A Question of Character, by Thomas C. Reeves

...He had the sexual morals of an alley cat...

...But it can also be demeaned and that, in retrospect, is what Jack Kennedy did to it...

...In the end, all the Kennedy presidency consisted of was the myth of Camelot, and that was essentially Jackie's—not Jack's—creation...

...He was a Kennedy, which was more than a family affiliation...

...By rights he should have been court-martialed for losing his ship...

...24.95 Paul Johnson 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 close his true medical history...

...After the Senate victory Joe set his son's sights higher and, under Sorensen's guidance, a new personality began to emerge, calculated to appeal to liberals, intellectuals, and "civilized people...

...By contrast, those of us who live in media democracies theoretically know all the facts about our elected leaders and can make informed judgments about their views, capabilities, and characters...

...His career shows that one of the most dangerous kinds of politician is a man who is good at public relations and nothing else...

...He grasped the important point that electing a Kennedy was not so much giving office to an individual as handing over power to a family business, a clan, almost a milieu—with a set of attitudes about how office was to be acquired and used which at no point coincided with the American public ethic...

...Those who suggested the book was ghostwritten were sued for libel or even, at Joe's request, investigated by the FBI...

...After all, did the Borgias need political convictions...

...Professor Reeves's book is primarily a study in moral character, rather than politics, and that is the right approachto the Kennedy problem...

...The outstanding case of how a great democracy can be misled is that of John F. Kennedy...

...But in general he is fair-minded, and there can be no doubt about the substance of his indictment...

...Janet Travell, had to give him two or three daily injections of procaine...

...Self-deception can only go so far: some of them must have known they were involved in one of the biggest frauds in American political history...

...In practice, alas, we are as easily deceived as ever...

...Most of his life he simply did old Joe's bidding...

...Oh," said he, "it's rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian city...

...His range of contacts and collaborators was enormous, and included the mob leader Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky's lieutenant Doc Stacher...

...T oe's neatest trick was to turn Jack j into a war hero...

...Nor was it difficult, in our own century, for Hitler to impose himself on the Germans, and Stalin to present himself to the Russians, as guardians and savior-figures...

...But he was still pushed forward primarily by money and skulduggery...

...Jack's political rise, however, was based essentially on money and corruption...

...It may be that the pendulum is now swinging to the opposite extreme, and there is a certain relentlessness in the way Reeves amasses material unfavorable to his subject...

...If Jack was not interested in making money, Reeves shows that in most other respects he happily accepted the family philosophy, especially its central tenet: that the laws of God and the Republic, admirable in themselves, do not apply to Kennedys, at any rate male ones...

...The lies centered on certain areas...

...His book is by no means the last word on the subject, for much of the truth still lies concealed in inaccessible portions of the Kennedy Library (and elsewhere), and in the memories and papers of Kennedy loyalists...

...Strictly speaking, Jack was never fit to hold any important office, and Reeves's list of the lies told about his body by the Kennedy camp over many years is formidable...

...The death of Joe Jr...

...What he stood for was an invention, and when he fell to an assassin's bullet, nothing of significance fell with him...

...The back pain Jack suffered seems to have increased after he became President, and his White House physician, Dr...

...J ack rejected the family tradition in one important respect...

...Old Joe and his men turned it into a "bestseller," partly by using influence with publishers such as Henry Luce, partly by buying 30-40,000 copies, which were secretly stored at Hyannis Port...

...We now know that his life was as meaningless as his death...

...When two officials brought urgent secret cables to the Lincoln Bedroom one afternoon, the President flung the door open, revealing a woman in his bed, read the cables, then resumed his activities...

...Like his father, he dealt with gangsters when he felt inclined...

...Jack certainly knew about that one, since he later admitted: "You know, we had to buy that f---ing paper or I'd have been licked...

...John MacGregor Burns was employed to manufacture a hagiography called John F Kennedy: A Political Profile...

...Certainly Joe persuaded Mayor Daley of Chicago to fix the result for his son in Cook County, which officially registered a huge Democrat turnout, thus giving Jack Illinois by 8,858 votes, though Nixon won 93 of the state's 102 counties...

...Reeves is particularly shocked that on at least one documented occasion, Jack's pastimes led him to be separated from the officer who followed him with the nuclear code-box chained to his wrist...

...But it will do to get on with, and the story he tells is disturbing, both in itself and in its implications...

...Indeed, parsimony to employees was one of the few characteristics he shared with his wife Jackie...

...Other writers ghosted a mass of articles signed by Jack and published in everything from Look, Life, and the Progressive to the Georgetown Law Review...

...His tenure at the White House was punctuated by both regular and casual affairs, sometimes in his own room when Jackie was away, sometimes in "safe" apartments, reached by tunnels under New York's Carlyle Hotel to escape observation...

...Old Joe had learned many tricks in concealing the true state of his retarded daughter, buried alive in a home, and he used them to gloss over the seriousness of Jack's back problems and the functional disorder eventually diagnosed as Addison's disease...

...Thus processed, it not only allowed Jack to graduate cum laude but also appeared in book form as Why England Slept...

...He had gone through the motions at Choate, Princeton, and Harvard, but was basically uneducated and a thorough philistine...

...That magisterial office, as has so often been demonstrated, can be greater than the human material that occupies it, and raise the man accordingly...

...was Paul Johnson's most recent book is The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 (HarperCollins...

...Instead, he kept her on the payroll but put himself into the hands of a rogue named Dr...

...It was enshrined in school textbooks as well as weighty academic tomes, Kennedy being well served, long after his death as throughout his career, by a legion of pliant, gullible, admiring, or corrupt writers, journalists, and academics, ranging from ill-paid hacks to august court historians...

...instead, Joe's management got him a medal for rescuing a crew member...

...He was aware that Judith Campbell was also the mistress of Sam Giancana and used her to transmit messages to the Mafia...

...In return, Joe promised the mobsters assistance in federal investigations...

...It also meant grabbing opportunities, including criminal ones, as they arose...

...But he did not fire Ravel, fearing that, though she had hitherto been willing to mislead the media about his health, she might now disA QUESTION OF CHARACTER: A LIFE OF JOHN F. KENNEDY Thomas C. Reeves/The Free Press/510 pp...

...The other main area of lying centered on Jack's achievements...

...He claimed he required some kind of sexual encounter, however perfunctory, before he could sleep...

...Max Jacobson, who later lost his medical license and was described by his nurse as "absolutely a quack...

...There was, of course, a lot of talk about "moral leadership," a phrase with peculiarly ironic undertones in view of Jack's personal behavior...

...He inherited his father's values in most respects, though they jostled in uneasy counterpoint with his mother's brand of superstitious Catholicism...

...He underpaid both domestic servants and staffers...

...Although he turned down a request to move into the White House, he had succeeded, by the summer of 1961, in making the President heavily dependent on amphetamines...

...Reeves's account of the behavior of the Kennedy brothers toward Monroe, and their coverup of the traces after her sudden death, makes gruesome reading...

...Nor did he believe in some of his commitments...

...It was the same story with Profiles in Courage, which began as a "disorganized, somewhat incoherent melange from secondary sources," and which was turned by Theodore Sorensen and a team of academic historians and professional writers into a readable book...

...Jack shared his father's reverence for the power that money brings, and the need to hang on to an unearned fortune made him a fierce anti-Communist...

...It was Joe Sr., however, who saw that to get national power—if not for himself, then for his sons —it was necessary to amass an enormous fortune...

...Jack's own platform did not amount to much...

...At one time he was on friendly termswith Richard Nixon...

...killed in the war, Jack became the crown prince and President-designate...

...We have long known that, despite much conspiracy theory, his murder was purposeless and inconsequential...

...To get Jack into the Senate, Joe diverted one rival into the governorship race by donating a large campaign contribution, gave another to Adlai Stevenson to buy his endorsement, and loaned the editor of the Boston Post half a million to secure its support...

...indeed, in some ways the existence of the all-powerful media actually abets the process of deception...

...What most people will fmd rather more shocking is the casual heartlessness with which Jack treated all the women with whom he had dealings, including his wife...

...He seems to have been incapable of any kind of deep emotion...

...13y the time Jack was in the race for the Democratic nomination, then the White House, he was—or rather his people were—developing certain themes, especially the stress on youth, brains, and glamour (cortisone treatment had given him a chunkier, more handsome appearance...

...FBI wiretaps and documents show that Mafia money went to pay off key election officials, including local sheriffs, who were handed a total of $50,000 to get out the Kennedy vote by any means...

...Did Jack, or for that matter his even more competitive-minded brother Bobby, who now played an increasing role in the campaigns, have any political convictions...

...But Jack never quite had his father's relish for money, power, and corruption...

...Jack eventually found this treatment intolerably painful...

...As it was, Jack's record as President was patchy...

...He set up trust funds of $10 million apiece for his children and squirreled away vast sums for a variety of other purposes, chiefly for buying people, whether politicians, newspaper publishers, or cardinals...

...So Joe created one of the biggest cash piles of the century through banking (or perhaps one should call it money-lending), shipbuilding, Hollywood, stock jobbing, and bootleg liquor, among many other activities...

...Oddly enough, the man who got it right at the time was that urbane British prime minister Harold Macmillan...

...As Reeves shows, he was mean...

...The Kennedy family's system of ethics, or rather of anti-ethics, was exceptionally pervasive and it is important to note the ways in which Jack followed it, and also the few instances in which he diverged from it...

...It is impossible not to conclude from Reeves's account that Jack's presidency might well have ended in a grave public scandal rather than assassination, and that his deteriorating health and growing drug dependence could have ruled out a second term...

...Opponents found they could not get a mention, or even buy space, in papers whose publishers owed Joe a favor...

...He left the Cuban problem as he found it, unresolved, and the Vietnam quagmire much deeper...

...Whereas he remained, in important respects, incorrigibly BostonIrish—he had absolutely no sense of noblesse oblige—she was upper-class...

...Having few convictions of any kind and virtuallyno program, he reacted to, rather than shaped, events...

...One can't help feeling that old Joe was actually a more interesting personality than his son—certainly a more powerful one—and one would welcome a full exploration of his business career and a detailed account of exactly what happened to his money, during his lifetime and since...

...By 1958 it had sold nearly 125,000 copies, and, after intense lobbying by Joe, Krock, and other Kennedy satraps, it won Jack the Pulitzer Prize for biography...

...The truth is, President Kennedy had no moral character, no real convictions, and no purpose other than the pursuit of power and pleasure...

...As Tip O'Neill later put it, "They were simply buying votes, a few at a time, and fifty bucks was a lot of money...

...The young man acquiesced, and gradually his competitive spirit, strong but hitherto devoted to games, was aroused...

...The Kennedy phenomenon is indeed a devastating indictment of the American media's willingness to protect a favorite son and to conceal the truth from the public...

...As Tip O'Neill put it, "Looking back on his Congressional campaign, and on his later campaigns for the Senate and then for the presidency, I'd have to say that [Jack] was only nominally a Democrat...

...One was Jack's health...

...The so-called New Frontier package had virtually nothing in it...

...Throughout his life, he lied fluently and effortlessly, or encouraged others to lie on his behalf...

...Known to his celebrity clients as "Dr...

...Old Joe pursued women ruthlessly all his life, not hesitating to steal—or rather, use—his sons' girlfriends if he THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 35 could: co-ownership of women by different generations seems to be a feature of Kennedy sex life...

...His conduct was reckless as well as unconscionable...

...While he was rich, she was penniless, and, once married, she went on regular spending orgies, which of course continued after she became Mrs...

...From the start, he was taught by his father that, freely laced with money, bluff—outright mendacity if need be—could solve all problems...

...Reeves lists many occasions on which material hostile to Jack Kennedy was altered or suppressed...

...F-- the farmers after November...

...Most of Jack's affairs, however, were brief, often lasting a matter of minutes, and conducted with whoever was available: girls without even first names, stewardesses, secretaries, campaign workers, prostitutes if need be...

...With the peace, Joe set about making Jack first a congressman, then a senator, then President...

...As for the actual presidential campaign against Nixon, it is impossible now to decide whether Jack won the White House honestly...

...To some extent, Jack's sexual antics and his Mafia links made him the prisoner of J. Edgar Hoover...

...Thomas C. Reeves, a onetime believer in the Kennedy mythology, has come to see the real Kennedy by closely studying the published evidence...

...Reeves is unable to discern any overriding pattern in his presidency, though he detects a certain growth in stature as it proceeded...

...Being a kind of royalty, he never carried money and would borrow it, if necessary, from friends, whom he rarely repaid...

...It quickly developed into an entire political party, with its own people, its own approach, and its own strategies...

...The money used for outright bribes came partly from the Kennedy coffers and partly from the Mafia, following a secret meeting between Jack and Sam Giancana, the Chicago godfather...

...Indeed, except as subjects for a public relations exercise, the two had virtually nothing in common...

...she was a culture snob with, on the whole, excellent taste...

...In view of what we know, it is amazing that Jack Kennedy's heroic reputation should have endured as long as it did—throughout the sixties and well into the seventies, in some respects into the eighties...

...Feel-good," because of his willingness to inject amphetamines laced with steroids, animal cells, and other goodies, Jacobson started to shoot powerful drugs into Jack, once, twice, or even three times a week...

...It was not that he was extravagant: quite the contrary...

...Both his grandfathers were unscrupulous ward-heeling Boston politicians who well understood the connection between political power and money, though they made their piles in different ways, one through insurance, the other in the liquor trade...

...That meant breaking out of the narrow Boston ambit and moving to New York...

...As he put it, ruefully: "I guess Dad has decided he's going to be the ventriloquist, so that leaves me the role of dummy...

...Money did not interest him and he never troubled to learn anything about it...

...In acquiring clothes and shoes she was almost in the Imelda Marcos league...

...made the father anxious for his second son's safety, so he was promptly plucked out of the Navy by the same means he got into it—influence...

...When unofficial checks of Cook ballots convinced the Republicans they had been robbed, Daley turned down an official recount...

...In charge of a PT boat, Jack allowed it to be rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer...

...But essentially he was a half-ambitious, half-reluctant, dutiful son-and-heir following the masterful demands of his father to get to the top by any means available...

...He did not always trouble to conceal what he was doing...

...Naturally, he knew of the dishonesty and lies that had made him a war hero and a literary celebrity...

...The Kennedy family machine, still rich and powerful even today, proved itself ready to twist arms, and if necessary break them, in order to sustain the mythology...

...His father used the full force of his fortune to break the Hubert Humphrey competition in the West Virginia primary...

...Her other yen was for endless repapering of rooms, which caused particular anguish, to Jack, who hated domestic change, especially when he had to pay for it...

...It is not always clear to what extent he shared in or was even aware of his father's malpractices...

...Joe had employed his Hollywood power to get himself actresses and starlets, and had even possessed the redoubtable Gloria Swanson until she discovered he was buying her presents with her own money...

...Onassis...

...Maximum use was made of Jack's war career in all his campaigns...

...He was inexperienced and ignorant, sometimes weak and indecisive, often ruthless, even vicious, willing to authorize murder and other illegalities, and to use the formidable powers at his command for unlawful acts of realpolitik...

...Cardinal Cushing later admitted that he and Joe had decided which Protestant ministers were to receive "contributions" of $100 to $500 to play down the religious issue...

...Indeed, the one respect in which he followed his father not merely dutifully but with real enthusiasm was in the seduction and exploitation of women...

...In view of Jack's health, all Joe's skill at manipulation was needed to get him into the Navy, secure him an immediate commission, and advance him in the service, especially since, while a young officer working in naval intelligence, he was spotted by the FBI having an affair with a Danish woman suspected of being a Nazi agent...

...The Mafia had a hand in the vote-rigging, too...

...In 1940 his thesis was written for him by a number of people, including Arthur Krock of the New York Times, and Joe's personal speechwriter, who described it in its original state as "a very sloppy job, mostly magazine and newspaper clippings stuck together...

...They included more or less outright bribery: in Jack's first House race, large families were given $50 in cash "to help out at the polls...

...As Reeves puts it, "No national figure has ever so consistently and unashamedly used others to manufacture a personal reputation as a great thinker and scholar...

...After his first visit to the newly elected President, he was asked what it was like in Kennedy's Washington...

...T hese attitudes were first formed by 1 President Kennedy's maternal and paternal grandfathers, but they were honed to a kind of diabolical perfection by his appalling father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who bought an ambassadorship from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then set himself the task of making his eldest son President...

...The willingness, then and later, of intellectuals and academics of high reputation to participate in the Kennedy con-trick is depressing...

...Jackie, on her return, was liable to find strange undergarments under the pillows...

...He fornicated during the 1960 Democratic convention, throughout the campaign, and even on the night of his inauguration, after Jackie had gone to bed...

...When Joseph Jr...

...His instincts put him in the same camp as Senator Joe McCarthy...

...She even gave it the name...

...Later he learned to make liberal noises on some issues...

...Reeves lists numerous ways in which Joe made his money work...

...Jack, in turn, used his political glamour to secure trophies from the movies, including Gene Tierney and Marilyn Monroe, the latter first shared with, then passed on to, Bobby...

...The "missile gap" did not exist, as Jack and his campaign people knew perfectly well...

...But getting him into the House and Senate took enormous sums of money, much of it spent openly but the rest doled out furtively by his father...

...After presenting his farm policy to an audience in South Dakota, he said to his aides: "Well, that's over...

...He became his own man only at the end of his first year as President, when the old monster was disabled by a stroke...