John F Kennedy (JFK) and the freedom of the free world

John F Kennedy (JFK) was the torchbearer of the free world at the height of the Cold War. The New York Times hailed him as someone who “reasserted American leadership of the free world”. When JFK visited the Berlin Wall for the first time on June 23, 1963, he said, “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world.” JFK paused and then added, “Lassen sie nach Berlin kommen!” (“Let them come to Berlin!”) What did freedom mean to JFK? I got a glimpse of it when I read the then New York Times bestseller, “The Dark Side of Camelot,” written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. Some of the claims made in the book are disputed. However, the broad tone is not. Here is what I gathered from the book about what freedom meant to JFK:

• Freedom to manipulate elections: Chapter ten is titled ‘The stolen election’. Hersh argues that JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, contracted with Chicago mafia leader Sam Giancana and got help from the organized crime syndicate to manipulate the election, especially in Illinois and West Virginia. It involved vote fraud and vote buying. Not all historians agree on whether the Kennedys had a deal with organized crime. However, most agree that there was localized vote fraud. But then the fraud might have been there on both the Democratic and Republican sides. And perhaps vote fraud has been a part of the democratic election process from the beginning. In Hersh’s words, “Money bought Joseph P. Kennedy enormous personal freedom, and bought his son the presidency.” My takeaway is that the Kennedys had the means to manipulate the election, and they exercised it.

• Freedom to overthrow and kill foreign leaders and civilians: Hersh and most historians agree that JFK approved and sustained intense covert efforts to remove Fidel Castro from power, including operations that explicitly involved assassination. The first major operation, the Bay of Pigs, was a major disaster. The CIA recruited and trained 1400 Cuban exiles in Florida for attacking and overthrowing Fidel Castro. On April 17, 1961, the CIA-recruited army made an amphibious landing at the Bay of Pigs, on Cuba’s south coast. The expectation was that there would be widespread revolt against the Castro regime. Instead, two days of fierce fighting resulted in 114 deaths, and 1200 from the exile army were captured. Hersh quotes Kennedy saying, “If we have to get rid of these…men, it is much better to dump them in Cuba than in the United States, especially if that is where they want to go.

Another major overthrow operation supported by the JFK government was to outlive not only JFK, but would consume three more US presidents and eight successive military governments in South Vietnam. JFK approved US support for a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu in 1963. Ironically, it was JFK who had strongly armed and supported Diem during the early part of his tenure. American troops in Vietnam went from 900 in 1961 to 16,000 in 1963. They were officially classified as “advisors”, though many were involved in combat-related operations. With US support, Diem was expected to fight against communist-backed opposition; instead, he started fighting Buddhist and other independent political groups. On November 2, 1963, Diem and Nhu were seized by General Minh’s troops in a Roman Catholic church, blindfolded, and executed by gunshots to the back of the head. “Americans are gratified by a sense of joy that they find in Saigon,” the New York Times commented in an editorial on November 4. While the number of people (civilians + military) killed during the coup was small (less than 50), over the years, the Vietnam War would cost the lives of close to 3 million Vietnamese (military + civilians) and over 50,000 US soldiers. 

• Freedom to use women like painkillers: “You know, I get a migraine headache if I don’t get a strange piece of ass every day,” JFK is quoted as saying in the book. Whether true or not, historians agree that JFK was extraordinarily promiscuous and compulsive in his pursuit of women. JFK’s partners included women from the glamour world, such as Marilyn Monroe and Judith Campbell Exner, who was also a friend of Mafia don Sam Giancana. But they also included a nineteen-year-old White House intern (who published her memoir in 2012), and numerous others whose names JFK couldn’t remember. So, he would say, ‘Hello, kid. How are you?’ One of his lovers recalls in the book, “I was just thrilled. Here is this handsome older man. He’s interested in me. But in retrospect, it’s really sad. I was just another girl. There was a compartment for girls, and once you were in the sex compartment, you weren’t a person anymore. I got declassed and depersonalized.”

So, what did freedom mean to JFK? Was it about using money, power, and position to fulfil one’s desires? Was it about changing the world to match your desired image, one in which there is no communism and the US is ruling the world? Perhaps, it was all of this. Daniel Kahneman says in ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, “We can be blind to the obvious, and we can be blind to our blindness.” Whether JFK was blind to his obvious biases, I don’t know. From his actions, he appeared to be a prisoner of his biases, yet he successfully managed his image as a hardworking chief executive and an attentive husband. But then, who is not a prisoner of his biases?