Mark Steyn celebrates what would have been JFK’s 100th birthday by looking at the pre-Camelot JFK’s life:
Jack’s early life was certainly privileged but not idyllic. The family patriarch, Joe, is an easy target: an enthusiastic adulterer at home, and abroad, as US Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, an equally enthusiastic appeaser. His wife, Rose, reacted to his infidelities by retreating into her social life. The distance she put between her and her husband also left her nine children (four of whom she would outlive) beached on the other side of the divide. She regarded them, as one biographer put it, as “a management exercise”, and she believed in mostly hands-off management. Jack was a sickly child who spent months in hospital, but his mother was too far away to visit. Maternal affection was confined to a postcard from Paris, a ship-to-shore telegram from the Queen Mary. For the rest of his life, Kennedy disliked being touched or hugged even in the course of his many fleeting, transient sexual encounters.
Sex was fine. Anything more he found awkward and difficult. He showered up to five times a day. You can do your own analysis; everybody else does. “If he were my son,” declared a master at Choate, “I should take him to a gland specialist.” “He has never eaten enough vegetables,” decided Rose.
Duty is more easily borne when the the world’s eminences are your dinner companions. You meet the seigneurs, and you get to enjoy a little of their droit de, too. A former lover of Prince George, Duke of Kent introduced herself to young Jack as “a member of the British Royal Family by injection”. The line seemed fresh to him, as it might not have a quarter-century later were random showgirls and mob molls running around Vegas and Malibu introducing themselves as members of the Kennedy family by injection. He signed his letters from Harvard, “Stout-hearted Kennedy, despoiler of women.”
On the other hand, not many 24-year-olds get to shoot the breeze with Lord Halifax, British Ambassador in Washington, at the height of the Second World War about where the man he served as prime minister had gone wrong. “Halifax believed,” wrote young Kennedy after their conversation, “that Chamberlain was misled and defeated by his phrases, which he did not really believe in, such as ‘Peace in our time’.” By the time Kennedy got into the phrase-making business, he left it to the professionals to craft all that sing-songy seesawing jingles people seem to think meets the definition of powerful rhetoric: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. Mankind must put an end to cheap applause lines, but let us never fear to invert them formulaically yet portentously.
The JFK before the speechwriters got to him is far more interesting. “We are at a great disadvantage,” Kennedy the gunboat skipper writes from the Pacific. “The Russians could see their country invaded, the Chinese the same. The British were bombed, but we are fighting on some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap… I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing better, but to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to ensure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most men possess.”
