John F. Kennedy’s Sex Life
Bruce Kuklick
Jeannette P. and Roy F. Nichols Professor of History
A number of people have asked me how I can get such an enormous topic into such a small time. And the answer is, I can’t. It’s bait and switch.
The most important thing about Jack Kennedy is he was a very sick guy. He was sick for 25 years, from the time he was a teenager until he died. His illnesses, which were many, were compounded by the fact that he was taking drugs from half a dozen different physicians, all of whom were prescribing without benefit of knowledge of what the other guy was doing. Historians think, actually, that had he not been assassinated, he might not have lived out a second term anyway; or, that if he did, he would have been in a wheelchair.
Now, the result of this prolonged, continuous illness was that Kennedy was a very detached, distant guy, with a very peculiar view of life, different from us. One expression of that detached, distant view was the fact that he treated women like pieces of meat. But it is of minor historical interest. What is of interest is another expression of that view, that in matters of public policy, he was much more dispassionate and impartial and detached than those around him. And that had an extraordinary effect on some of the successes of his policies, mainly, I think, in his foreign policies.
Two examples I’ll close with. First, the Cuban Missile Crisis. If you look at the transcripts we have of that, Kennedy’s vision of what was going on was so much more detached, so much more impartial than those around him, that it led him to navigate a very treacherous series of problems to come out of that crisis without the world being destroyed.
Second and last example concerns Vietnam. I’m not one of those people who think that everything would have been fine had Kennedy lived. But his – the differences between him and his advisors over the advisability of getting into Vietnam are also extraordinary. He’s much more detached, much more concerned with the prudent calculation of interests, much less involved than a normal human being, who was a policymaker, would have been.
So that what I want you to remember is not Kennedy’s sex life, which is only a prurient interest, but rather the way it typifies his detachment from ordinary human affairs, and allowed him to be the sort of politician that he was. Thank you.