Looking Back: All His Bright Light Gone - Part 1
As many people who listen to me on Black Op Radio--or read my material here or at my substack site know, I am generally disappointed in the quality of biographies about John F. Kennedy. And that is putting it mildly. When I am asked to comment on the subject, I usually say that there is no comprehensive, satisfactory, full-scale bio of JFK. The ones that came out back in the sixties, works by people like Ted Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger, are dated today. They are useful as general source books if one needs to look up something in the common domain. There is also Monica Wiesak’s credible book from 2022, America’s Last President. That is a good volume, but it only deals with Kennedy’s presidency; it is not a biography. I would recommend it to anyone in order to understand what the man achieved in just three years.
I touched on this issue in my essay, The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 324-73) From about 1965-75, there were books written by people like Sorenson, Schlesinger, Pierre Salinger, Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell. These books were worth reading, and I still have them in my library as references. The problem is that there was not enough declassified material at that time to give a full and deep authority to them.
In 1975, with the public hearings of the Church Committee, things started going a bit loony. This was due to the exposure of the plots to kill Fidel Castro, and of Kennedy’s relationship with Judith Exner. And in 1976, the negative biographies began to cascade forward. Part of this was to counter the fact that the Church Committee could make a case for President Eisenhower’s complicity in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, but they had no such evidence against Kennedy for the attempts to kill Castro. (ibid, pp. 326-29). But that comparison in culpability was enough to begin a flood of smear biographies. And it did not matter if they were good books or not. In my opinion, biographies by the likes of John Davis and Richard Reeves are pretty much worthless. But these authors gave the establishment and the MSM what they wanted: cheap sensationalism. The epitome of this kind of pathography was achieved by Seymour Hersh and, most recently, Maureen Callahan. (Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/maureen-callahan-goes-over-the-edge-along-with-megyn-kelly-pt-1)
In my view, this river of muck was embraced by the MSM due to their two colossal failures back in 1963-65. Since they bought into the Warren Report, they completely missed the story on the true circumstances of JFK’s murder. Secondly, they also whiffed on what President Johnson was doing to Kennedy’s Vietnam policy, which should have been obvious by the end of 1965. When Kennedy was killed, there was not one combat troop in Vietnam. By the end of 1965, there were almost 180,000 in theater. That is a huge story to have missed.
These smear books helped disguise the issues. After all, they seemed to imply, JFK was not worth the trouble in the first place. The MSM did not want to be reminded of this collapse, and these books helped. Therefore, in the 1991 film JFK-- where Oliver Stone, Fletcher Prouty and John Newman suggested there might have been such a connection between Vietnam and the assassination--the three were vociferously assaulted in the press. Even though the evidence eventually declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) backed up those two theses that buttressed the film. In fact, when the Board declassified documents about JFK planning to exit Vietnam, even the NY Times had to admit it was so. (12/23/97, story by Tim Weiner)
Funny, no one apologized to Stone, Prouty and Newman. At least I do not recall anyone doing so. In fact, I do not recall any mention that the trio had been correct six years previously.
II
In this initial installment of Looking Back, I want to address a book that does qualify as a fair and complementary view of Kennedy, and it is also a biography of his life. Published back in 2016, it is called All His Bright Light Gone by Peter McKenna. I had not heard of this volume until a reader pointed it out to me. It’s a relatively brief book, less than 300 pages of text. But according to the author, he spent five years working on, not just the subject of who Kennedy was, but also how his death altered America. This is reflected in the subtitle: The Death of John F. Kennedy and the Decline of America.
It is not unusual that I missed the book when it came out. Because, as of today, I can only find two notices about the book upon its release. I would not call either one of them a review. One was by McKenna himself on a Facebook page where authors post excerpts from their new books. This concerned the grief JFK felt over the death of his sister Kathleen. The other was at a site called The Story Graph. There, a poster, under a pseudonym, wrote a note that referenced a speech Kennedy gave at Vanderbilt on May 18, 1963. That speech excerpt takes up most of the notice. And it does put across one of the main themes of McKenna’s book, which we will get to later.
In the prologue, McKenna says that he grew up in a lower-middle-class Irish family. Kennedy inspired him, and he visited the Rotunda after JFK died, waiting in line for six hours to render his graces. But it was not until the presidency of George W. Bush—especially the economic meltdown of 2007-- that he realized just how good a president Kennedy was. Thus began his search for the meaning of John Kennedy, the man and his presidency.
At the outset, McKenna states that Kennedy understood that the American government was a democratic republic. In other words, Kennedy’s view of the presidency was a stewardship for the common good. That view of the office ended with Kennedy. McKenna states that after his death, the American political system began to enthrone the idea of wealth accumulation. Or, as Gordon Gekko said in Wall Street, “Greed is good”. By giving these ideas both honor and political clout, “little by little, the look of this country began to change.” (p. 16) And one could say that this reached an apogee with Donald Trump.
This is an interesting, attractive concept, and I tend to believe it is true. I just wish McKenna would have drilled down on it more. Because, as far as I can see, the only comparative analysis he makes is much later with Ronald Reagan. (See Chapter 28)
III
In Chapter 1, the author makes a statement in which he counters what many MSM historians seem to claim about Kennedy. He writes:
Kennedy’s legacy is not what he could have accomplished if he had more time. It is instead what he accomplished in the short time he was given. His “actual tangible material impact on history” was enormous. His true legacy is the difference between the type of country he was building during his presidency and the type of country we became after his death. (p. 25)
From here, McKenna goes into a biographical aspect of Kennedy. JFK was a sickly child who almost died of scarlet fever at age 3. Joe Kennedy moved the family from the Boston area to New York when John Kennedy was 12. (p. 35) This was for financial reasons, but also because Joe felt the Boston Brahmins were quite snobbish to the Irish. In the Big Apple, the family now moved into a mansion. But because of his several ailments—appendicitis and dizzy spells among them--and because Joe was always pushing for his children to be aware of current events, young John Kennedy became an avid reader. He first attended Choate, and then very briefly the London School of Economics, where he was stricken with hepatitis. (p. 43) He then entered Harvard.
At age 20, young JFK began traveling the world, especially Europe. He was surprised that in 1937, while he was in France, the citizens were not really worried about what was happening in Germany. (p. 44) One reason this puzzled him is that when he was in Germany, he got the feeling that they considered themselves superior, and they expected him to return the Heil Hitler salute. (p. 46) Unlike his father, young Kennedy did not endorse the Munich Agreement, and he thought that England also was too relaxed in face of the Nazi threat. He was correct about this. Hitler broke the pact and usurped the Sudetenland shortly after. This later inspired Kennedy to write his first book, Why England Slept.
Oddly, McKenna does not write about young Kennedy’s visit to Palestine in 1939. In spite of the fact that when McKenna’s book was published, in 2016, the Arab/Israeli strife was already in full bloom. As I have noted elsewhere, in a letter to his father, JFK made some quite insightful comments about what he saw while he was there. From that letter, one can argue that this was a formative experience for his later foreign policy on the Middle East. (Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jfk-vs-trump-on-iran)
McKenna then segues to JFK in the service, first in naval intelligence, where he ended up in the hospital again in 1942. Kennedy did not like working in intelligence. So he had his father help transfer him to the South Pacific and the PT Boat squadrons. To put it mildly, these were dangerous missions. (p. 58) You had wooden-hulled ships going up against high-caliber Japanese destroyers. McKenna dutifully and vividly goes over the famous 1943 PT 109 incident where Kennedy’s ship was cut in half, down the center, by the Amagari. Kennedy did an admirable job in rescuing what was left of his crew--two had perished in the crash. (p. 61) The equally admirable rescue attempts by Kennedy finally succeeded through the aid of natives that he approached. (p. 66)
After recovering from exhaustion, Kennedy actually went back to these missions. Five men from his former crew signed up with him. (p. 69) But he was now diagnosed with a degenerative disease in his spine, plus an ulcer. So he was ordered back to America. He had two botched back surgeries and was then plagued with colitis. (p. 73) On top of all this, his brother Joe Jr died on a very dangerous air mission in Europe in July of 1944. Aggrieved by his passing, JFK collected a book of memories about Joe. In 1945, he had about 500 copies mailed out in a private printing. To a teacher of both young men from Choate, he inscribed the following:
The war makes less sense to me now than it ever made, and that was little enough—and I should really like—as my life’s goal, in some way, and at some time, to do something to help prevent another. (p. 75)
IV
In 1947, he was visiting his sister Kathleen in London. He collapsed in a hotel room. It was discovered he had Addison’s disease and was hospitalized. He returned to America on the Queen Mary. Upon his arrival, he slipped into a coma and was given last rites. (p. 81) With an accurate diagnosis, he was now given pellets of synthetic hormones to compensate for the adrenal insufficiency--without which he would more than likely have been dead in five years.
Shortly after this, in 1948, his sister Kathleen--whom Jack was strongly attached to--died in a plane crash with her fiancée. JFK took a while to recover from this blow: he was unable to sleep, shut himself off from the world, and any reminder of Kathleen would cause him to weep. (p. 83)
His serious back problems would continue, exacerbated by the crash of PT 109. It became so painful that in 1954, he decided to undergo a risky operation. After which, he fell into a coma and was given last rites again. But he survived, and he could now walk without crutches or a wheelchair. (p. 82)
After the war, Kennedy thought of entering two professions. One was journalism, which he dabbled in as a freelancer for the Hearst Corporation. For example, he covered the founding of the UN in San Francisco for that organization. (p. 93) The other professional option he entertained was becoming an attorney. But instead, he ultimately decided on public service. He told his friend Patrick Landan that he did not like the term politics. (p. 91) The way Kennedy felt about the war, and his experiences in it, obviously had an impact on this decision.
Once it was made, Joe Kennedy arranged for incumbent congressman Joe Curley to run for mayor of Boston so that Jack could enter the race for his congressional seat. In this 1946 first campaign, young Kennedy worked hard. He practiced speeches, climbed triple-decker apartment houses with a bad back, and toiled long hours. The day before the primary, while participating in a parade, he collapsed and lost consciousness. (p. 97) He won the primary by a 2-1 margin over Mike Neville. In the general election, he won even more convincingly over his GOP adversary, Lester Bowen.
Once elected, Kennedy had a problem. He did not like serving in the House of Representatives: the limited debate time, the arcane rules, the parochial interests. He also found his colleagues to be old—he was 29-- and boring. Added to all this, the seniority guidelines shuffled freshmen like him to the sidelines.
Kennedy occupied his time by trying to secure more, better and cheaper housing for vets. Since some were living in box cars and abandoned buildings. (p. 101) The legislation for low-interest loans and subsidies he backed passed in the Senate but failed in the House. He went after those who defeated it by saying they represented lobbyists, not the people, and there was nothing but greed behind their ideology. He especially had it out for the American Legion. He proclaimed: “The leadership of the American Legion has not had a constructive thought for the benefit of the country since 1918” (p. 102)
Another issue that Congressman Kennedy spoke about was his opposition to the Taft-Hartley bill. He thought the bill would do more harm than good with its restrictions on unions. He claimed the Republicans were not debating unions’ proper role, but were trying to weaken them for putting “a crimp in corporate profit-making.” (p. 102).
In my opinion, McKenna passed up a prime opportunity to fulfill his overarching theme here. Because, in 1947, Kennedy debated fellow congressman Richard Nixon on this issue in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Taft-Hartley banned closed shops, allowed right-to-work laws (or, as I call them, right-to-be-poor laws), and restricted secondary boycotts. The right-to-work clause was especially damaging, since today there are 26 such states.
Tiring of the limitations in the House of Representatives, John Kennedy now planned on running for the Senate. He picked a formidable opponent in Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge.
