On Monday November 11 and Tuesday
November 12, PBS’s American Experience
series aired a two-part documentary on John F. Kennedy titled simply, “JFK.” It was apparently meant to help
mark the 50th anniversary of his assassination in Dallas on November
22, 1963. What I’m interested in is not re-hashing the well-worn material on
Kennedy’s life, presidency and
assassination, but rather thinking about the overall effect he and his public
persona had on American culture. So though I was deeply moved—especially by the
final episode in this 4-hour documentary, where the most beautiful couple in
American presidential history debark from their gleaming plane in Dallas and
lead their motorcade through jam-packed Dallas streets filled with adoring
well-wishers as a simple drone music builds in the background to the horror we
know and fear is coming but don’t see; and then watch that noble cortege with
its black horses moving down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington—it is, I think,
important to step back a bit and gauge what has been wrought. In brief, I
believe that JFK’s most enduring contribution to American political life was
not any one policy or legislative achievement (he had almost none), but his
grasp of the importance of images, particularly television images, and how
those images played in public, not least in this documentary itself.
Especially as he
matured, JFK was perfectly equipped to project an image. He was movie-star
handsome, and when paired with his equally classic wife Jacqueline, almost
royal in his impact. And the media loved him. It is a commonplace to note that
he won the presidency based on his TV debate performance with a haggard looking
Richard Nixon. After that, national magazines featured his and Jackie’s
beautiful faces almost monthly. When the two children, John-John and Caroline
came along, they only added charm and warmth to the family picture, both of
them outfitted in classic English clothes and stylish haircuts to make them
almost icons of American childhood. When Caroline hugged her father or leaned a
tired head on his shoulder, or John-John peered out from beneath his
presidential desk, it was enough to make you weep. Indeed, when John-John
saluted his father’s funeral cortege, all America did weep.
To its credit, the
documentary allows us to see, or at least hear, that not all was as it seemed.
For one, Kennedy suffered from debilitating diseases (Addison’s Disease, which he
denied in his campaign for the presidency) and back problems throughout his
life, sometimes to the point where he could barely stand. It was probably only
his father’s wealth that allowed him to get the best treatment possible
(including multiple daily injections of pain killers and amphetamines), usually
outside the public eye, to allow him to continue, and, most of the time, fool
the world into seeing him as the epitome of youthful energy. The same is true
about the idyllic family, with mutually loving parents, that was projected. JFK
was a notorious womanizer and we are told that it didn’t stop with marriage. He
carried on when in the White House, on trips, and everywhere else he could.
Marilyn Monroe was only the most famous of his sexual partners. But in public,
he always managed to maintain that ease and charm to which he’d been both bred and
trained, again thanks to his father’s almost endless supply of money. As to the
source of that fortune, the documentary is silent about that, but earlier
investigations have suggested that old Joseph Kennedy got his start either in
bootlegging in the 20s, or insider trading on the stock-market thereafter, or
both. By the time Jack comes along, though, the money has pretty much been
laundered and put into more acceptable income-generating sources (Joe bought
the Merchandise Mart in Chicago for a song in 1945, where his real fortune was
made) and all we see are American mandarins whose position is tainted, if only slightly,
by their Roman Catholicism.
Nonetheless,
though he never got major legislation through the southern-dominated Congress,
John F. Kennedy did have the courage to stand firm against all of his major
advisers during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was truly his historic
moment—when the world really could have slipped into nuclear Armageddon. Had it
not been for JFK’s cool under fire, fending off such war-mongers as General
Curtis LeMay who wanted to bomb the hell out of Cuba as usual, it well might
have. Of course, it could also be argued that the crisis arose from America’s
arrogance and determination to overwhelm the Soviet Union with nuclear might in
the first place, but that’s another story. What the documentary does tell us is that a secret
back-channel communication from JFK to Russian premier Khrushchev brought the
two nations back from the brink. Khrushchev agreed to remove the Russian
missiles from Cuba in exchange for Kennedy’s promise to (secretly so as to
avoid antagonizing the congressional hawks) remove the U.S. missiles that had
recently been placed in Turkey. As it turns out, Kennedy never did honor that
promise. It also seems to be the case that a Russian submarine commander, under
attack from American depth charges, thought the war had begun and was about to
launch his missiles—refraining only at the last minute. So it was really the
Russians, as much as JFK, who exhibited prudence and humanity when faced with
Armageddon. What Kennedy did, though, was to promote the story not of his cool
head under fire, not of his reluctance to murder 300 million people in a
nuclear exchange to save face, but his ability to face down the Russian leader
and force him to remove his missiles
from “our” hemisphere. In other words, JFK remained the master of image, and of
public relations. And as always, it worked. His popularity soared, his
presidency was secured, and he was well on his way to a second term. With his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech at the
Berlin Wall, the image of the leader with the proper ‘cojones’ assumed global
proportions.
Finally, Kennedy’s
stance on the civil rights movement, then reaching combustible levels in
Alabama, is the other legacy that endures. The documentary is fairly honest
about that, making it clear that Kennedy felt harried by a growing movement
that continually threatened to usurp his energy and divert it from what he saw
as the major international crisis— containing communism (JFK really was a ‘cold
warrior’ determined to thwart communist expansion). He bridled at the ‘impatience’
of black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and the young radicals who refused
to buckle beneath the threat of snarling dogs and fire hoses. And though the
documentary inexplicably leaves it out, he also expressed both fear and
annoyance when King insisted on going through with the March on Washington on
August 28, 1963. Left out or not, it was probably that event which finally pushed
him to make his courageous speech introducing the Civil Rights Act to the
nation. As a result, Kennedy finally emerged from his cautious attitude towards
the civil rights movement and made inevitable the legislative promise that even
Lyndon Johnson could not ignore, and was finally able to fulfill in 1964—after
JFK was killed. Most commentators have opined that Kennedy himself would never
have been able to get the bill through a southern-dominated Congress. They are
probably right. Unlike pubic opinion, Congress is not fully amenable to image.
Particularly where race is concerned, it must be cajoled and pushed and
browbeaten and bribed, and Johnson, unlike Kennedy, was the master of these
tactics.
Still, it was JFK
who put civil rights on the agenda. It was also JFK who put a nuclear arms
reduction treaty on the agenda. So we must credit him for that.
His lasting
achievement, however (if we can call it an achievement, since the effects are
not always and everywhere positive), was in the arena of image. Politics has
never been the same since John F. Kennedy. His looks and his style, including
the epitome of style embodied by Jackie and the children, especially as they
were captured by both television and still camera, transformed politics. One
can hardly find a politician these days who does not somehow “look” like
JFK—with the glaring exception of Lyndon Johnson, who made his political bones
the old way, and whose looks became his Achilles heel when Vietnam protests exploded
on his watch. More than that, perhaps, is the use of private money to mount
campaigns outside the normal party apparatus. JFK was the first to use the
primary system (and his father’s unlimited money) to build so much momentum
that he overwhelmed the party bosses’ normal way of conducting a convention. The
procedure for choosing a presidential candidate has never looked back. And
perhaps the most prominent example of his pre-eminence in the arena of image is
the documentary, JFK, itself. Though
I tried to resist, though I tried to remember how it was back in 1960 and
during the momentous events of his presidency, and though I tried to inure
myself to the charm of that royal family cavorting on Hyannisport and
exhibiting that noble ease that only comes with great wealth and privilege, I was
unable to resist finally. So that when that insistent music accompanied the
open car as it made its way through the Dallas streets, I was filled with
dread. My president, my nation, my family
almost, was about to be gunned down. Was
gunned down. And as my eyes filled with tears watching once again that funeral
cortege, I remembered where I was when I first heard that staggering news on
the radio—our president has been shot,
America has been shot—and then
watched transfixed for days in front of a TV set with an entire nation as the
rest of that unforgettable drama unfolded.
Those images will
never leave those of us who saw them. The images of this president, of the
nation itself, of all of us looking inward, were thereby transformed.
Innocence. All America seemed, in retrospect, innocent; as innocent as John-John,
in spite of what we knew. And now, with murder, two murders on our screens, innocence
had left, never to return; in its place dark corridors with hatted gunmen and subterfuge
and back-room deals and the gritty often dirty business of governing. That’s
what this documentary, with its indelible images of that innocence, left me
with. And the wonder about how such images implant themselves, and whether
we’re better for them or worse, whether they’re authentic or not, and whether
this nation is better for having been treated to those JFK images, or not.
Lawrence DiStasi
