Which famous person in history who is idolized, was actually a horrible person?
Lizzie Wasilewska, B.A. Humanities, Charles University in Prague
I have to wonder what people would have thought of this man if his looks had mirrored his moral character.
Historian Richard Reeves wrote:
Kennedy controlled every person who came in contact with him. He was a Brueghel in the sense that he created a world of his own, but instead of squeezing oil paint, he squeezed people to create his own personal world. He was at the center of all he surveyed. He enjoyed using people, and setting them against each other for his own amusement. He lived life as a race against boredom.
Based on this biography, it seems that he took after his father in terms of his perspective on gender. “Dad told all the boys to get laid as often as possible,” he said. And: “I can’t get to sleep unless I’ve had a lay.” And, in a letter to his father: “an awful lot of people were there, three girls to every man, so I did better than usual.” [1]
This didn’t end after marriage. Everyone knows that. But the romanticization of it is something I can’t begin to understand - perhaps because of those quotes.
And perhaps because his “affairs” included, at the age of 45, coercing a teenager into oral sex with other men. [2] From the New Yorker:
Alford, as a teen-ager, was procured and then essentially pimped by the President and his aides. By her account, Kennedy asked her to perform oral sex on an aide while he watched. She did, and their contact continued for more than a year; it ended soon after she turned down a request to “take care” of Ted Kennedy. Maslin does pause to call this “vile,” before going back to rolling her eyes at Alford.
What shouldn’t be as surprising as Maslin presents it is that Mimi didn’t turn to anyone who might have got her out of the situation she was in. Instead, there was a Presidential aide who kept an eye on her and gave her contact information for an illegal abortionist. (She says she didn’t have to use it.)
From Reeves’ quote, you might get the impression that his manipulative nature granted him political talent as a president. Judging by outcomes rather than some vague impression of potential, it did not, despite the fact that he had the highest approval rating of any president.
In only 35 months, he managed to launch the country into chaos.
He blundered through negotiations with the Soviet Union and conveyed a weak image to Khrushchev. Shortly after their meeting at the Vienna Summit, the construction of the Berlin Wall began, and tensions escalated rapidly.
The Bay of Pigs disaster resulted in Cuba releasing captured US-trained Cuban exiles in exchange for $53 million
The Vietnam War (for which the ungainly Johnson is often allotted most of the blame)
The Cuban Missile Crisis
Many of his domestic policies were stagnant, and few were even passed through Congress. Johnson, again, enacted most of the programs that Kennedy had attempted and failed.
His reaction to the Civil Rights movement, with which he is sometimes associated, was decidedly lukewarm and timid. He also condoned Hoover’s wiretap on Martin Luther King Jr.
The wiretapping habit, which wasn’t limited to MLK, revealed a controlling impulse:At his behest in 1961, the Internal Revenue Service set up a "strike force," the Ideological Organizations Project, targeting groups opposing the administration.
In 1962, outraged that American steel manufacturers had raised prices, he ordered wiretaps, IRS audits and dawn FBI raids on steel executives' homes. [3]
His assassination froze him like a bug in amber: all history forgotten and replaced by his iconic images.
Footnotes
[1] JACK BE NIMBLE : A QUESTION OF CHARACTER: A Life of John Kennedy, By Thomas C. Reeves (The Free Press: $24.95; 491 pp.)
[2] Mimi and the President
[3] MISUSE OF THE I.R.S.: THE ABUSE OF POWER |
