejudice. Some Americans are uncomfortable about electing a Catholic president. They think he might owe allegiance to the Pope and to Rome, rather than to the US and the American Constitution. But the advantage of that is he becomes known as a man of faith. That becomes part of his image. And actually his religious faith was sincere. Despite his private life, he was a devout Catholic, not a paternity. And then at his inauguration as President on 20 January 1961, that's when the idea of the Kennedys as America's royal family, you know, people still say that today the Kennedys are America's royal family. That's where that idea is created, because of the pageantry of the occasion. So I think part of the image is to do with its multifacetedness. It's also partly to do with JFK's own knowledge of things like fashion, clothes. If you're a man and you're wearing a jacket, how many buttons should it have? 2 or 3? How wide should the lapel be? If you're wearing a certain type of trousers, colour trousers, what color should your socks be? He has this huge encyclopedic I mean, whole articles are written in magazines like GQ and Esquire about Kennedy's wardrobe. And, you know, people always talk about his hair and just what fabulous hair he had and he did. It's why he looks youthful. If you look at his face, he looks about the age he is. The reason he looks youthful is so, you know, he sourced the best hair tonic you could get from a New York company. So it's all those little things as well which contribute to his image. Yeah, Jackie's very significant because she adds to his image in a number of ways. So, as I say, he's known as a literary figure, a kind of culturally sophisticated person. But when they get to the White House, she enlarges that aspect of his image because she is so cultured herself. He's very smart. She's very smart, but truth be told, she's far more cultured than he is. She knows. And a lot of it's to do with her Francophilia. She was obsessed with French culture. She knew a lot about art, about interior design, about classical music, about theater. He's not really interested in those things. The Kennedy family culture was kind of politics, you know, sports, showbiz. I mean, he read biography, he read history widely, but she's more cultured. So she puts on all of these cultural events at the White House, like the famous concert given by the great cellist Pablo casals in late 1961. That's a big newspaper story. She arranges. It was described as the cultural event of the Kennedy years. She arranges for the French government to loan the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, to the United states in early 1963. And I think some estimates indicate that about 2 million Americans went to see it in Washington and New York. So she adds to the idea that he's culturally sophisticated because of all those cultural events she puts on at the White House. She adds to the idea that he's a symbol of the family because he's now married and also has two children. So that enlarges the idea that he's a family man. And she plays a crucial role in his posthumous image because of that interview she gives after the assassination for Life magazine, where she talks about him in the context of Camelot and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. So she plays a really important role in ensuring that the American people would remember him well. And that was something she was very concerned about. I mean, when, despite all of the grief and the horror of the assassination, she thought very lucidly about this. And she said privately, she said she was very concerned about how historians, bitter old men is how she described them, seems rather uncharitable, but how they would remember John Kennedy. And so she set out to make sure that the American people remembered him well. And the interview in which she mentioned Camelot was part of that. So she's really important in terms of influencing JFK's image in a positive way, very positive way, as first lady and also after his death as well.
- [35:02]
Eleanor Evans
You do turn to his death and the aftermath and you address the question of what might have happened had he not been killed in 1963. Could you give us a brief sense of where history might have gone if that had not happened?
- [35:16]
Mark White
Obviously, his presidency ends prematurely. He's only in the White House about a thousand days. Huge things happen during that presidency. The Berlin crisis of 61, the Cuban missile crisis of 62. Civil rights comes to the fore. But yeah, it ends in less than three years. And so that has meant historians have naturally tended to think about, well, what would have happened had he lived. And I think, you know, generally speaking, historians look at that issue just from the perspective of their overview on jfk. So if they have a negative view of Kennedy and his presidency, they basically say, well, bad things would have happened. If they've got a positive view of Kennedy, they say, well, various good things would have happened. In terms of the hypothetical issue, obviously the 1964 presidential election would have been important. He would have needed to win it to have stayed president in the mid and late 1960s, the Republican candidate in 64 turned out to be Barry Goldwater, who's an important figure in terms of the history of modern conservatism in America. But the time was seen as too extreme by most Americans and he ends up being trounced by Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 election. And I think Kennedy being president, he would have beaten Goldwater comfortably. So I think we can safely assume that John Kennedy would have been President till January 1969. So the question then is what would have happened to his presidency? The most important issue, and this is the one that historians have dwelt on the most, is Vietnam. Basically, the key question in terms of the hypothetical is would he have taken the US into a full scale land war in Southeast Asia, in Vietnam, in the way that his successor, Lyndon Johnson did? Because about a year and a half after the assassination, Lyndon Johnson, who'd been his vice president before that senator for Texas, made the fateful decision to take the United States fully into the Vietnam War. And so by 1968, he's got half a million American troops there. And in the end, it's a war that the US Loses. So would Kennedy have made that decision to go to war in Vietnam? I think if you look at it closely, there are arguments both ways. There are factors which can lead one to think, well, he would have gone to war. Those factors that can make one think he wouldn't have done. And for me, in the end, I think it's most likely he would not have gone to war in Vietnam. And I think there are a number of important differences with Johnson. One is he has a fantastic reputation as a foreign policy president by the time of his assassination, in particular, because he's had this huge triumph at the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, where he stood up to the Russians, forced Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leaders, to back down and withdraw nuclear missiles from Cuba, and he's prevented World War iii, helped keep the world safe. And so he doesn't really need to prove himself in foreign policy in the way that Lyndon Johnson did. Johnson was regarded as fantastic in the domestic policy arena, but far less tried and trusted in the foreign policy arena. Also, if you look at the trajectory of Kennedy's foreign policy as president after the Cuban Missile Crisis, as I've said, he moves towards reducing Cold War tensions, de escalating the Cold War. So if you extrapolate on from that, I think it's far less likely that he'll decide to go to war in Vietnam to stop Vietnam going communist. One other thing which is important is during his presidency, he'd become increasingly skeptical of the generals because he noticed they always gave him very hawkish advice whenever big foreign policy issues came up. So, for example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they persistently advised Kennedy to bomb Cuba, just go to war there. And in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he kept saying to them, look, the problem with the advice you're giving me is you don't put it in any broader political context. If I go ahead and bomb Cuba, don't you think that Nikita Khrushchev is going to respond somewhere, Berlin, Turkey, and then the conflict's going to broaden? So he came to have a very skeptical view of his own generals. And so I think he would have been far more able than Lyndon Johnson was to have got advice from his generals that he needed to go to war on Vietnam and to have rejected that advice. So I think, on balance, it's most likely he would have avoided war in Vietnam. And also just the fact that he did tend to be very cautious in the policy arena. He didn't like to take big dangerous risks in terms of policy. So I think it's most likely he would have avoided the war in Vietnam. The other big issue, which is in terms of domestic policy is would he have got that civil rights bill through which he'd introduced to end segregation in the South? It would have been difficult, and you can certainly argue it both ways. I think it's most likely he would have done, is my view. I think what is interesting is with Lyndon Johnson, he developed this incredible domestic policy program, the Great Society, which was the most sweeping liberal legislative program in American history. He passed more legislation than any previous American president, President, including Franklin Roosevelt. In the end, we know what happens politically. We know what everyone thinks about the rights and wrongs of that. And he did very many important things, obviously on civil rights, but also on health care, on the environment and so on. We know what happens politically, which is there was a conservative backlash against it, beginning with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. The Republicans win five out of six presidential elections. And I think if Kennedy had remained president, had he not been assassinated, there are things that he did want to do in terms of progressive liberal reform such as civil rights, but I think he had a more limited conception of the domestic reform that should have taken place. I think it would have been less radical than it was with Lyndon Johnson. So that raises the issue. Would he have been able to keep the kind of liberal consensus that had been in place in America since the 1930s with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal? Would he have been able to keep that in place, retain it for longer than Johnson was able to? And I think that's a really interesting issue. So, yeah, those are the important hypothetical issues that come into play if one assumes he hadn't been assassinated.
- [41:04]
Podcast Host
That was Mark White, historian and the author of Icon Libertine Leader. You can hear more From Mark on JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile crisis, one of the most fraught periods of his leadership. In our three part podcast series, the Cuban Missile Crisis. World on the Brink. Just search for that wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer, ARD.