AT NOONTIME ON January 20, 1961, forty-three-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy placed his left hand on a frayed Bible chronicling the births and deaths of three generations of Fitzgeralds, his mother’s family. With his right hand raised, the youngest man to be elected president of the United States took the oath of office administered by Chief Justice Earl Warren. After pledging to preserve, protect, and defend the US Constitution, Kennedy shook hands with Warren, new vice president Lyndon Johnson, vanquished rival Richard Nixon, and President Dwight Eisenhower before addressing thousands of Americans who had trudged into the nation’s capital on the tail end of a nasty winter nor’easter that had dumped eight inches of snow on the parade route and dropped temperatures to a windchill of only seven degrees. Most attendees had dressed smartly—bundling up against the bitter cold. But President Kennedy decided against wearing an overcoat or a scarf. Instead, he sported a stylish but simple morning suit in yet another attempt to showcase his strength and youthful vitality. Kennedy’s choice worked for the television cameras, but some standing just feet away from the new president were alarmed by what they saw. General Howard Snyder, White House physician under Eisenhower, noticed that Kennedy was sweating despite not wearing a topcoat in the brutally cold January weather.
“He’s all hopped up,” Snyder confided to his Washington friends. “I hate to think of what might happen to the country if Kennedy is required at three a.m. to make a decision affecting the national security.”1
Serious questions about his health had surfaced during the often-bitter presidential campaign. While traveling across the country to elevate his national profile, Kennedy always brought with him a special black bag that held his “medical support.” So secret were its contents that panic set in when the candidate misplaced it during a campaign swing through Connecticut. Kennedy himself called Connecticut governor Abe Ribicoff to warn him of the gravity of the situation. “There’s a medical bag floating around, and it can’t get in anybody’s hands. You have to find that bag,” he told Ribicoff. “If the wrong people get hold of it, it will be murder.”2
The bag was found and returned to Kennedy without incident. The candidate’s medical condition remained tightly under wraps until he went head-to-head with Lyndon Johnson, then a Texas senator and political opponent, for the Democratic nomination. Two of Johnson’s surrogates, Texas governor John Connolly and India Edwards, former vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, leaked a story to the press that Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease. The Kennedy campaign firmly denounced this rumor, despite its truth. JFK’s doctors countered with a letter falsely describing his health as “excellent” and asserting his fitness to serve as president. Just before the fall election, burglars attempted break-ins at the offices of two of Kennedy’s New York doctors. Fortunately for Kennedy, his advisors had planned for such a scenario and kept his medical records on file under a false name. Before agreeing to join the Kennedy campaign, Harvard-educated historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. asked him point-blank about the rumor that he had Addison’s and was taking regular doses of cortisone to manage the condition. Kennedy said that talk about his health had stemmed from wartime bouts with malaria and that he displayed none of the symptoms associated with Addison’s disease, which included black spots in the mouth and yellowed skin.
“No one who has the real Addison’s disease should run for president, and I do not have it.”3
Kennedy apparently defined Addison’s disease in his own way and successfully managed to dodge and parry questions about his physical ability to serve in the White House. Health posed just one of the formidable obstacles that Kennedy had to overcome to be standing at the east portico of the US Capitol and addressing the world as the nation’s thirty-fifth president.
As a Roman Catholic, Kennedy had to convince fearful voters in the Midwest that he would not take any guidance from the Vatican, while also standing up to political forces in the southern states by running on a strong civil rights platform.
Liberals had also roundly criticized Kennedy for doing nothing to stem the tide of the Red Scare during the early 1950s. Jack Kennedy’s father had been a friend of Senator Joe McCarthy, and younger brother Bobby had served under McCarthy on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations before losing a bid for appointment as staff director in favor of McCarthy’s top henchman, Roy Cohn. But Jack Kennedy had always been indifferent to McCarthy. They did not share the same voting record, and Kennedy had agreed to vote for Joe McCarthy’s censure in 1954, but was then hospitalized for a life-threatening back surgery.
Many vocal Democrats saw Kennedy’s delicate treatment of McCarthy as the same kind of appeasement Joseph Kennedy had recommended as US policy with regard to Adolf Hitler’s Germany in 1940. But Republicans had a different view. Vice President Nixon, the GOP nominee, wanted to paint Kennedy as soft on communism. The Nixon campaign pointed specifically to Kennedy’s comments about Eisenhower’s hard line against the Soviets after the downing of Francis Gary Powers’s U-2.
But in 1960, what Kennedy had going for him was a sense of youthful idealism as well as courage, as defined by Ernest Hemingway—grace under pressure.
The Nobel Prize–winning writer was now among the invited guests waiting to hear President Kennedy usher in a bold new era for American politics. It was an era that would acknowledge the sacrifices and triumphs of those who had stormed the beaches of Normandy and sailed into the deadly waters of the Pacific but not become trapped by history. The new president had even invited the surviving members of his PT-109 crew to witness their skipper’s inauguration. Pappy McMahon was there. He owed Kennedy his life for swimming for hours with Pappy’s charred and broken body on his back. During McMahon’s long and grueling hospitalization with third-degree burns, Kennedy had written a letter to Pappy’s wife, Rose, back home.
“Your husband is alive and well,” Kennedy wrote on August 11, 1943. “He acted in a way that has brought him official commendation—and the respect and affection from the officers and crew with whom he served.”4
Later, on Inauguration Day, McMahon would ride a float modeled after PT-109. It was meant as a surprise for the new commander in chief. Kennedy stood up on the reviewing stand, tipped his silk top hat at his former crew, and gave them the skipper’s signal: “Wind ’em up, rev ’em up, let’s go!” Two men were not on the float that day—those lost under his command: Harold Marney and Andrew Jackson Kirsey.
Kennedy had also penned a letter to Kirksey’s widow, Kloye Kirksey, during the war, telling her that her husband had done a “superb job” and had talked about her and their infant son often and with tremendous pride. The widow wrote back, and the two continued to correspond for several years as Kennedy made sure she received all veterans’ benefits available to her. During the campaign for the presidency, Jack Kennedy and Kloye Kirksey came face-to-face during a stop in Warm Springs, Georgia. Kennedy also met Kirksey’s son, also named Jack. Kennedy asked about the young man’s education and plans for the future. It was a fatherly discussion with a boy who did not have one. Kennedy had just recently learned about the joys of parenthood himself. His daughter, Caroline, was now three years old, and his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, would give birth to a son, John Jr., seventeen days after the election. Caroline’s precocious charm and the arrival of a healthy baby boy helped ease the couple’s pain over past pregnancies. Jackie Kennedy had suffered a miscarriage in 1955 and a year later had given birth to a stillborn daughter they had planned to name Arabella. Two healthy children marked the dawn of a new era for the couple themselves.
Young Caroline told her father that he had beaten Richard Nixon by walking into his bedroom at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port the day after the closest presidential election on record at the time and announcing, “Good morning, Mr. President.”
As a father of two young children and now leader of the free world, JFK evoked hope and progress in his inauguration speech and called upon all American citizens born in the twentieth century—a new generation—to protect human rights while standing together to defend freedom in its hour of maximum danger.
Kennedy’s new political era would focus on the United States’ responsibility to lead a different world, one where mortals held the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.
“To those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request; that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction,” President Kennedy stated during his inaugural address. “We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be deployed.”5
In both the development and delivery of his inaugural address President Kennedy hoped to build a new bridge of cooperation and friendship between the United States and neutral governments of the third world and to show Allied leaders such as Charles de Gaulle of France, Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, and Harold Macmillan of Great Britain that despite his youth, Kennedy would not shrink in his new role. Most importantly, he wanted to show Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev that he was willing to negotiate for peace but would also defend the United States and its allies against armed aggression and any encroachment on freedom.
Khrushchev read the text of President Kennedy’s speech the following morning in Moscow and ordered Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia to reprint it without comment. US ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson had also assured him that President Kennedy would not resume American overflights of the USSR, suspended since May 1960.
Perhaps, thought Khrushchev, the dark days of the Eisenhower administration, the U-2 program, and the Cold War were coming to a close as a new dawn emerged for the world’s two superpowers.