Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [74]
JFK was also lecherous. Very lecherous. He once told Harold Macmillan, the courtly prime minister of Great Britain, that he would get migraine headaches if he went three days without a woman. And we’re not talking about the lovely Jackie here, not exclusively. It seems improbable that such a wreck of a man, a man who couldn’t take his shoes and socks off without help, had a string of lovers. But he did.
Somehow the truth about Kennedy stayed out of the public domain. The press was more respectful toward politicians in those days, I guess. Or more afraid of them. Or, possibly, America really needed the fragile glass bubble of Jack and Jackie, that aura of youthful glamour, to remain intact, believable. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I was too busy getting Above Myself, falling in love with a posh girl, ineptly capturing her lovely body in a shadowy barn, to take much notice of what was going on in the real world.
I had, as it happened, only a few more days of ignorance, innocence, left to me.
I digress. I’ve gone off on a tangent again.
Anyway, the fact is — was — that JFK was a very sick man within kissing distance of a career-exploding scandal. It’s likely — no, it’s highly probable — that Nikita Khrushchev knew all of this; the Russians were good at espionage. That may be why, in Vienna, the Russian steamrollered the American. Why Khrushchev lectured, hectored, Kennedy like a bullying schoolmaster humiliating a new boy with a wet patch on his pants.
Later Kennedy would admit that the meeting with Khrushchev was “the roughest thing in my life. He just beat the hell out of me.”
What frightened JFK more than anything was that the Russian leader seemed not to share his dread of nuclear catastrophe. Kennedy had gone to Vienna in the hope that he could persuade the Soviet Union to agree to a ban on the testing of new nuclear weapons. To sign a nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Khrushchev was having none of it. In fact, he told Kennedy in no uncertain terms that Russia intended to continue to build its arsenal and that, in the event of a military conflict with the United States, Russia would not hesitate to fire its missiles. Kennedy came back from Vienna badly rattled, convinced that Khrushchev was “a ruthless barbarian.” Not the kind of guy to put nukes into Cuba as a mere bluff.
In America the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the narrative of our brush with extinction, has been mythicized. Retold as a showdown between Freedom and Tyranny, Light and Dark, Good and Evil.
Kennedy’s generation was the first to have had its imagination shaped by movies. It grew up, experienced its major thrills, in cinemas. And the cinemas showed Westerns. It’s High Noon, and the Bad Guy in the black hat stands in the middle of the street of the frontier town with a gloved hand poised over his holster and calls out the sheriff, who is the Good Guy and wears a white hat. The sheriff is afraid because he is not as quick on the draw as the Bad Guy, but he does not show his fear because he is the chosen representative of the people, their champion. He is the one who stands between them, their desires for peace and prosperity, and the dark anarchy of the Bad Guy, who will abuse their homes and their wives and daughters. And the Good Guy wins, of course. Even though, sometimes, he is mortally wounded in the process.
Kennedy, in the white hat, won the showdown with Khrushchev, in the black hat. (Or maybe that should be red hat.)
At the time, the version of this myth that established itself was the “eyeball-to-eyeball” variant. The man who put this about was Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk. He saw the world’s glimpse into the burning precipice in terms of the game he’d played as a boy in Georgia,