THE KENNEDY AFFAIR(S)
Steinfels, Peter
THE KENNEDY AFFAIR(S) PETER STEINFELS THE blase attitude with which Americans have absorbed the reports of John F. Kennedy's amorous activities has me perplexed. It is true that reports of JFK's...
...Tm still trying to deal with Paul Tillich...
...If we are going to be moved by that, and I believe that even sophisticated citizens were, then perhaps we should have the full story...
...But a (Continued on page 95) Steinfels (Cont...
...Those, however, were meaningful...
...Statistics lie...
...And what do you think...
...I call a theologian instead...
...The question," he replies, "is what do we learn about a man's character from the fact that he goes for women like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield rather than, say, like Lou Andreas-Salome...
...To what extent was he calculating and ruthless...
...I can't help thinking that reports of a few staff concubines may be pertinent to those queries...
...Except possibly a few couples in Iowa...
...Greeley can't be expected to know everything that J. Edgar Hoover knew...
...Much attention to their family affairs, to their ski trips, to what they eat for breakfast, is part of the process in which personality is substituted for policy...
...Yet for a nation which, from the days that Washington's opponents charged him with ruining a washerwoman's daughter, has always held sexual propriety an essential test of its governors' characters, this indifference is curious...
...The lady in question will soon clear up the matter further with a book, no doubt titled JFK and I, Cosa Nostra...
...Word travels fast, however, if people are interested...
...It is further true that much of the media has refrained from following Time magazine's lead in reporting not only the President's involvement with various movie stars but also his more bureaucratized interests, with "Fiddle" and "Faddle," for instance, the Secret Service's code-names for two young women, "assigned no discernible duties," who accompanied Kennedy on his travels...
...Their reaction is instantaneous...
...Is this discretion the sign of maturity...
...An ex-priest, interviewed while he applied a bumper sticker saying "Love God and Do What You Will": "I don't know...
...I am tempted to telephone Andrew Greeley who once proposed that JFK be declared a Doctor of the Church...
...Second, private conduct is revelatory of a person's character...
...but not many Americans believe that...
...I guess I should have known that a poll wouldn't help...
...but when such things happen to be revealed, should we studiously look the other way...
...If that does not satisfy me, I suppose there are two reasons...
...I ask the Typical American Family, found standing outside a nearby McDonald's...
...What do you think 01 hauie and 'Faddle...
...Remember those images of a vigorous JFK on the beach, those glossy multi-page spreads of the Beautiful Family...
...Or of general anesthesia...
...number of judgments about the Kennedy presidency are affected by our view of the man's character...
...We all know that Lloyd George was a great leader as well as a satyr, and Robespierre was a prude...
...Certainly we should not ordinarily pry into the relations between Presidents and their gardeners, or between Presidents and their personal companions...
...Should I be satisfied with the standard liberal view of the matter, namely that Kennedy's amours are private and irrelevant except insofar as one of them may suggest a direct link between the President and the plot to assassinate Castro, or may have provided Hoover with the leverage he needed to carry out his own vendetta against Martin Luther King...
...First, it is a fact that our Presidents' private lives are not private...
...Of course sexual behavior is hard enough to fathom in itself, let alone to relate to those qualities of character thought necessary for statesmanship...
...I know it is risky to write about something on which one cannot claim to have reached a firm opinion, especially when that something involves the personal life of a deceased and popular leader...
...Or the triumph of H. L. Mencken, the dilution of the last drop of Puritan blood in a wash of easy-going wisecracking cosmopolitanism...
...That would be a cheap shot, however...
...Lay off," he says...
...Or if they are, they are letting on that they are not...
...It is true that reports of JFK's meetings with the female companion of two mobsters who contracted with the CIA to bump off Castro have been euphesiized so as to leave open the possibility that the President and the young lady were getting together to discuss Robert Frost...
...When the investigation of Richard Nixon's finances showed that he had evaded paying the social security tax for his gardener, small matter that it was, I thought it revealed something about the man, perhaps because it was such a small matter...
...Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were said to have had extra-marital affairs...
...I object, pointing out that a NORC study has shown that seventy percent of mid- / town Manhattan residents still believe in chastity, especially in regard to sex...
...I ask a philosopher friend who is waiting at a newsstand for the racing form...
...All 4.2 members of the family yawn and slump to the sidewalk sound asleep...
...The question in my mind is whether these relationships were meaningful...
...Did he find more in all that James Bond than simple escapism...
...Statistics," he says...
...A Manhattan editor: "Who can object when everyone in the country is swinging anyway...
...But people are not interested...
...Are we witnessing the final triumph of John Stuart Mill, the acceptance of the liberal doctrine* that a sharp line can, and should, be drawn between private and public conduct...
...Not knowing what to think about this, like a good American I decide to take a poll...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 3
