JFK’s Last Hundred Days
By Thurston Clarke
New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2013
448 pp. $30
On Friday, November 22, 1963, I was three, and napping in my family’s home on St. Margaret’s Bay Road in Halifax, when at about 3 p.m. (1 p.m. in Dallas, Texas), I was awakened by an adult neighbour running up the road, weeping, and screaming, probably, “The President’s been shot.”
Fifty years after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Thurston Clarke’s new bio of the 35th U.S. President, JFK’s Last Hundred Days (Penguin Press, $30), seeks to explain just what it was about the man that helped make his death “the first time many children saw an adult cry” and why it is that “JFK” remains iconic globally. Indeed, Clarke opines that the “survival” of Kennedy’s memory is proof of his “greatness.”
He has a point: Presidents Garfield and McKinley perished by assassination in 1881 and 1901 respectively, but are hardly remembered, even though McKinley won the 1898 Spanish-American War. President Lincoln is certainly great, but he waged the U.S. Civil War successfully, before being shot and killed in 1865.
So why or how is JFK “great”? Clarke says the answer lies in the achievements of—and plans set in motion—during the last 14 weeks of Kennedy’s life. To document—as the subtitle reads—“The Transformation of the Man and the Emergence of a Great President,” Clarke adopts the practice of Kennedy portraitist Elaine de Kooning: “to discover the essence of a man who compartmentalized his life, you had to look into all his compartments.” Clarke delves deep into these “compartments” and finds vivid contradictions. His JFK combines “courage and mendacity, generosity and sudden rages, idealism and cunning,” so that he is, in the end, “a very complicated yet appealing human being.” Complexities abound. In mid-August, 1963, the Democrat Kennedy appoints Republican Henry Cabot Lodge as his ambassador to South Vietnam. He expects that this appointment will provide him with political cover if he withdraws US advisors from Vietnam as he is considering.
However, Lodge aids and abets—and JFK tacitly approves—a coup against South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem that results in his assassination, just 20 days before the US president’s own murder. Though Clarke marshals evidence that JFK did plan to pull US forces from Vietnam, it is curious that Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary to both JFK and his successor President Johnson, escalated the war drastically, 1965-68, in the process, likely slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, in napalm and bullets.
McNamara is quoted as saying, on October 2, 1963, “we need a way to get out of Vietnam.” Yet, he shortly ramps up the US bombing runs to war-crime status. Maybe the rationale for JFK’s Machiavellian policies is that he was “high-minded in public and pragmatic in private.” So, he signed an atomic bomb atmospheric test-ban treaty with the USSR, while pursuing secret efforts both to subvert Cuba and engage Fidel Castro in détente.
In personality, too, JFK proved two-faced: all photogenic charisma on the hustings, but a reckless philanderer behind closed doors. His rhetoric echoed Winston Churchill, but his life mirrored Lord Melbourne, a Brit statesman, “known for his hedonism, intellect, and aristocratic style.” JFK was courageous: He proposed “the most radical civil rights [i.e. black equality] legislation since the [US] Civil War, risking his reputation, presidency, and reelection.” And he was inspirational, thinking up the moon mission, thereby marrying “the power of the presidency to the poetry of the stars.”
When JFK dreams of visiting the scenes of his WWII South Pacific heroism and then travelling to Greece with his wife “administering” to his every wish, he reveals both his romance of triumph and his lust for pleasure. He cut a James Bond figure: Lauding cool gadgets, cold calculation, and chic ladies.
His death did mark promise cut short. Thus, his mourners created “a grief-stricken empire of asphalt, mortar, and brick so extensive” that it could compose “a web of lights” observable from space. Clarke is a thorough scholar and a fine writer. It’s a pity then that US poet Carl Sandburg is both “Sandburg” and “Sandberg” in the same sentence (p. 130).
