John F. Kennedy

I haven’t thought about John F. Kennedy as a person for many years. The Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and the civil rights confrontations are easily handled as my old friends parry and thrust at our frequent lunches, but I don’t recall JFK, the living, breathing, and dying person ever having been discussed.

Al Patterson, one of our old pals from Washington State, emailed a couple of articles written by the almost infamous John Dean in which Dean compares President Bush with former presidents and places him squarely in the category of Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and his own employer, Richard Nixon. This categorization stems from a book, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House, by James David Barber, the late presidential scholar at Duke University.

Silly me; the topic was fascinating and I felt compelled to read the original book and make up my own mind. On line, I found a used copy of the 1982 edition – the last I believe – and began. I haven’t quite finished but thus far have found it highly entertaining and extraordinarily interesting for reasons that I’ll explain in a later posting.

But in reading the section on JFK all of the old emotions of the period flooded back. Those us who were young when Camelot was in full flower in Washington cannot help but be nostalgic for those heady days. The glamour of the Kennedys was vicariously ours, and we idealized them so. When it all came crashing down it on that day in Dallas it was as if a beloved relative had been taken from us and all of our illusions had been shattered.

Being Irish and from the Boston area, I felt a link to JFK even though we were separated by miles, money, and class and the fact that we had never actually met. My own personal stories about Kennedy are typical of those with my background. I happened to be in New Haven on the day in 1960 when he received an honorary doctorate from Yale and made one of his thousands of witty bons mots: something along the lines of, “Today, I have the best of all worlds – a Yale degree and a Harvard education.”

When I was married in 1962, I was in the process of negotiating an internship in Washington, a huge step for a boy from Brockton, MA. Never anything but a wise guy, including at the wedding reception itself, I was rendered speechless when a young stranger approached and asked “You’re going down to Washington to help Kennedy run the government?” I quickly tried to be humble and indicated that it would be just a training position. He persisted and thanked me for my service. That a person could believe so sincerely in the new young president was a great eye opener.

New to Washington in December of 1962, I was walking from my office on Vermont Avenue past the White House and entering onto the Ellipse to catch my bus on Constitution Avenue when a limousine pulled up beside me and the president popped right out in front of me. He strode up to me and smiled broadly as he moved to light the National Christmas Tree. I was stunned and could barely nod and smile in return.

Those stories and other of similar worth aren’t much, but whenever I read of President Kennedy as a living being, those memories and all of the idealism of that time return to me. Then I remember William Manchester’s book, Death of a President, that was a gift to me and which I read once and threw away after weeping over so many of its pages.

I never knew Jack Kennedy but somehow I feel connected to him. It was great to be alive, young, and a part, albeit very small, of his team.

Blog on!

Wild Bill