Posted on 02/15/2012 6:40:55 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
Last week, the other slipper dropped daintily when 69-year-old Mimi Alford, whose dalliance with the leader of the Free World as an intern had been documented earlier by Sally Bedell Smith and Robert Dallek, described in her own words her seduction at 19 by John F. Kennedy.
She thereby became one of a circle of "friends" entertained by our hero during a presidency that was doomed to be short, but intense.
In this, we learn that she was seduced on her fourth day at work, (and in Jackie's bedroom); that they sometimes played with rubber ducks in a bathtub, and that on two occasions he asked her to service his friend and his brother, giving new meaning to the words "executive order" in ways that are creepy indeed.
For this, he was not unfairly described as a "monster" by Timothy Noah, in a post praised by Powerline's Steven Hayward, in a rare note of bipartisan unity. Rich Lowry said it proved Kennedy's life was a "lie."
But was it? The idea that a man who will be betray his wife will also betray his country is one of those sayings that ought to be true, but is not.
Alexander Hamilton, Franklin Roosevelt, JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. betrayed their wives often, some of them frequently, but all would have died before betraying their country, and did.
Victor Davis Hanson, a colleague of Lowry's, notes that Kennedy was far more honest in public than Richard M. Nixon, whom we believe never strayed.
In his defense, should there be one, Kennedy grew up believing this behavior was normal, seeing his father bring floozies into the household, warning female houseguests to lock the doors to their bedrooms, and rounding up women to sleep with his father whenever old Dad came to town.
His father-in-law slept around on his honeymoon, (one reason Jackie's perspective was also distorted.) In the Senate, he hardly stood out in a body that held Lyndon Johnson, Estes Kefauver, his old friend George Smathers, and 30 years later still sported Gary Hart and Bob Packwood. This partly explains, but does not excuse his behavior, which is only a part of the whole.
He was not a monster when he lied his way into the Navy, volunteered for hazardous duty and saved his crew when catastrophe struck it, swimming miles pulling a badly burned shipmate by a strap that he held in his teeth.
His crew did not think him monstrous when he swam into the ocean alone for miles at night, looking for rescue. He wasn't a monster when he gave his salary each year to charity.
He wasn't living a lie when he supported the Marshall Plan in one of his earliest speeches, and became one of the three early Cold War presidents who helped to design the institutions and strategies with which the war would be won.
His excessive side shocks because it seems so unlikely: He was not weird like Hart, hungry like Clinton, or an unbuttoned wreck like his kid brother, Ted.
He was otherwise disciplined. His other appetites were modest, and easily satisfied. Extreme adulation made him uneasy. He was stoic, and bore pain without complaint or self-pity. His sin seems less part of a pattern than a stand-apart blemish and flaw.
He deserves a kick in the groin from his wife and his intern, but not the back of its hand from his country, to which he always was faithful. He was a cad, and a patriot.
Deal with it all as you will.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."
They should call it "Came-a-lot."
Such a deeply religious clan. They fretted everso about which magnate to whore out the widow Jackie....They finally settled on Aristotle Onassis after the contract had been worked out and their idea of decorum had been preserved. We later saw the widow butt-naked in photographs (full frontal, BTW) at Ari’s pool, IIRC.
As a clan goes, the Kennedys are about the most despicable that has ever been, and now word comes of another Red-headed Kennedy monster ready to assume the Kennedy mantel in his quest for the Congress.
According to Barack Obama, the Kennedys brought his daddy to the USA.
Amen. Never liked Kennedy, but this reminded me of something out of the Tabloids.
And it’s a bit more than betraying one’s wife in the JFK case. JFK was exploiting the weak.
Hamilton did not do such a thing, nor is there any evidence afaik that the very troubling adjectives “often and frequently” apply to Hamilton’s case.
(1) Untestable emotional hyperbole.
(2) What does "betraying the country" mean? In each case some other true and contemporaneous patriots had serious public arguments that each of those men were betraying their country.
Thanks, yeah. I narrowed my scope to their examples, even though Al Ham was a “Democratic-Republican” - guess that’s what we would have called GW a hundred years ago.
As a side note, Jackie’s reputation must be a fraud as well.
She really was a well-born airhead, and social climber who married for status and money because that’s all she knew.
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