Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [4]
Before he came along, politics mostly meant gray men in three-piece suits, indoor types, sexless: Truman, Taft, Dewey, Kefauver, Eisenhower, Nixon. What he did was grip the country, quickening us. From the black-and-white world in which we’d been drifting we suddenly opened our eyes, feeling alive and energized, and saw Technicolor. JFK was wired into our central nervous system and juiced us. He sent us around the planet in the Peace Corps, and then rocketing beyond it to the moon.
Most of all—and, to me, this is what matters above everything else—he saved us from the perilous fate toward which we were headed. All those ICBMs, all those loaded warheads: the Cold War Kennedy inherited was bound for Armageddon. It was just a matter of time—we thought, I thought—until there’d be nuclear war, that “World War III” dreaded in every heart.
If you were a kid you didn’t have to read the newspapers to know this, for, unlike our elders, we were actually living it. Weekly drills sent us crouching under our little varnished wooden desks on command. Then, at one critical moment in the fall of 1962, a lone man, President John F. Kennedy, understood the danger clearly, pushed back against his advisors’ counsel of war and got us through. The hard-liners in Moscow and Washington, their backs up, were ready to fight. The word in the air was escalation. JFK found a way to deliver us.
How’d he do it? What personal capability did he have? What had he learned? What combination of nature and training enabled him to see through the noise and emotions of the Cuban Missile Crisis and allowed him to grasp the root of the matter, to understand what he was up against, and what Nikita Khrushchev, his opposite number, was thinking? How did he know to overrule the experts, the angry generals and the professional Cold Warriors, whose every instinct dictated “Bombs away!”?
It goes without saying that Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy were beautiful. But don’t look at the pictures; they’re a distraction. Jack understood that better than anyone, using them to divert us from his own far more complex reality.
Yet look at them we did. And it’s hard, now, to grasp just how brief that moment was: only seven years from 1956, when we caught the first glimpse, to 1963, when the moment was extinguished.
Whether you’re politically conservative, liberal, or moderate, whatever age you are, you probably have your own responses to and your own questions about Jack Kennedy, still today. And that includes all those questions about his personal life, the ones that linger and disturb.
I began this book wanting to discover how he became that leader who, at a moment of national fear and anger, when emotions were running high, could cut so coldly and clearly to the truth, grasping the nature of the catastrophe to be averted.
Not only has that decisive vision continued to hold me and stir my admiration, it has also fed my fascination with him. So what was it about him? What brought him into the world’s hearts and hopes so vividly, inspiring such fascination, leaving it, mine included, so alive behind him?
Jack himself, also an avid reader of history and the lives of history-makers, once remarked to Ben Bradlee that the chief reason anyone reads biography is to answer the simple question, “What’s he like?”
Having thought about it for so long, I believe I’ve come to recognize, and even unearth, key clues that help explain the greatness and the enigma of Jack Kennedy. They don’t come easily, however. Those glamorous images deflect us from the answers. But if you want to get Jack, you need to look for what they hide.
Among them: He was a dreamer who found his dreams as he read voraciously throughout his boyhood, all alone in one infirmary and hospital bed after another. He