Does Character Count?

What does our obsession with John F. Kennedy tell us about ourselves? What was it, what is it, about this man that has led tens of millions of people all over the world, even those born after his death, to attach some sort of mythical quality to him?

Kennedy was a very complicated man, but all decent people can agree that what has been learned since his death casts him in a far more negative light than he basked in before and immediately after his death. If Americans knew about him while he was alive what they have learned since his death, they would have been repulsed by him.

But there's a disconnect. It's as if his martyrdom absolved him of his sins, even though the two were entirely unrelated. Kennedy wasn't killed for any political position he ever took. He was killed by a loser looking for fame, the same type of fame Kennedy had so skillfully manipulated.

Since Kennedy's murder was unrelated to his conduct, his murder should not logically change our opinion of his conduct. But we don't run on logic, do we? I'll be the first to acknowledge a sort of irrational reverence for this man in some sense.

Partly this is because I can appreciate what he meant to people. I can appreciate what people thought he was. My adolescent Irish-Catholic mother had a picture of the man above her bed, as did most people she knew. But I can also appreciate how far the perception was from the truth.

The extent of the recklessness and depravity of Kennedy's adulteries, for example, is simply impossible to comprehend. When Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998, it was for things that John Kennedy did daily between breakfast and lunch.

I was opposed to Clinton's impeachment, and I'm not necessarily saying that Kennedy should have been publicly exposed and humiliated for his sins, but consider what they say about the man's character.

Kennedy slept with dozens and dozens of women while president, in the White House as often as anywhere else. Interns, yes, but more. Kennedy was sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, who was perhaps the most famous woman in the country and, how shall we say, one Excedrin tablet short of a full medicine cabinet. The kind of woman who might say anything.

It would be as if Clinton were sleeping with Angelina Jolie. And then Angelina committed suicide. When Monroe committed suicide (it was rather a Michael Jackson "suicide", thought by many to be homicide), one of her last visitors was......Bobby Kennedy. Who was also sleeping with her.

Kennedy was also sleeping with Judith Campbell, who in turn was sleeping with Mafia Godfather Sam Giancana. In addition to attending to their carnal needs, Campbell also arranged communications between President Kennedy and the Godfather. And what were they talking about? Murdering Fidel Castro.

So this would be like Bill Clinton, when he's not sleeping with Angelina Jolie, sleeping with the girlfriend of the Mexican drug cartel leader and asking her to ask her boyfriend to murder the president of Venezuela.

So in addition to sleeping with dozens of women while his wife bore him children and lost one after birth, Kennedy was sleeping with famous and/or dangerous women who could obviously and directly blackmail him and, therefore, the nation itself. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but Monica Lewinsky was no threat to national security. And there weren't dozens of her.

Back to Giancana. What do Kennedy's contacts with the Godfather tell us about his character? It tells us something that relates directly to how his character affected his official duties as president in a way that all the adultery did not. It shows that this man was not bothered with law or morals.

Kennedy had no compunction about hiring Mafioso to murder the head of state of a sovereign nation. "Illegal" or "immoral" were not words that had any impact on him. Perhaps every president acts this way, but Kennedy's actions had near-apocalyptic consequences.

Kennedy's finest hour is regarded as the Cuban Missile Crisis. I share that assessment. The man literally saved the world, from a certain point of view. That's the truth, but it ain't the whole truth. And it's a great example of what people knew about Kennedy when he lived versus what we've learned since.

What caused the Cuban Missile Crisis? Why did the Soviet Union feel compelled to send nuclear warheads to Cuba? Why did Cuba want them? Well, the Soviets and the Cubans knew something at the time that we only learned years after Kennedy's death.

John Kennedy had hired the Mafia to murder Fidel Castro. He had trained thousands of Cuban exiles and armed them to invade Cuba. He had invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. He had authorized terrorist attacks and sabotage in Cuba, burning sugarcane, blowing up ships, killing civilians.

All of these things are true. Does it mean Kennedy didn't perform well during the Crisis? No, but it means that he essentially caused the Crisis. Kennedy's finest hour was based entirely upon a lie and upon direct consequences of his own lack of character.

So was his image as a good husband. And so was his image as a young and healthy man. We now know that Kennedy was perpetually on drugs that were illegal even at the time, namely steroids and amphetamines. He was a sick man, and obviously a tough one for soldiering through as he did.

There is something about his murder, of course, that makes me feel vaguely treasonous for even pointing these things out. Even though he died 16 years before I was born, I do feel a strange sort of bond with him.

But ultimately I'm drawn back to that devastating question: what does it say about us that good looks and television talent seduced us into totally ignoring drastic failures of character? What if Senator McCarthy had been as handsome and as smooth as JFK? We might live in a considerably uglier country today.