JFK: A moving target

“By now it may well be impossible to add any sensible or proper words to all the millions that have been written and spoken about the life and cruel death of John F Kennedy,” said Alistair Cooke into a BBC microphone on 24th November 1963. That day, his Letter from America broadcast struggled for a theme. There was “the sense that we have been cheated” and of course the “idea of a young lion shot down,” though Cooke also worried about lapsing into “a sentimental fit.” Mostly there was paralysis and incoherence. He reported “a desperate and howling note over the land.”

Since then several more million words about Kennedy have spilled out. The New York Times recently noted that some 40,000 books have been published on Kennedy since his death. That works out at over two per day. The books have been arriving even faster with the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination this month. The howling note has died, but people have not stopped asking: who was John Fitzgerald Kennedy? And what is his legacy?

The economist Jeffrey Sachs has confident answers to both these questions. He is interested in Kennedy as a “moral leader,” whose “quest for peace” is what matters today. In To Move The World (Bodley Head, £15), Sachs takes us through the foreign policy triumphs of Kennedy’s final months, from the nadir of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 to the “historic success” of the nuclear test ban treaty in September 1963. “We can use his example, his ideas, and his oratory,” Sachs argues, “as we struggle to achieve global cooperation in our own time.”

Sachs focuses mostly on the oratory, and spends entire chapters explicating Kennedy’s speeches. Most prominent is the “Peace Speech,” delivered at American University in June 1963. “If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity,” proclaimed Kennedy. “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all share the same small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

Speeches like this still thrill, and Sachs reprints some as an appendix. They form the most interesting part of a dull book. This is Sachs’s first work of history, and it shows: “historic” is not an adjective that historians tend to use. The picture of Kennedy is familiarly heroic. And, for a book about peace, Sachs has little to say about war. The one in Vietnam is mostly ignored, as is Kennedy’s increase in military spending to an astonishing 50 per cent of total federal expenditure. To define Kennedy in terms of a “quest for peace” is to miss an awful lot from his personality and his foreign policy.

Thurston Clarke’s new account of JFK’s Last Hundred Days (Allen Lane, £20) injects some welcome ambiguity. Clarke wants an “intimate portrait” that goes beyond the speeches and the successes. Certainly the picture is less fawning: Kennedy’s philandering, anxieties, narcissism, and savage humour all get their due, as does his ill-health. He had Addison’s disease and was given the last rites of the Catholic Church four times as an adult. Persistent and excruciating back pain necessitated a special rocking chair in the Oval Office and a doctor on constant alert.

“More than most presidents—more than most middle aged men,” Clarke argues, “he was a work in progress, a moving target for anyone trying to capture him on canvas or in prose.” Clarke enlists others who honed in on Kennedy’s elusiveness. The public intellectual Alfred Kazin complained that Kennedy was no moral leader, but “always making and remaking himself.” Jackie Kennedy’s view was chilling. “[H]is life is an iceberg,” she wrote. “The public life is above the water—& the private life—is submerged.” Clarke takes us below the surface often, and the cumulative detail is remarkable. His 400-page portrait is precise and usually engaging but, in the end, it is an example of biographical pointillism that does not pull back to reveal the whole picture.

Clarke and Sachs have written about very different Kennedys, but both focus on his last months, when, they argue, he touched greatness. There is an escapable pathos, because we all know how the story ends. Publishers know this too. For Sachs and Clarke and dozens of others, black and white JFKs figure on book jackets that look like funeral programmes. The nature of his death continues to overwhelm our attempts to see Kennedy straight. Especially now, it limits our capacity for sensible and proper words about him.

What about words by Kennedy himself? We learn relatively little from the speeches he polished with Ted Sorenson, which Sachs celebrates. Nor the uneven books published under his name. Nor even the secret White House tapes. These have the merit of extemporaneous discussion and have been indispensable for political historians—but the President controlled the crucial on/off switch.

Instead, some insight comes from The Letters of John F Kennedy (Bloomsbury, £20). Edited by Martin Sandler, this book is, amazingly, the first reasonably comprehensive collection to be widely available. They show Kennedy using words from a young age, and using them well. Here he is in 1943, a 26-year old naval officer writing to his parents after the death of ten men on his torpedo boat. “People get so used to talking about billions of dollars and millions of soldiers that thousands of dead sounds like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten I saw—they should measure their words with great, great care.” Kennedy knows how to make sentence go somewhere and certainly measures his words carefully. Billions become thousands, thousands become ten, and loud-talking dollars become hollow clangs.

Letters suited Kennedy’s intellectual agility and attention span. They allowed him to run with an idea while forcing him to arrive at a point, for it had to be stuffed in an envelope eventually. He worked himself out on the page, then presented an aspect of this persona to others. Not always confident and charismatic, Kennedy’s letters show that his performance could sometimes be halting and difficult. In presenting himself to the world, he always took great care.

His most delicate letters were the most political. In 1959 Kennedy was trying to schmooze Eleanor Roosevelt, then a kingmaker in the Democratic Party. He was a war-hero senator running for President. Mrs Roosevelt had appeared on national television and declared that Kennedy’s father was trying to “buy” the Democratic nomination for his son. “I am certain you are the victim of misinformation,” wrote Kennedy, masking fury with politeness. He asked her to withdraw the remark. She evaded. He persisted. Correcting the record “would be consistent with your reputation for fairness,” he urged. (Secretly, he copied in the owner of the Washington Post.) After more hesitation from Roosevelt and further solicitations from Kennedy, she publicly withdrew the accusations. By the end of their exchange her “Dear Senator Kennedy” had become “my dear boy.”

These letters do not show Kennedy as a great thinker but they do help reveal how he approached the world. Compartmentalization was essential. Friends, politicians, parents, lovers, and brothers—each had their own place in his scheme and each encountered a different Kennedy in his letters. His epistolary dance with Roosevelt was masterly, but he never forgave her. “She hated my father and she can’t stand it that his children turned out so much better than hers,” he snapped to Gore Vidal, an occasional intimate.

Nikita Khrushchev had a special compartment in Kennedy’s letter bureau. The Soviet leader had initiated a remarkable exchange in 1961. “I thought it might be useful in a purely informal and personal way to approach you and share some of my ideas… without a backward glance at the press, at the journalists.” Kennedy agreed to a “personal, informal, but meaningful exchange of views.” Thus began an extraordinary exercise in 20th century diplomacy by letter. During the Cuban missile crisis this exchange turned urgently serious as letters and telegrams shot between the two leaders, trying to find the words with which each side could back down. Post-crisis, Khrushchev and Kennedy wrote to each other that disarmament talks were essential. “Events could have become unmanageable,” wrote a shattered Kennedy. A test ban treaty was eventually negotiated. This “quest for peace” was the result, it seems, of careful letters between terrified leaders more than inspirational speeches and moral leadership

Kennedy’s words were more often wary than bold. As his pen hovers above the page, we see political anxiety fight personal hubris. Vidal observed that Kennedy’s “stubby boy fingers tend to drum nervously on tables, on cups and glasses.” Yet this truth about Kennedy won’t stop ambitious and overconfident from attempting to channel what they believe is their inner Kennedy. On Monday, former foreign secretary David Miliband employed a Sachsian vision of JFK in a lecture about Britain and Europe. Kennedy’s vision in intricate matters of EU policy was, Miliband insisted, “prophetic and profound.” Kennedy would want Britain in Europe; would urge European leaders to stimulate “the demand side of the economy”; would, “I am sure, be a big supporter of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership”; but might worry about the “diminishing power of the European Commission” after the Eurozone crisis. Coincidentally, the opinions of this imagined Kennedy all happen to match those of Miliband.

Kennedy is rarely presented as the difficult man that he was. He could be restless, careful, arrogant and anxious all at the same time. And, given his skill at presenting himself to different people in different ways, he remains impossible to pin down. So, even 50 years on, we inevitably get a simplified picture of JFK. The sense that he died on the cusp of something, a young lion shot down, is too tempting. What would have happened with Vietnam, the urban crisis, 1968, Watergate, or even the Eurozone had Kennedy lived? We get to finish the story however we want. Sensible or proper words be damned.