John F. Kennedy: Myths vs Reality

John F. Kennedy was a man of charm, power, and contradictions. Behind the public image of the heroic president lay a figure plagued by pain, haunted by his past, and driven by desire. Dan is joined by esteemed biographer Randy Taraborelli to explore Kennedy's private life, delving into his turbulent marriage to Jackie, the domineering influence of his father, and the family secrets that shaped JFK as a president and as a man. Randy's new book is called JFK: Public, Private, Secret and reveals extraordinary insights into the most formative moments of Kennedy’s life from the people who knew him best. Produced by Mariana Des Forges, Beth Donaldson and edited by Dougal Patmore Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:33Dan Snow?

  Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, JFK, he remains one of the most magnetic and mysterious figures in modern history. He was charming, pragmatic politician, the handsome war hero turned president. He led the nation through some of those dangerous moments of the Cold War. Behind that polished image was a man at war with himself. Behind closed doors, he battled chronic pain. He was haunted by memories of his childhood, by loss, by trauma. He struggled to feel empathy.

• 1:13Dan Snow?

  He had numerous affairs, Hollywood actresses, late house interns and allegedly spies. Yet he claimed that his wife Jackie was the only love of his life. Their marriage was hard and it was painful because of his acknowledged infidelity and yet Jackie remained devoted to him. He was a complicated man, this was a complicated relationship. He was assassinated in November of 1963, over 60 years ago, and there are still so many unanswered questions about his life. The true nature of his marriage, his ties to the mafia, the way that he compartmentalised his emotions and managed to justify his own actions to himself and those closest to him.

• 1:56Dan Snow?

  He remains an enigma and of course, the manner of his death has given rise to even more countless conspiracy theories that have only muddied his story.

• 2:07Dan Snow?

  It's difficult really to come to hard and fast conclusions about JFK. But journalist Randy Taraboli has just written a new biography called JFK: Public, Private, Secret, and he thinks he's come pretty close. He's just done a vast amount of research. He's interviewed people close to JFK, his family, and he's looked in the FBI CIA files. He's spent a lot of time at the Kennedy archive. I mean, he's done a lot of stuff, guys. And he's said to explain the most formative events in Kennedy's life. We're going to step away from some of the big global history that you'll be familiar with, and we're going to look at the personal history of JFK. The events who shaped the politician he became, the president he became, the man he was, before his life was cut short by the assassin's bullets.

• 3:11Dan Snow?

  Randy, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Happy to be here.

• 3:16Dan Snow?

  Give me a sense of the world, the culture, the social community that JFK is born into in 1917.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  It was a very different world. He's one of nine children born to Joe and Rose Kennedy, an affluent family. JFK said it best himself in an interview that he gave that you had no fear at that time. There was a sense of peace that Americans and the world basically never felt again. Because after World War I, then you knew that II was possible. And after II, you never knew what was going to happen after that. It was as if all bets were off after the first two world wars. Prior to those wars, there was just a different culture and there was a different sense of, I think maybe optimism that maybe we never had again.

• 4:09Dan Snow?

  And in terms of his immediate family, I mean, are there trips to Paris? Are there ski trips up country? Like, what does that cultural, what do his surroundings look like?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  They bought a huge house in Hyannis Port, which became the central hub of all Kennedy activity in decades to come. But in the beginning, it was just their big giant home on the beach. They had money. Later on, Joe Kennedy gave each of his children a million dollars, just as sort of mad money to keep in the bank in case he ever needed it. And back then, a million dollars was worth a lot more than you can imagine. I mean, probably close to maybe $50 million today, maybe even $100 million, because we're talking way back. And he just gave it to them. I mean, they didn't want for anything. And yeah, there were trips to Europe and they

• 4:59Speaker 01

  lived a good, fast and sort of wonderful life all the way up until the time of the war.

• 5:07Dan Snow?

  Were they Democrats?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  They were Democrats, yeah.

• 5:11Dan Snow?

  And what did that mean? I mean, was it because the Democratic Party's changed quite a lot in the intervening 100 years?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Back then, it wasn't as it is today, I guess, in a lot of respects. But one thing that I think was definitely true is JFK said, you know, that as a child, he and his family just believed that every man had an opportunity to be successful. And I think that's easy to say when you're rich, right? But I think that there was a core value there of working hard for what you want to achieve. And certainly, we saw later on in JFK's life and times that he was, while he may have been spoiled in many ways in his family in terms of maids and butlers and that kind of nonsense, he was also a man of great purpose. And he was

• 5:58Speaker 01

  somebody who wanted to define himself as a contributor to society. He always wanted to be a public servant. And I think that that goes all the way back to the influence of his father on not just Jack, but also on his older brother, both of whom Joe Kennedy wanted very strongly to become public servants in government. So I guess my point is that there was always a sense in the Kennedy family that service mattered. And that even though we have all of this money and you guys are spoiled beyond belief, I, meaning Joe Kennedy, still expect you to do something with your lives other than sit on

• 6:41Speaker 01

  your butts and collect the interest on the million dollars I just handed over to you. And I really think that Kennedy did a lot that he didn't have to do because he could have skirted a lot of these responsibilities. And I'm speaking particularly of enlisting in the military, something he certainly didn't have to do. But he really insisted on doing it because it was part of the soul of the man who wanted to contribute.

• 7:10Dan Snow?

  You mentioned his dad. He was very ambitious for this because he was a senior public servant, he's an right, as you say, he'd become ambassador to the UK and he'd hold important jobs within the US as well, US government. Our JFK's older brother, Young Joe, was the blue eyed boy, like obviously supremely talented, destined for great things. Two other kids would go on to become senators and hold other positions in public life. He obviously, he laid it on pretty thick. I mean, was it too much sometimes? Was there a sense that he was overly ambitious? Was he trying to live out his own frustrated dreams to his kids, do you think? How did that all work?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Well, it really depends. You know, it's a long story and at different points along the way, he had different motivations. It's not easy to paint Joe Kennedy with a wide brush stroke because there were different influences and different impulses along the way. But certainly, you're right, he was an ambassador in Great Britain and was ultimately, you know, relieved of that post when it appeared that he was sympathetic to Hitler. That's kind of up to interpretation. I've never quite bought that. I think that's an easy sort of place to go. But my research, and I spent a lot of time on this, Joe Kennedy

• 8:27Speaker 01

  really did not want America to go to war. And that was interpreted as being

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Sympathetic to the other side, right? When actually, my interpretation of it is a little bit more simple. He felt like we should not go to war and he was trying to find ways for that to not happen. He definitely didn't want his sons to be in jeopardy. So it was personal for him as well as political. But it cost him his position overseas. And that then began a series of problems for him in his personal life that were never rectified. And by that, I am referring to his wife, Rose,

• 9:15Speaker 01

  who had so loved her time in England, was so cut out for it and felt so strongly that Joe would be able to parlay that position into perhaps a presidential run at some point. And she sort of fancied herself as a possible first lady. She had a lot of dreams and ambitions. She had defined herself as much more than just a mom. She wanted to do a lot and she thought she would have that opportunity. And when he was fired and they had to come back to America in shame, she felt, and it's funny because I'm just reading her diary right now.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  She says, "He had no idea of how much it cost me for that to have happened." "He had no idea of how much, all the dreams that I had," Rose said. "All the things that I wanted to do, all the things I wanted him to do. He ruined it all." She completely blamed him. And on the heels of this occurring, their daughter, Rosemary, she had like very strong intellectual disabilities and they didn't know what to do about them. Today, of course, it would be handled very differently. He made a decision at this exact same time when they just got back from being overseas.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  He made a decision to have her institutionalized without telling Rose or the rest of the family. Basically, he decided that she should have a brain surgery called a lobotomy. And he consulted doctors and he actually did his due diligence. It wasn't like he just made this decision overnight. But he did make the decision unilaterally. And it went very badly, as we all know today. And she ended up completely incapacitated. And he was so filled with shame and regret. He could not go to his wife because he was already seen by her as such a loser. She already had such a dim view of him. For him to now go back to her and say, I just did this terrible thing to our daughter. I'm sorry to have to tell you. He just could not do it.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  He was just too proud and he could not bring himself to do it. And much to his great detriment emotionally and in every way. He kept it from Rose and the rest of the family, what had happened to Rosemary. And he just sort of insisted that she be erased from the family. And what I think is also astonishing is that Rose went along with it. Like you would think the mother would say, wait a second, what happened to our daughter? Right? You would think the mom would insist that I need answers. And you would think that the family would insist it as well. You wouldn't imagine that all the siblings would go along with the fact that this girl just suddenly disappeared.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  But I think that it speaks to the culture of the family. And the culture being that the father knew best and that he was the one who handled everything and you did not defy him. I think that it speaks to that culture that they all went along with this. And it would be years before they would question it, even Rose.

• 12:23Dan Snow?

  Extraordinary story. JFK and his older brother both got to Harvard, both excel, both study in London, I think. So it is the ideal apprenticeship for an elite young aspiring politician. The war, though, comes as, I guess, a gigantic interruption in those plans. And JFK ends up serving. Was that against his father's wishes?

• 12:46Speaker 01

  It really was. JFK wanted to serve. He was determined to serve his country. Joe Kennedy got him a desk job in Washington. The reason being that JFK had all sorts of medical issues. He was sick from the time he was three years old, when he got scarlet fever. And then he remained sick for his entire life with one thing after another, Addison's disease and all sorts of back issues and all kinds of problems. I mean, the man was very, very ill. And so the father, with good reason, did not want him to serve. And plus, they didn't think he would ever pass the medical exam anyway. So the father arranged for him to get a job in Washington.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  But then JFK got involved with a woman, and her name was Inga Arvid. And it was his first love, and he was 24 years old. And she was this knockout beauty who was older than he was. And the rumor around her was that she was a girlfriend of Hitler's, which was preposterous. In fact, she had interviewed Hitler as a journalist prior to him becoming the Hitler that we all grew to know and hate. Back before the Holocaust, when he was more a personality in Germany that was intriguing, not when he was Hitler as we've come to know him. And she did do a couple of interviews with him, but that was the extent of it.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  However, at that time, you couldn't even have even the broadest association with Hitler, even the most tangential association with Hitler. At that time, that was the kiss of death, as it was for her. I interviewed her son, and Joe Kennedy did not want his son JFK to have anything to do with this woman, even though JFK was completely obsessed with her, and it was his first love. And so he arranged to have JFK shipped off to one of the Carolinas so that he could put distance between Jack and Inga. And it did do that. It created distance between them, obviously. But what it also did was that while JFK was down there, he got the idea that he wanted

• 14:52Speaker 01

  to be in real combat. And so he pulled some strings and managed to figure out a way to actually serve in real combat, which is how he ended up on PT 109. So it's kind of ironic, you know, that the reason for that was because Joe Kennedy was trying to get him away from this woman. And if he had just let that go, perhaps JFK would not have ended up on PT 109, which is where he became a hero, but ultimately where he almost died as well. But I say all that to say that Kennedy wanted more than anything to see real battle. And boy, did he ever.

• 15:28Dan Snow?

  Just in case people don't know that epic story really of how he was in that small patrol boat, so small fast boat in the South Pacific, which actually, sometimes it's not super glamorous. If you want to make your name as a naval officer, you want to be serving on aircraft carriers and battleships near the admiral. But actually, in terms of building your media brand, your platform, it turned out to be the best possible thing that could happen to him. But explain that moment that captured the nation's imagination.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  He was on PT 109 and there was a Japanese destroyer that came right at them and hit them, hit him and his crew square in the middle, split the boat in half. And it resulted in, you know, huge balls of fire and all the men ending up in the sea, a couple of them dying. It was a real disaster. And JFK was a skipper and he was responsible for these guys. And he had to get them to safety. And so they all got on makeshift rafts made from boards and wood from the boat that had been destroyed. And JFK dragged one of these

• 16:32Speaker 01

  guys by the straps of his life preserver. JFK had these straps in his teeth, dragging this guy and swimming for miles to an island where they finally landed. And basically he saved his crew because they really didn't know what they were going to do out there. I mean, you can imagine it's, you know, the black of night and you're in the ocean and... Emily don't know how he did it, but he did do it. And he suffered a lot of injuries that continued to haunt him for the rest of his life as a result of that, but he was a legitimate war hero.

• 17:08Dan Snow?

  Randy, it's a strange thing with JFK is that on the one hand, people think of him as the most vigorous of presidents. On the other hand, you just look at his health, injured, playing football at Harvard, got injured, back problems for the rest of his life, war injuries. And then, as you've already referred to, these illnesses, this extraordinary sequence of diseases. And how do we square that circle? How do you see him as, say, after the war, as a younger man? Would he have walked in the room and been bursting with energy? Or was he seriously restricted even at that point?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  He was such an interesting person because he could have gone either way. This is a guy who was so sick and had so many problems, he could have just spent his life in a leisurely fashion and taken his medication and been on his crutches and just lived at the beach and just had a, you know, I don't want to say a nice life. He would have been ill and sick and problematic, but he wouldn't have been challenged. Right? He insisted on challenging himself despite all of these obvious problems. So much so that people that he would meet along the way, such as Jackie Kennedy's mom, would be shocked, you know, that Jackie's mom is quoted in the book as saying, you know, you're too young to be this old. Right?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  You're too young to be this old. Nobody could understand how he was able to function. Even Bobby Kennedy, his brother was like, I don't even know how he does it. When he was a senator, he would go down on crutches and he had a terrible back operation right after he and Jackie married and he almost died. But you would think that that would have been enough to force him into exile. Instead, he used that time to at least co-write the book Profiles in Courage. And I say co-write because a lot of people question if he actually did the actual finished version of that. But I saw his notes at the Kennedy Library and man, there's a lot of them. I mean, the guy wrote this thing out in a long hand and you can't even read a single word.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  I mean, I've never seen penmanship like this before, but he devoted himself to Profiles in Courage while he was laid up in bed. With a back operation that was so debilitating that they called a priest to give him last rites two times. So my point is that the spirit of JFK was such that he did not care how sick he was, he was still going to live his life. And not only that, but I think because he was so sick all the time, he had decided somewhere along the line that he needed to squeeze in as much as he could, as quickly as he could. And so for him, excess was never enough. And

• 19:46Speaker 01

  that was not only to his advantage, but also to his detriment. Because in his personal life, excess was never enough, which partly explains all the women. It's as if he was trying to just get as much living in as he could, because he was very, very sure he was not going to make it to 50. And very surprised when he made it to 40. So he had this fatalist approach to life, where he just believed that I'm not going to be here very much longer, so I need to do as much as I can do as quickly as I can do it. And he did that, not only politically, from being a congressman, to a senator, to a president, but also in his personal life.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  More on JFK up this, folks.

• 20:39Dan Snow?

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• 21:22Dan Snow?

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• 21:50Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail. But suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 22:34Speaker 02

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• 23:05Speaker 03

  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned, but Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:45Dan Snow?

  Well, let's talk about squeezing everything. In late twenties, he runs for the US House. It sounds like his dad did a lot of arm twisting and he, well, did lots of things. He encouraged an incumbent to retire, spend more time with his family so that JFK could have the seat. But also, he talked to journalists, he managed the ad campaign. I mean, he kind of creates his son, I guess, in terms of his public perception. And six years later, in his mid-thirties, he's in the Senate as well, same kind of thing. Financed, supported by, well, mum, dad, sisters, brothers. Robert, his brother, emerging as campaign manager. It's a family affair.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  It is, you know, and what's interesting to me is that JFK did not start out as being cut out for any of it. Joe was cut out for the other brother, but then Joe was killed in the war. And when he was killed in the war, all of the emphasis for that fell on Jack. Joe was the kind of man who could give a great speech. Joe was the kind of guy who just was instantly electric. He had the charisma, he had the style. Jack always felt like he was less than Joe, and in many ways, he was. His early speeches were terrible. I mean, they really had to work with this kid to turn him into a politician.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  And there were many times when JFK felt like he was in his brother's shadow and that he was never going to amount to what his brother could have amounted to had he not been killed in the war. And he often felt like his dad was very disappointed that it was he who was the focus of all this attention as opposed to Joe. So there was always this sort of JFK felt like disappointment being registered by his father that he wasn't instantly presidential, right? It took time and energy and work for JFK to become the JFK that we all came to know and love by the time we really got to know him, which wasn't until he was a senator.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Joe Kennedy, he pulled all kinds of strings and did all kinds of things to get his son into positions of power and spent a lot of money doing it as well.

• 25:55Dan Snow?

  They sent out the copy of this article talking about his experiences in the Pacific and his hair, and they mass mailed it to like all the potential constituents, right? All the voters in that area.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Well, of course, you're going to use the fact that the guy is a war hero, right? I mean, it's like, it would have been a surprise if they hadn't done that. He was a legitimate war hero. So when it came time for him to run for Congress, I mean, they were going to milk it for all it was worth. And obviously it worked. He also had a really good platform. The thing I think that really impacted people when it came to Jack Kennedy was that he was able to do publicly with that which he could not do personally. And this was the real dichotomy of JFK, is that publicly, as a man in government, he was able to show empathy.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  And his empathy was very transparent and readable to the masses. But personally, he had no empathy whatsoever. Personally, he could not figure out how to feel anything. And he felt stuck in himself personally. He felt like he was always trying to be a better person, but couldn't figure out how to do it. Professionally, he felt a lot for people who were impoverished and for the underdog and for Americans. And he had strong feelings when it came to poverty and later on civil rights.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Personally, though, he wasn't able to muster any of that. I think a lot of it had to do with the sister, Rosie, who had been institutionalized. And each member of the family built a wall so that they just would not feel anything about her, the sister that they all had loved very much. Who was now gone from them and they weren't even allowed to cry about it. And I think that when you're raised that way, you become an adult who is then completely cut off from your emotions. And unfortunately, this was Jackie Bouvier had to deal with in a marriage to this man

• 28:09Speaker 01

  who felt nothing about anything, right? And she then would spend the entire 10 years of their marriage trying to figure out what to do about this and why this man was the way that he was.

• 28:26Dan Snow?

  Wow, yeah. So we should say he met Jackie Bouvier in the sort of early 50s as his political star was rising. We've referred to one or two of them, but he had lots of girlfriends. We can't get into too much psychology here, but serial womanizing, if you want to call it that, or promiscuity, whatever, is that part of, do you think him trying to feel, him exploring that side of himself?

• 28:46Speaker 01

  I think so. I told my research team when I started this book that the one thing that this book will not be is an alphabetical compendium of all of JFK's girlfriends because they're basically all of the same purpose. There are maybe three or four that actually I felt really mattered to him and had some kind of real influence on him. Inga being one of them, and that was before his marriage. And then another woman, her name is Joan Lundberg, who he met when he was a senator and she was living in California and she was someone who became very, very important in his life because he met her at a time when he was completely ostracized by Jackie's family

• 29:30Speaker 01

  and by his own family because of his behavior when Jackie had a stillbirth in 1956 of a baby that she called Arabella. And JFK did not return home from a cruise to be at her side. And that was when they all began to realize that this guy has some serious problems and we don't know what they are, but he's got no empathy whatsoever. For him to not return to his wife's side in that moment really set off alarm bells, not just on her side of the family, but also on his.

• 30:02Dan Snow?

  So Randy, the experience of having their first pregnancy, their first child was? Was a terrible one for Jackie and Jack.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  It was terrible. The first child experience was bad because JFK was on a cruise that Jackie really didn't want him to go on because she was, you know, very heavily pregnant. He insisted on going and he went and while he was gone, she suffered a stillbirth. And they tried to get JFK back to be at her side. And his position was, there's nothing I can do now. The baby is gone. What can I do? Not realizing and not, as I say, connecting to the fact that he was needed by her. And the only reason he came back was because George Smathers, a friend of JFK, Senator George Smathers,

• 30:53Speaker 01

  who was on that cruise and who I interviewed, told me that he told JFK, if you don't get back to your wife's side, there's not one woman in America who will ever vote for you. And that is what spurred him into action. Like it took that for JFK to say, oh yeah, you know what? I need to get back. It wasn't about Jackie. It was about the politics of it all, you know? And then when he got back, it was kind of cold and disconnected and dispassionate. And that's when Jackie's mom was so upset with him, Janet Auchanclawes, that she wouldn't even allow him to stay in the main house with them. She put him up in the servants quarters over the garage, right?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  And he was a senator at that time. You can imagine Senator JFK sleeping in the servants quarters over the garage because his mother-in-law won't allow him to sleep in the house with her and the family. That's how upset she was. And in the midst of all that is when he went to Los Angeles and he met Joan Lundberg, who is this woman he then began to have an affair with, who acted as sort of a therapist to try to get him through this period of time. But I say all that to say that, yeah, there were many women. And JFK just really was very dismissive of all the women, saying, I only love one woman and that's Jackie. These other women really are inconsequential to me.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  And he said Jackie knows everything about everything. I have no secrets from Jackie. And I have to tell you that. She probably would have preferred to be in the dark about a lot of it. Where Joan is concerned, Jackie is quoted as saying, he didn't have to lie to me about Joan. I was already lying to myself about Joan. So she was well aware of Joan as well and trying to find a way forward in her marriage to JFK.

• 32:41Dan Snow?

  His affairs are famous. How did that affect their marriage? Did Jackie knew about these affairs? How did she cope?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  It was a process for her because she started the process with the thinking, this does not happen to me. This is a thing that happens to other women in their marriages. This does not happen to me. And eventually it morphed into, well, this does happen to me, but only because I allow it. And getting from point A to point B was not easy for her, but she loved him. And even though her mom really wanted her to divorce him after Arabella, after the baby who died, who he did not return for. The mom wanted Jackie to divorce him.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  And they actually went about the business of finding out what his assets were. I mean, they were getting ready to divorce him at that point. This is 1956. But ultimately Jackie made a deal with his father and he gave her a whole big chunk of money to stay in that marriage. And she took it. And then once she did that, then she is kind of stuck. Once she took that money, she was kind of stuck, but she did take it. And I think that one of the reasons she took it was because she felt like she deserved it. She had been putting up with a lot with this guy. And she was like, you know what? I think I deserve it. And she took it. And her family really was against her taking that money because they felt like it was a trap.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  And of course psychologically, I think it was because once she accepted that deal and made that deal with Joe Kennedy, even though she wasn't trapped, she could have gotten out of it if she really wanted to. But psychologically, I think she felt trapped by that deal.

• 34:31Dan Snow?

  The later years of JFK's presidency coming up after this.

• 34:42Speaker 04

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• 35:13Speaker 03

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• 35:52Dan Snow?

  So he runs for president. We now see this as a moment of classic generational cultural change. Just going back to that time, is that how he presented himself? Was he trying to say, I'm a new man, I'm a new president for a new era?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, I mean, when JFK became president, it was called the New Frontier for a reason because prior presidents had been older and Eisenhower was old and bald. You know, statesmen are generally back at that time in the 1950s and 40s up to JFK was elected in 60. They were stuffy and uninteresting and you didn't like run to your TV sets to see these guys, right? And JFK came and he, despite the truth of the matter, he came across as being very vital and very healthy, lots of hair, good-looking, chiseled features, great speaker, beautiful wife.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  She's only in her early 30s, first lady, like 32 years old, gorgeous. He's in his 40s, handsome. They looked so great together and he made great promises. It was a new frontier. He was trying to make inroads in civil rights and he was fighting communism and and doing it all with sort of like this varnish of beauty and glamour. So it was like powerful, but yet it was also glamorous at the same time. No one had ever seen anything like that in government before. Glamour and power. Power, yeah, but not glamour. Mimi Eisenhower, the previous first lady, was certainly not glamorous. Glamour was not really a part of

• 37:33Speaker 01

  the White House experience until Jackie Kennedy. When Jackie and Jack came into office, that was a whole new kind of presidency and Americans really, really, really loved it.

• 37:46Dan Snow?

  We could do a whole podcast, frankly, and it would go for eternity about the presidency, the life and the times of JFK. So I'm continuing on this vein of trying to get perhaps at the man himself, what makes him tick, some of those psychological underpinnings of his presidency. How did he respond to the enormous pressures of being in the White House? You know, we see the aging effect that it's had on so many incumbents famously, but fore and aft pictures of George W. Bush, Barack Obama. Was it distressful back then? At one point, he was flirting with nuclear disaster with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yeah. So how did he respond to that?

• 38:19Speaker 01

  It was stressful. You know, Jackie is quoted in the book, saying something that's very interesting. And she said it in one of her oral histories, "You don't know how to be president until you're president." Like, there is no training for that job. One day, you wake up and you're the leader of the free world and good luck. And unless you've been vice president, like Richard Nixon, who ran against JFK, if you've been vice president, then you've had sort of an inkling at least, right? I mean, you've been in the Oval and you've been in the Situation Room and you see what you're up against if you've been a VP. It's not the same as being president, but at least you have an idea. When you've never had that position and you just come in and one day you're president, that is a big awakening.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  And he had a lot of stressors at that time because, you know, everything at that time was about nuclear war. That was the thing people were concerned about because of Khrushchev and Castro and Cuba being so close to Florida. And I was a kid back then and I remember we used to have air raid drills in school where they would make all the first graders hide under your desk, right? As if that was going to protect you from the effects of an atomic war. We would all hide under our desks and they would turn off the lights and we would all like be waiting for the bomb to drop. That was the psychology back in the 1960s. And this is what JFK was up against.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  People were afraid of nuclear war and of communism. And in his first hundred days in office, he had a very bad moment, which we now know of as the Bay of Pigs, which was an invasion in Cuba that had been formulated under the previous administration in which JFK inherited. And as often happens in presidencies, you inherit the other guy's bad news, right? And then you've got to make the best of it. And this thing went really badly and it went south and people were killed and it was a disaster. But what I love about the story is that JFK took complete and total accountability for this failure. He didn't blame the other guy.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  He didn't say, I had nothing to do with this, you know, this was on the other guy's watch and I just inherited it, which is the truth. Instead, he gave a press conference and said, this is my responsibility. This is my fault. I'm the president. And he fell on his sword. And amazingly enough, his approval rating soared to 85% after that. Because that's what Americans want in a president, is they want somebody to take accountability. And that's when he began to learn the process of accountability at that time. And you see this man grow into not only a leader who takes accountability, but he grows into a husband who also takes accountability for his bad marriage to his wife.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  And him talking to Joan Kennedy, who is his sister-in-law, Ted's wife, and toward the end of his life, telling Joan, "The way I treated Jackie is shameful."

• 41:25Dan Snow?

  So he became a better president and a better husband at the same time?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true. And one of the big moments for him in his life was when Jackie figured out that the reason for this sort of wall, this reason that he was not able to even be present for the stillbirth of their child, was when she learned about Rosemary Kennedy being in the institution. And she and her mom said something so interesting and so true. If JFK was able to let go so easily of the sister that he so loved, then how is he to feel about a baby he did not even know? And that's when they realized they needed to do something about this. And that's when Jackie became determined to find out where Rosemary was

• 42:13Speaker 01

  and to reunite her husband with his sister. Because she realized that the only way he was ever going to get rid of all this wall between the two of them was for her to destroy it by reintroducing himself to her sister. And so she went about the business of trying to figure out where this girl is. And she did. She found her in Wisconsin. And she went to JFK and she said, "I found your sister. She's at St. Coletta's in Wisconsin." And guess what? He knew. He knew where she was. He had found out. He just could not bring himself to visit her. And Jackie said, "Well, then, fine. You're going." And she made him go. And then he began to visit his sister, and it was hard for him.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  But reintroducing himself to his sister changed his entire outlook on life. And he began to feel as a real person. I mean, his biggest problem was that he wasn't able to connect. He began to connect to Jackie and to his family and to his children. And he stopped having the affairs in 1963. And he began to devote himself to his wife. And they were on their way to renewing their wedding vows, which they planned to do in 1964. And when Jackie and her mom Janet Auchenclosch were planning the renewal, which of course would never happen because of the assassination, Janet, the mom, turned to Jackie and she said, after everything that you've been through with this guy,

• 43:42Speaker 01

  all the affairs, all the heartache, she said, you still really love him, don't you? And Jackie's response to that was, yes, I do. But, she said, it's we who made him. It's we who made him, she told her mother. And that was her way of taking accountability for her marriage, for her part, for her allowing all of it to happen, for her allowing all the women in the White House, you know? For her trying to turn a blind eye to it. It was her way of taking responsibility for that. And all of this happened just within months of his death.

• 44:19Dan Snow?

  So he takes his marriage more seriously. Do you think it was the fact that the world almost stumbled into nuclear annihilation? I mean, do you think he started seeing his job, his marriage, his role very differently at that point? Or is that combined with his visits to his sister? Where does that balance out?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  It's all of it, right? A person's life experience is all the things that are happening at the same time, right? It's like when we look at our life experiences, we can't say, well, this is responsible for this, and this is responsible for that, and this is responsible. No, that's not the way life works. Life works is that you're just like trying to navigate all this. And while you're doing so, you're living your life, and you're being duly influenced in one way or the other. So yeah, the Cuban Missile Crisis was, you know, cataclysmic, and he managed to get us through that. And that definitely impacted him and made him want to be a better husband and better father. But at the same time, they lost a child, Patrick. Shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis,

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Jackie gave birth to a boy named Patrick who died two days later. And that really shook JFK. And mind you, it had only been seven or eight years since he didn't even return for the death of Arabella. But now with the death of Patrick, he was barely able to function. And that's how deeply he began to feel in his life. And that also brought him much, much closer to Jackie. And some very bad decisions politically were made during this period of time because he was so distracted by his grief that he kind of stumbled into Vietnam as a result of making some bad decisions.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  When you're living the life of a president, I mean, I'm writing about the 1960s right now. And Lady Bird Johnson says something in her diary that I was just reading right before this interview. And she said that you can't imagine the complications of every single day of being a president unless you are the first lady and you're witnessing it. And she said that every decision that you make affects not just your family, but the entire world. That's why you're called leader of the free world, because you really are. And JFK told something to his stepbrother, Jamie Aucklandclaus. This is Jackie's half-brother. It's hard to keep track of all the halves and the steps. But Jackie's half-brother, Jamie, said that JFK told him, "It is the greatest honor of

• 46:44Speaker 01

  my life to be the president of this country. It's the greatest honor of my life." So, I mean, he took it very, very seriously and he really wanted to do great things. And I think that in his short time in office, a thousand and some days, he really did show himself to be quite a good president.

• 47:04Dan Snow?

  Well, Randy, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much. Please tell us the name of your book.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  The book is JFK: Public, Private, and in Secret. And thank you for the interview. I've enjoyed this. And I gotta tell you, I loved writing this book. It was three of the best years of my life. I missed it when I finished it. I really did. I missed it. I missed those people. And I hope that the reader feels the same way when they finish the book. I hope that they, they kind of miss them.

• 47:30Dan Snow?

  Thanks so much, Randy, for joining me on this episode of Dan's Notes History, exploring the inner world of JFK. It's a great, I loved it. It was a huge subject. It's such a huge subject, we couldn't possibly cover it all in one episode. So we didn't want to leave the story unfinished because of course, everyone knows about the dramatic horrific ending of JFK's life. So we thought we'd release a podcast on Thursday from our archive. We released it a couple of years ago. It gives a moment by moment account of that terrible day. JFK's assassination. We look into the theories and the aftermath and CIA files and all that kind of stuff. So don't forget to hit follow to get the next part of the story on Thursday's episode. Bye bye.

• 48:17Speaker 02

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• 48:50Dan Snow?

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