The Button

I remember that Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy was one of the last books I put on my Third Decade reading plan. I have several presidential biographies on my draft of a Fourth Decade, and I don’t remember what led me to read this one sooner. Maybe I was thinking about Vietnam in comparison to our current military involvement in Asia. Maybe I was thinking about civil rights because of Confederate statues and “fine people on both sides.”

Whatever the reason, it wasn’t that I’m more interested in Kennedy himself than in some of the other U. S. Presidents on my future reading plans (Madison and Eisenhower, for instance). I’ve thought of him as overrated and extremely problematic in that the good he did (or might have done) always has to be taken in the context of his lies about Vietnam. As it turns out, Dallek made Kennedy’s faults look even worse, his virtues even better, and the most amazing parts of his story even more astonishing, and he caused me to reassess the 35th President.

The bad parts first. I found Kennedy’s sense of rich-boy privilege disgusting; as kids, he and his siblings were known to step off a pleasure boat and just throw their coats on the sidewalk in town knowing that someone (they never knew who) would pick them up. The extravagant womanizing started in high school, so it can’t be explained away as caused by a mid-life fear of death. And his willingness to lie to the American public as President just felt like the beginning of a Greek tragedy.

Now for the amazing: Kennedy’s health problems started while he was still a child, and doctors prescribed for him what was then an experimental treatment: steroids. But he didn’t get shots or swallow pills as you or I might: young Jack had to cut a slit in his leg and slip a tablet under the flap in his skin. Sadly, the overdoses of the steroids caused even greater issues later, including his spinal problems. As President, Kennedy was on a crazy cocktail of drugs every day to deal with the constant pain. Dallek doesn’t think the heavy medication affected his performance, but can we really believe that?

And finally the good: Kennedy’s heroism in World War II was not exaggerated, as I had previously thought. After PT 109 was destroyed, Kennedy swam for miles, pulling an injured buddy by gripping the straps of his comrade’s life vest in his teeth. And, wow! did he have to fight his generals to keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from going nuclear. I said that I’ve thought before that all of the good in John Kennedy has to be taken in the context of his lies. But now it seems to me that all of his missteps have to be taken in the context of his insistence that the President alone decides when nuclear weapons will be used. It is a cliché of our times that the President has The Button. But Kennedy made The Button and then took it out of the hands of the people who insisted that nuclear war could be won. This sounds like crazy hyperbole, but I think I was able to enjoy this book only because Kennedy’s restraint during thirteen days in the fall of 1962 left us a world where I and books still exist.