Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy Whitehouse by Richard Dallek, is a book that goes under the hood and reveals some interesting facts about JFK and his tenure as president. Robert Dallek is a very accomplished presidential historian. There’s not a lot of really new stuff, but he does pull a lot of threads together to recount Kennedy’s presidency.
We all know that JFK liked the ladies. I knew he had health issues but the book goes into a lot of detail on his medical problems. I had no idea he was as sick as he was. He took a lot of medication, sometimes just to get through a public event. One of the points Dallek makes is that JFK’s health issues never compromised his presidential activity, something that was not true of Woodrow Wilson (at the Versailles Treaty Conference in June of 2019 he was essentially incapacitated by the Spanish Flu and agreed to a terrible treaty that set Germany on the way to Hitler and WW2) or FDR who did not a have a good WW2 settlement conference with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta in 1945, a few weeks before he died.
Like many of my generation, I was smitten with John Kennedy’s charisma. I was living in Bangor, Maine, in November of 1960. I still remember walking to a downtown newsstand to buy the newest <em>Mad Magazine</em> that came out a few days after the election. The cover had a picture of a grinning Alfred E. Neuman with the headline, “Congratulations, Jack!” I was really impressed that the “What Me Worry?” gang got it right until I turned to the back cover which had the same picture and “Congratulations, Dick!” on it. Great move.
Anyway, the book summarizes what was good and not so good about his thousand days in office. He did think that he was going to be a great president who attracted great talent. He had an impressive roster on name-brand advisors, most of whom screwed up a lot of stuff during the first two years of his administration.
— The Bay of Pigs was more of a fiasco than I remembered, with both the military and civilian advisors all for it, with the assumption that even if the landing didn’t go well, JFK would bomb Cuba into submission, something the president and his sane advisors were against. Both Kennedy brothers remained obsessed with getting rid of Castro even after the invasion failed.
— Vietnam was a mess that he inherited, with no reasonable solutions available. Vietnam’s leadership was inept and American observers were toadies to VN President Diem, who was as crooked as he was clueless. Dallek quotes one of the few Kennedy advisors who saw Vietnam as a long, probably unwinnable, fight as saying Robert McNamara was “auto-intoxicated” by his meetings with Vietnamese leadership. In 1963 JFK sent several observers to figure out what was going on. After he read their reports, he wondered if the two groups had visited the same country.
— Fake news. The administration really didn’t like the news coverage of the war. They thought that reporters like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, now recognized as iconic journalists, were hurting the war with fake news. Actually, the reporting was accurate, but so many advisors were in such a self-reinforcing bubble that they thought that the news accounts were indeed wrong.The military back then was crazy. General Curtis LeMay and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were pretty consistent in their approach to international affairs.
— Invade Cuba or, to save American lives, use nuclear weapons to get rid of Castro.
— They were totally against any arms reduction treaty and considered any pull back on nukes giving in to the commies.
— Winning in Southeast Asia was easy - massive American troop levels and lots of bombing. That turned out to be what we did but that didn’t turn out too well.
It’s ironic that back in JFK’s time, the military was a wild card, much like what the movie Dr. Strangelove portrayed. Under President Trump, the military is a moderating influence.
Dallek thinks that JFK would have pulled out of Vietnam after he was reelected but one never knows. The country was unraveling fast during 1964 and 1965 and no president back then wanted to abandon an ally to the communists.
Kennedy had a bad back, colitis and other gastro-intestinal problems, and Addison’s disease, to hit the highlights. He was on all sorts of medications, the mix of which may well have compounded some of his medical issues. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Jackie convinced the president’s doctor to change JFK’s meds because they were making him depressed and not thinking clearly at a bad time.
Dallek wonders if JFK’s health would have held up for a second term or if the womanizing would have become a problem. We’ll never know.
All in all, Camelot’s Court is a good summary of our guy, JFK. It’s relatively short for Bob in the Basement, 433 pages plus another 70 of notes and bibliography.
