May 29th marks the 100th birthday of John F. Kennedy, the former president whose life was cut tragically short on November 22, 1963. Kennedy and his presidency remain an interesting study, marked by intrigue and tragedy, including his famous affair with Marilyn Monroe, a near-assassination attempt before his inauguration, and his changing philosophy on economics. Here are seven things you didn’t know about Kennedy.
1. Kennedy donated his presidential and congressional salaries to charity. A $10 million trust fund that Kennedy’s father had established for him was more than enough to provide a living for Kennedy, so he was able to donate the salaries he earned as president and in his 14 years in Congress to charity.
2. Kennedy was plagued with myriad health problems throughout his life. A lot of the health problems seemed to stem from corticosteroids he took in 1937 to treat colitis. He had to take more corticosteroids in 1947 when he was diagnosed with Addison’s Disease, a life-threatening disease that causes a person’s adrenal glands to not produce enough hormones for the body to adequately function, resulting in severe fatigue, nausea and abdominal pain, among other symptoms. But the side effects of the corticosteroids had an effect on Kennedy, resulting in degenerative bone disease and bad infections from a weakened immune system. Kennedy also had back problems that he couldn’t hide from the public eye, but he was able to hide nine hospitalizations during the 1950s.
According to Kennedy historian Robert Dallek, Kennedy “could barely climb a flight of stairs and could not put on his own socks” and was on a plethora of medication.
3. Kennedy didn’t want Lyndon Johnson to succeed him. The reason Kennedy selected him as his running mate in 1960 was to prevent him from stalling his agenda as Senate Majority Leader, otherwise Kennedy and his allies didn’t particularly care for Johnson. As Kennedy’s vice-president, Johnson didn’t take on any real responsibilities or give his opinion on matters, although he was loyal to Kennedy.
Still, the prospect of Johnson succeeding him worried Kennedy:
“Bobby told me this later, and I know Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, ‘Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?'” she said.
The president gave no serious consideration to dropping Johnson from the ticket in 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy recalled. But he did have some talks about how to avoid having Johnson run for president in 1968, at the end of what would have been Kennedy’s second term, she said.
“He didn’t like that idea that Lyndon would go on and be president because he was worried for the country,” she said. “Bobby told me that he’d had some discussions with him. I forget exactly how they were planning or who they had in mind. It wasn’t Bobby, but somebody. Do something to name someone else in ’68.”
4. The death of one of Kennedy’s babies brought him and Jackie closer together. Jackie Kennedy had previously suffered a miscarriage and given birth to a stillborn baby; in 1963 she gave birth to a baby boy named Patrick six weeks early with a condition called hyaline membrane disease that prevents oxygen from reaching the baby’s blood. Boston’s Children’s Hospital fought to keep Patrick alive but unfortunately their efforts were futile.
Naturally, the Kennedys took Patrick’s death hard: (H/T: Vanity Fair)
For several hours he sat on a wooden chair outside the hyperbaric chamber, wearing a surgical cap and gown and communicating with the medical team by speakerphone. Near the end they wheeled Patrick into the corridor so he could be with his father. When the boy died at 4:19 a.m. Kennedy was clutching his little fingers. After saying in a quiet voice, “He put up quite a fight. He was a beautiful baby,” he ducked into a boiler room and wept loudly for ten minutes. After returning to his room he sent Powers on an errand so he could cry some more. He broke down outside the hospital and asked an aide to beg a photographer who had captured his grief not to publish the picture.
His eyes were red and his face swollen when he arrived at Otis that morning. As he described Patrick’s death to Jackie, he fell to his knees and sobbed.
“There’s just one thing I couldn’t stand,” she said in a faint voice, “if I ever lost you . . .”
“I know . . . I know . . .” he whispered.
Evelyn Lincoln called Patrick’s death “one of the hardest blows” Kennedy had ever experienced. Sorensen thought he was “even more broken” than his wife. Jackie said, “He felt the loss of the baby in the house as much as I did,” and would notice him tearing up when he subsequently held John. His tears were all the more astonishing given that Joe Kennedy had frequently told his children, “There’ll be no crying in this house.” They shortened it to “Kennedys don’t cry,” repeated it to their children, and according to Ted Kennedy, “All of us absorbed its impact and molded our behavior to honor it. We have wept only rarely in public.”
In the aftermath of Patrick’s death, John and Jackie started showing more public affection toward each other, which the public had rarely seen up to that point.
5. Kennedy initially dabbled in Keynesian economics as president, but then switched to supply-side tax cuts when the Keynesian policies predictably failed. Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) consisted primarily of Keynesians, so Kennedy took their advice and implemented a number of big-spending programs to jump-start the economy. Despite the infusion of government cash, the country was still mired in economic calamity; Kennedy noticed that “in the recovery year of 1961, growth totaled only 2.6%, barely above the long-term average. In the previous recovery year, of 1959, growth had been 7%.” per Time.
Kennedy later took the advice of his Treasury Secretary to implement across-the-board tax cuts that went into effect after Kennedy’s assassination. The result was “an eight-and-a-half year, uninterrupted run of growth at just over 5% per year,” according to Time.
6. Kennedy engaged in an affair with Marilyn Monroe in the White House. Via The New York Post:
Monroe first met the president in February of 1962, when she was invited to a New York dinner party in his honor where he greeted her with with, “Finally! You’re here.” He got her number before she left and invited her to Palm Springs the next month, where, he added, his wife would not be joining him. They spent a weekend shacked up at Bing Crosby’s house in the desert town, which, according to various sources, was the extent of the affair. Monroe, however, desperately wanted more and saw herself as Second First Lady material, even calling Jackie and telling her about the affair, according to “These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie.” Jackie, no stranger to her husband’s infidelities, responded (we assume sarcastically), “Marilyn, you’ll marry Jack, that’s great . . . and you’ll move into the White House and you’ll assume the responsibilities of first lady, and I’ll move out and you’ll have all the problems.”
He engaged in several other affairs as well.
7. Kennedy was almost assassinated before his presidential inauguration. Richard Pavlick planned to drive his car, which was filled with dynamite, into Kennedy’s car in December 1960, but couldn’t pull the trigger because he didn’t want to harm Jackie and the Kennedy kids. Eventually, Pavlick was caught during a routine traffic stop, but had he decided to go through with it, there’s a good chance his assassination attempt would have been successful.