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Thursday, January 14, 2010

Thanks for Nothing, Ted Sorensen

Here's a belated book review of my most frustrating read of 2009: Ted Sorensen's book Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History.

The book came out in 2008 and it's billed as Sorensen's frank personal memoir of his 11 years as John Kennedy's speechwriter and right-hand advisor.

Sorensen says in the preface that he was still in shock from JFK's assassination when he wrote his 1965 memoir Kennedy, plus Jackie and family were still alive and he didn't want to insult anyone and etc, etc. This time he's going to tell the truth, as well as he can remember it, for history. Great!

(Incidentally, you could call me a Sorensen fan.  I'm certainly a Kennedy fan, and Sorensen had the kind of brainy, working-for-the-good career I have always thought was admirable. )

The first 100 (large-print) pages or so of the book are recollections of Sorensen's childhood in Nebraska, then there are another 80 pages of his early years in Washington and early working years with JFK.

(Sorensen almost hired on with Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, incidentally -- another high-minded liberal and later one of only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964. Sorensen then turned down a job offer with Washington's Scoop Jackson to take the job with JFK. Jackson was more of the Democratic rising star at the time, it seems. Sorensen asked both Jackson and JFK what he'd be doing for them. Kennedy told him he wanted him to research and write up detailed analysis of, and offer solutions for, the fading economic industries of New England. Jackson said, "I need a smart lawyer to get my name in the paper more.")

On to page 180, where we get a chapter titled: "My Perspective on JFK's Personal Life." Great! Finally, finally, I'm going to get the straight dope, from someone who knows, about exactly what shenanigans there were and how we can resolve the adultery-happy horndog side of JFK with the smart, idealistic statesman we also believe he was. Right?

Well, wrong. Instead I get 13 pages of Ted Sorensen wagging his finger at me for wondering about it and admonishing me not to believe everything I read in the paper. Well, 10 pages of him finger-wagging, and 3 pages of oblique references that seem to admit that JFK fooled around but really don't tell me a thing. (Sample: "To paraphrase E.B. White, 'He awoke every morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy it.'" And: "JFK had many virtues, and would probably have been a less interesting men if he had no vices.")

Sorensen admits that Kennedy has affairs ("After 1956 I was aware of a few flings and fancies along the campaign trail") but insists that most women who say they slept with him are untrustworthy, and who would ever trust a Secret Service agent who was breaking his oath to remain silent anyway? He even offers this remarkable quote from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr: "Questions which no one has a right to ask are not entitled to a truthful answer." Wha--?

Sorensen never met Marilyn Monroe and doesn't know if she and JFK had a romantic relationship. "Nor did I ever arrange a date for him... He never asked me to lie to the press or to his wife." And of course, "I do believe JFK loved his wife dearly, enough to take pains not to confront, humiliate, hurt, or anger her with public misconduct."

Then he rushes to wrap up with a denunciation of our salacious media age.

Well, heck.  As a fan, a Democrat, a student of history, and a citizen, I just don't think it's really wrong to puzzle over that part of JFK's life.  Most of the rest of his career has been revealed fairly clearly, from several angles.  I feel like I have a handle on it.  This, I still can't quite make sense of.

We're not talking about a few "flings and fancies" (what an artful phrase) with sweet young things on the campaign trail. That seems to happen to nearly every politician out there. (Except surely not George W. Bush or Barack Obama!)

We're talking about nutty stuff, and a lot of it: claims that Kennedy had naked women in the White House pool, had women sent in when Jackie was away, made it with Marlene Dietrich upstairs at the White House, etc, etc. God knows how much of it is true -- surely some of it is not -- but any part of it makes you think "Wait, how?"

Sorensen plays dumb. Oh, he does mention the pool: "Even hijinks in the White House swimming pool, long alleged, were perhaps inappropriate but not illegal." Yes, long alleged indeed. Alas, he just can't tell us if "hijinks" occurred or not. I'm sorry, but it's very, very hard to believe that the president was having it on with naked women in the pool and Sorensen never heard a word. Because, you know, in the White House nobody gossips.

It's just strange. It's very unsatisfying (and I imagine that this one chapter is the entire reason that Harper Collins agreed to publish the book in the first place. They must have been BEGGING Sorensen to address it frankly).

So we're still in the dark. We can believe biographers like Kitty Kelly and Thomas Reeves, with Kennedy making it with women in the upstairs bath while loyal Secret Service agents stand by to assist, or we can believe Ted Sorensen, who worked side by side with Kennedy for 11 years and barely heard a whisper about it.

But whatever the truth was, I'm a bad guy for wondering about it. Phagh.

It's too bad, because the rest of the memoir is quite lively.  Sorensen does get off a good little speechwriting story about Lyndon Johnson, too:

"I was told that, when LBJ received a speech draft containing a quotation from Socrates, he scratched out the philosopher's name and replaced it with 'my granddaddy.'"

Thus endeth the review.

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Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 11:33 AM0 comments  

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

John F. Kennedy on Twitter

The John F. Kennedy Library has begun following John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign on Twitter.

You can get updates (quotes, mostly) from here (or sign up to follow the tweets). Spoiler: Kennedy won that election, beating out Richard Nixon. Barely.

The Kennedy Library also has a YouTube site, loaded with videos -- but not organized in relation to the Twitter material.

And if you just can't get enough Kennedy, well, LIFE magazine has a terrific archive of photos.

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Posted by Mr. Hehn at 5:19 PM1 comments  

Monday, December 28, 2009

The Weekend of the Naked Kennedys

Today's flap over the JFK naked-women-yacht photo -- the one that turned out to be a fake -- came at an odd time for our family.

36 hours earlier we had been confronted with a naked photo of JACKIE Kennedy, at a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. The hotel, 21c, is a groovy boutique hotel with modern art galleries in its lobby and basement. Tucked back in one corner was a grainy black-and-white shot of Jackie Kennedy (then Jackie Onassis), nude, against a white background.

I had no idea such a photo existed (or that it was art) but a quick trip around the Internet told the story: a paparazzo nabbed the shot 1972 on Skorpios in Greece, it was published in Hustler in 1975, and just recently the photographer gave a little tell-all chat about how he got the shot.

At 21c the artist had pasted a dagger in the middle of the photo, along with a nonsensical side statement declaring that the photo was no longer a nudie shot but now a meditation on iconography, intrusion, the modern world, etc, etc. It still looked a lot like a nude photo of Jackie Kennedy to me. Turning a corner in a lobby museum, after cocktails but before dinner, and seeing a shot of a naked, pale, and rather skinny Jackie Onassis, and then finding out it really is an actual naked photo of Jackie Onassis, is enough strangeness for any weekend.

(I'm a bit too modest to link to the photo here, with or without the artistic dagger. The shot is surprisingly scarce online anyway, though I found it by searching Google Images for "Jackie Kennedy nude.")

Our hometown of Cincinnati is also the site of the first Hustler store, and of Larry Flynt's infamous obscenity trial back in 1976. And just this month his brother sued Flynt in some kind of complicated fraternity-of-adult-bookstores wrangle. Between that, the museum, and today's JFK photo, the whole holiday season was starting to seem like a psychedelic whirlwind of naked Kennedys and yachts, with the unwelcome visage of Larry Flynt looming in the background.

So thank heavens the JFK photo turned out to be a phony.

See non-nude photos of Jackie Kennedy >>

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Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 5:13 PM0 comments  

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Celebs As Santa: The Rat Pack

In honor of Peter Lawford's 25th deathday... the Rat Pack in holiday mode.



From left: Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Frank Sinatra in the 1964 movie Robin and the Seven Hoods.  The flick was a takeoff on the Robin Hood story, set in 1930s gangsterland.

Lawford wasn't in this movie, and there's a little more to that story than Christmas cheer.  Per Wikipedia:
Peter Lawford was originally cast as Alan A. Dale, but when Lawford's brothers-in-law, John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, opted to stay at Lawford's house during a West Coast trip instead of at Sinatra's as originally planned -- Sinatra had built a helipad and made countless other arrangements for the eagerly awaited presidential visit -- a furious Sinatra ostracized Lawford from the Rat Pack. Bing Crosby ended up cast in Lawford's role.
This is one of those not-quite-right Wikipedia moments:  JFK stayed at Bing Crosby's house, not Lawford's.  But Lawford was the one who delivered the bad news to Sinatra, and Sinatra killed the messenger.

Sinatra was close with certain mobsters, including the notorious Sam Giancana, and the Kennedy administration was fighting organized crime at the time. Bobby Kennedy, as Attorney General, put the kibosh on JFK staying with Sinatra -- saying the president "couldn't stay at Frank's and sleep in the same bed that [Sam] Giancana or any other hood had slept in," as Lawford later put it to Kitty Kelley.

None of this explains why Bing Crosby got Lawford's role in the movie, since Crosby was the guy that Kennedy stayed with.  Perhaps it was tit-for-tat on Sinatra's part: "JFK stayed with Crosby instead of me, so I'm casting Crosby instead of you."   Whatever.  By the time the movie came out, JFK had been killed and Sinatra had switched to the Republican party.

Maybe it's not such a cheery story after all.  Happy holidays, everyone!


(Image supplied by WENN.)

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Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 11:27 AM0 comments  

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Tiger Woods: A $500 Million Divorce?

The New York Post, without citing its source, says Elin Nordegren may seek as much as $500 million from Tiger Woods if she divorces the golfer.

The newspaper said Nordegren is looking at filing divorce papers in California. Why? The Post says the state's no-fault divorce laws could make it easier for her to claim a large portion of Woods' fortune.
So reports The Orlando Sentinel today.

The Post actually goes a little farther than that, saying flat-out that Nordegren will divorce Woods.

The Post is going Full Purple with its prose these days. Here they are on Tiger's not-that-surprising Las Vegas habits:
When he wasn't forking over cash to silence his harem of beautiful bimbos, Tiger Woods tossed tens of thousands of dollars on the blackjack table at a Sin City casino, according to one of his mistresses.
In other breaking Woods news, reports claim that Tiger's dad, Earl Woods, was also unfaithful. So get ready for the Joe Kennedy / John Kennedy, Disney World-vs-Camelot type comparisons. If anyone has the energy to go there, that is.

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Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 9:02 AM0 comments  

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Rachel Uchitel and the Promotional Touch

The National Enquirer claims that golfer Tiger Woods has been dallying with a woman named Rachel Uchitel.

Uchitel seems to have a certain self-promotional touch in any case. Here she is in a profile from Black Book last year:
Although I've been romantically linked to a famous baseball player, a Broadway star, a musician, and various film and television actors, I will never kiss and tell! Some of the simplest things in life make me happy, and I want to end up with someone who truly loves and respects me for who I am.
Who says that about themselves, "I've been romantically linked to a famous baseball player"?

A similar example comes a little later in that Black Book story, where Uchitel says:
My grandparents owned and operated El Morocco supperclub in the 1960s; famous people from President John F. Kennedy to Cary Grant frequented the place on a regular basis.
Which is true, but not very accurate.

The El Morocco was opened as a speakeasy in 1931, and its glory days as a Manhattan hotspot were the 1940s and 1950s. It was filled with society and showbiz types then, no doubt. The club was never quite the same after the death of original owner John Perona in 1961. It closed and reopened several times after that, including a stretch as a strip club in the 1990s.

Uchitel's grandfather, Maurice Uchitel, did own the El Morocco from 1964-70. It was a bit of a miracle if JFK "frequented the place" then, though, since he was killed in 1963.

Cary Grant, in his 60s, made his last two films during that era -- Father Goose (1964) and the bizarre Walk, Don't Run (1966). It's possible he was at the El Morocco "on a regular basis" then, sure, but not likely in the way suggested.

So just to say that Rachel Uchitel doesn't seem to mind the spotlight and likes to spice up the story a little bit. Possibly a tricky choice for an assignation if you're a celeb.

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Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 10:36 AM0 comments  

Thursday, August 27, 2009

LBJ Talks to Ted

From the Houston Chronicle: A page with links to audio of President Lyndon B. Johnson calling Ted Kennedy on the occasion of his brother John's death in 1963, and again on the occasion of his brother Bobby's death in 1968.

The audio comes from the archives at the University of Virginia. Direct links are here (John) and here (Bobby).

On this date in 1908 Lyndon Johnson was born.

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Posted by Mr. Hehn at 11:10 AM0 comments  

Teddy, JFK, and 122 Bowdoin Street

Those who know Boston may be interested in the route that Ted Kennedy's body will take today.

Near the State House the Senator will visit an odd address:
Continuing to Bowdoin Street, Senator Kennedy will pass 122 Bowdoin, where he opened his first office as an Assistant District Attorney and President Kennedy lived while running for Congress in 1946.
122 Bowdoin was a local station stop on John Kennedy's political railway. He did more than just live there in 1946; he kept the place for years as a combination office and crash pad for whenever he was in Boston.

It was near the Boston political action, with a coffee shop downstairs where State House types would go to gossip and cut deals. When JFK voted on election day in 1960, 122 Bowdoin was the legal address he gave.

I once read in one of the JFK biographies -- it wasn't A Thousand Days but might have been Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye -- that JFK kept the apartment while he was president, and that after JFK was killed in 1963, the Kennedy family still kept renting the apartment, year after year. The implication was that the family kept it into the 1970s and beyond.

In 1985 I visited Boston and made a special trip to find 122 Bowdoin and see if JFK's name was still on the register. The address isn't hard to find -- it truly is just steps from the State House:


View Larger Map

It was a nondescript building. It looked like a hundred other apartment doorways downtown, with a narrow entrance into a small vestibule with a buzzer system, then a locked door leading to a lobby stairway.

Alas, the directory showed no listing for John F. Kennedy.

But a second look showed a name that was close: J. Kennett. A subtle shorthand for privacy, I wondered? After all, if you pronounce both of the last two letters you get "Kennet-tee."

Still, just coincidence, I figured. I assumed the family had given up the apartment years ago.

Now I'm not so sure.

Check the JFK Library's useful list of JFK's addresses over the years. Only two of them list dates with an open-ended hyphen: Hyannis Port ("1929-") and 122 Bowdoin Street, Apt. 36 ("1947-").

We know the Kennedys still own the first address, the compound at Hyannis Port; Teddy just passed away there, in fact. Does that mean they also...?

These days you can rent your own apartment at 122 Bowdoin: $900 for a studio, $1850 for a two-bedroom. Pretty fair prices for Boston.

But can you rent apartment 36?

Well, whatever the truth about 122 Bowdoin, I find it touching that Sen. Kennedy will cruise by today.

As an aside, the JFK Library also lists "The President's Books at 122 Bowdoin Street." Among the 150 or so titles:
Pennsylvania 1651-1756
The Man versus The State
Lolita
The Cabinet of Irish Literature, Volume I-IV
Rasputin--Neither Devil Nor Saint
Off My Sea Chest
Things Catholics are Asked About

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Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 5:27 AM0 comments  

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Robert McNamara, Peacemaker?

Mr. McNamara saw his central role as preventing nuclear war. During his tenure as secretary of defense, there were conflicts that could have escalated into nuclear war -- the confrontation over Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis. All of this must be seen against the backdrop of the prevailing ideas of the time, the domino theory and the cold war.

Mr. McNamara became defense secretary in 1961. The Joint Chiefs were hawks. This is clear in reading the transcripts of the Cuban missile crisis; the generals speak to John F. Kennedy with derision, contempt and anger. When Mr. McNamara took office he discovered secret Pentagon plans for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.

He worried that the Joint Chiefs wanted nuclear war, and he was determined not to allow that to happen. From '63 to about '67, we had first-strike capacity and nuclear superiority against the Soviet Union. (In the words of George C. Scott in "Dr. Strangelove," I'm not saying we wouldn't have got our "hair mussed." But we would have destroyed them.) After Kennedy’s death, he served that central role of keeping the Joint Chiefs in check. If true, he becomes not the villain of American history, but something quite different.
Filmmaker Errol Morris muses on the career of Robert McNamara.

Morris's movie about McNamara, The Fog of War, is terrific -- highly recommended.

That's McNamara below right, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the president and Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

(Photo credit: Cecil Stoughton, from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.)

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Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 1:58 PM0 comments  

Monday, March 16, 2009

Don't Call Him "John-John"

John F. Kennedy, Jr. was never called "John-John" by his family.

At least, not according to JFK aide and speechwriter Ted Sorensen. In his 2008 book Counselor, Sorensen recalls sending a draft of his 1965 memoir Kennedy to Jacqueline Kennedy for her review.

At one point Sorensen had referred to "John-John, as his father called him." That led to this note from Mrs. Kennedy:
His father never called him John-John -- only John. That nickname now plagues the little boy -- who may be stuck with it all his life. I know your book deals with more important things -- but it would be great if you could put this nickname to bed.

I don't know where it started, as both of us hated nicknames -- our own -- Jack and Jackie we thought a most unfortunate combination -- and we always called our children by their first names.

I can only think it started when I was hugging John as a baby and saying nice things to him -- like John, John -- and some newspaper woman -- it may have been dear old Laura Berquist -- picked it up -- John gets angry now when strangers call him John-John -- because he thinks it is babyish -- He has many fights in the park about it. You could help him if you said his father never called him that...
Mrs. Kennedy was right about the nickname sticking with her son all his life. But this is the first time we'd heard it was a mistake to start with.

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Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 7:06 PM0 comments  

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Today in Nixonology

In our new profile of Illinois senator Roland W. Burris we include a link to photos of a his mausoleum -- no, he's not dead -- in Chicago's Oak Woods Ceremony. The sizable monument to Burris lists the senator's many accomplishments under the heading "Trail Blazer."

It shouldn't be surprising -- blowing your own horn is what you do in politics. It reminded us of the epitaph on Richard Nixon's grave. The former president's tombstone says "The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker." The line comes from his first inaugural speech in 1969, and at the time he was casting it as pitch for America to answer the call to "lead the world at last out of the valley of turmoil." Oops!

North Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos -- and American hippies -- probably didn't think of Nixon as a peacemaker. Then again, the word comes already loaded with irony, at least in the U.S., where it can also be used to describe things that do the opposite of peaceful: a gun (a Colt revolver from the 19th century), a Cold War missile (a land-based intercontinental ballistic missile from the 1980s) and a long-range bomber (the Convair B-36 from the 1950s). So maybe Nixon meant that kind of peacemaker -- the biggest boom in the room that keeps the troublemakers in their seats.

Thinking about Nixon persuaded us to haul out the May 1974 publication of The White House Transcripts, the text of what the Nixon White House turned over to the House of Representatives committee that was investigating the Watergate break-in. The book begins with an introduction by R. W. Apple, Jr. of The New York Times:

"On February 25, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee formally asked the White House to produce recordings of forty-two conversations between President Richard Milhouse Nixon and members of his administration."

Lo, and behold! It was 35 years ago today that Nixon turned over the tapes. As it turns out they were incomplete and heavily edited -- the White House tried to soften the blow of dirty words by replacing them with the now-famous phrase "expletive deleted." But it gave the public a chance to see what Nixon was like behind closed doors, and it wasn't very pretty. He comes across as a petty and vindictive loner.

We then took a glance at The Haldeman Diaries by Nixon Chief of Staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman to see if there was any special entry on this day. Nope. It was a Sunday. There is, however, an entry for 28 February 1973, in which Haldeman mentions that Nixon had just finished reading a book called Kennedy's 13 Mistakes. Haldeman comments that Nixon: "... made the point that [John F.] Kennedy blew practically everything and still got credit for it." Later in the same entry, after relating Nixon's comments on Democrats and "the poison in the upper classes," Haldeman concludes the day's entry with:

"I think he felt better as a result of the meeting, he did drag it on for quite a while -- this whole area of discussion and his soliloquies are his favorite subjects -- before he took off for the barbershop and the governors' dinner tonight."

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Posted by Mr. Hehn at 12:04 AM0 comments  

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Obama's New Limo is an Armored "Cocoon"

Made by Cadillac.
"One news agency, noting its 8-inch-thick doors, says the limo can withstand a 'direct hit from an asteroid.' But GM spokeswoman Joanne K. Krell laughed off the comments. 'And it will fix you a latte if you ask,' she jokes."
A $25 billion latte, if you include the cost of the GM buyout.

Meanwhile, a historical side note:
"In 1965, Lyndon Johnson was the first president to ride in a bulletproof limo in an inaugural parade, less than two years after his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed while riding in an open car."

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Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 11:53 AM0 comments  

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