“JFK AND THE MASCULINE MYSTIQUE: Sex and Power on the New Frontier” is author Steven Watts attempt to place President John F. Kennedy in the age of male rejuvenation of the 1950’s and early 1960’s.
It’s important to realize that we were lied to about almost everything about Kennedy.
We were told and shown that he was a good family man, but the truth is that he was not just a womanizer but an obsessive one. He was said and shown to be athletic and nimble and graceful, but was secretly sickly, beset by ulcers and a bad back and Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Addisons Disease. If he had gained a second term, it’s likely he would have been our second wheelchair-bound president.
We were also told that he was a scholar and a historian and a bibliophile and highly cultured. But he had to have White House social secretary Letitia Baldrige signal him when to clap at classical music concerts. He also fell asleep at those concerts.
The one thing we weren’t lied to about was his hero status during World War II.
PR was mighty and JFK was a figure men could rally around as a masculine ideal, fit for a time when the American male was getting paunchy, lazy, bureaucratic, lethargic, and physically unfit. JFK latched onto manly men and manly men latched onto JFK the politician, all to their advantage, at least briefly.
Who were these latchers-on?
Try actor Kirk Douglas.
Douglas was a big Kennedy supporter and his movie SPARTACUS in 1959 showed the male ideal. A poor man from a poor family, Douglas raised himself up and got himself accepted at St. Lawrence University. In real life he was a testosterone-oozer, as most JFK acolytes were.
Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and the rest of The Rat Pack fit into the 1960 image of the chain-smoking, heavy-drinking, womanizing ideal. Sinatra even had a helipad constructed for JFK at his Palm Springs home that he personally destroyed in a (manly, of course) rage when JFK couldn’t visit because a mobster had slept in Frank’s home previously.
And don’t forget Hugh Hefner.
Hef invented 1950’s masculinity. He made porn mainstream. He also linked naked woman to consumerism – television, audio systems, golf clubs, cigarettes, fine wine and dining, modern architecture, jazz, automobiles, whatever could be advertised and sold. Perhaps because he came from a stolid Protestant background and was more thoughtful and intellectual than a lot of JFK’s other malemates, he comes off as a balanced observer of his times.
Oddly, Dean Martin comes off as both intelligent and wise. (The drinking swinger bit was a ruse. Mostly.) It was Martin who tried to warn Sinatra off mob connections, and Martin who advised all the Rat Packers – except Peter Lawford, who was JFK’s brother-in-law – to back off from politicians and politics.
A fictional character, Ian Fleming’s James Bond, also embodies JFK’s mindset.
In fact, the disastrous Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion incident was likely inspired by JFK’s admiration of both Fleming and Fleming’s Bond.
Fleming was a British intelligence officer, and JFK wanted “his” CIA to be as creative with sabotage and coup attempts as Bond would be. Jack Lord, who plays a CIA agent in an early Bond movie, even looks like JFK.
JFK fantasized about LBJ attempting a coup, and considered writing a Bondesque novel about that scenario after his presidency. Yikes.
So I suppose that the harebrained (or, rather, hairbrained?) CIA notion of getting itching powder into Fidel Castro’s beard, or the one about supplying the dictator with exploding cigars, was a product of Fleming-think in the world of Kennedy.
So women were showing up in the workforce during World War II. They failed to leave it. The burgeoning suburbs produced fat, nicotine-saturated bureaucratic gray flannel suited organization men who were alcoholic and working on their second coronaries.
Hollywood and the newspapers and TV and the American imagination itself thereby produced a would-be corrective to the situation by embracing wildly alpha males.
It didn’t work for long. We got our very first television president.
But not our last.
