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CNN Live Sunday
Interview With Robert Dallek
Aired May 18, 2003 - 18:28 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
HEIDI COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: Robert Dallek joins me now. Good evening, Mr. Dallek. You have a new book out about John F. Kennedy. It's called, "An Unfinished Life".
There has been so much written about President Kennedy, books and mini-series and movies, et cetera. What did you think there was left to talk about?
ROBERT DALLEK, AUTHOR: Well, as a historian, one always hopes that there are new files, new records, and I was not disappointed because what I know as a presidential historian is that 40 years -- 35, 40 years after a president leaves office or dies there is an abundance of fresh data that you can get at.
In this case, the medical files to me was really quite extraordinary. These have never been seen by a biographer before. We did know John Kennedy had a variety of medical problems but not the extent, the depth, the intensity of what he had to struggle with. In these records, I found that he was hospitalized nine times between 1955 and 1957, once for 19 days, twice for a week. He was on a great variety of medications. The deal with Addison's disease, which is the malfunctioning of adrenal glands...
COLLINS: And nobody knew about this.
DALLEK: Well, there was hints of it, some information, but the extent of it, the depth of it and the extend of the medications he was taking was rather startling.
But most important was I set these medical records down along side of the crises he faced, in particular the Cuban Missile Crises, and I found him lucid, cogent, as anyone could have been, as on top of things as anyone could possibly have been.
It was a very impressive achievement on his part. In fact, my medical friends tell me that if it were not for the medicines he probably couldn't have functioned all that well. They really helped him and allowed him to perform so effectively in the White House.
COLLINS: Well, let's talk about that for a moment. How did his sickness affect his actions in the White House?
DALLEK: Well, I don't think it distracted him from the crisis that he had to attend to. It may be that late at night out of earshot so to speak he would have his difficulties. I mean I do know that he had problems turning over in bed at night because of his back. He had difficulty pulling on the sock and shoe on his left foot. He couldn't go up the staircase the way you or I could. He'd have to kind of sidle up sideways.
But when there was a crisis he would take extra hydrocortisone because Addisonians have difficulty dealing with tension. They don't have the adrenal glands to secrete adrenalin and so they give them additional hydrocortisone, salt tablets, but there were terrible fundamental problems that he had.
His cholesterol was something like at one point in these records it was 410 and often 325, 350. How much longer he would have lived after his presidency who knows, but he had an iron will. The man really had a kind of strength of character that allowed him to soldier through the crises of his presidency.
COLLINS: Hum. Well, there's also been a lot of attention to JFK's so-called Monica. How did you find out about this?
DALLEK: Well, there was an oral history in the Kennedy library, authored by Barbara Gamerikian (ph) who had been in the Kennedy White House Press Office, and 17 pages of it were blacked out and I went to her and I asked Barbara if she'd let me read them. And, she said well it's going on 40 years since he died. She agreed to let me see them and I was a bit startled because what I found there was that he had an affair with a 19, 20-year-old intern. Now, this makes a...
COLLINS: But we hear so much about his character.
DALLEK: Yes.
COLLINS: How do we look at that from both sides?
DALLEK: Sure. Well, you know, these were flaws in his character. I think the man was a compulsive womanizer. There's something sad about not just a 45-year-old man who needs to carry on that way with a 19-year-old, but also to have been president of the United States.
What's so striking to me in all this, and particularly the three lines I have about this in my book, is the fact that in the 1960s the press did not report on a president's private behavior. It's a world apart.
Bill Clinton couldn't get away with this because there's such an aggressive media nowadays. But in Kennedy's days, I don't know if they knew about this Mimi, but they certainly knew about his womanizing. A lot of them did and if they didn't they suspected it but they didn't report on it.
And, as Kennedy said at the time, the right-wing press might put out stories about it but until it became front page news in the "New York Times," it really wasn't going to be a story that caught the public's attention.
COLLINS: But if it had been put out there, do you think that the public would have changed their opinion whatsoever about the popularity of JFK?
DALLEK: Well, I think it would have been disturbing to them but, you know, Heidi, what's fascinating is 40 years later, recently a poll asked the country who was the greatest president in American history. Abraham Lincoln number one, John F. Kennedy number two, and they've been hearing about his womanizing now for about 20 years since the 1970s, 30 years almost, and yet it hasn't had that much of an impact on their inclination to approve of him and judge him.
I think it's similar to what happened with Bill Clinton. There was a strong feeling in the general public that they didn't want him impeached and they didn't want him tossed out of office because they saw his transgressions as private, not in terms of breaking public laws or violating the Constitution.
Nobody holds a brief for what Clinton did and I certainly don't hold a brief for what John Kennedy did but the public seems to separate out the private from the public. Whether they would have done it in 1962, '63, is very questionable.
COLLINS: Is this part of the reason why you think then that JFK, his appeal to the American people is still so strong?
DALLEK: I think his appeal to the American people is still so strong, number one because he was assassinated and, on the other hand, William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Forty years later, hardly anybody remembered him.
But television has kept Kennedy's memory alive and also his charismatic qualities and, maybe most important, that he gave people a sense of hope of a better future, and I think people still cling to that.
They see him as so attractive, as someone who was so promising and that future in a sense was lost and as a consequence of his death we had Johnson and the credibility gap and Vietnam. We had Nixon. We had Watergate.
That does not suggest that John Kennedy would have brought us utopia. There surely would have been other problems but we wouldn't have had those problems, and so I think people maybe feel that what a pity, what a tragedy. He's frozen in our memory at the age of 46. No one can imagine now that he'd be 86 years old.
COLLINS: And hence the title of your book, "An Unfinished Life." Presidential Historian Robert Dallek, thanks so much for being us.
DALLEK: Thanks.
COLLINS: We appreciate it very much.
DALLEK: Thanks for having me.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired May 18, 2003 - 18:28 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
HEIDI COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: Robert Dallek joins me now. Good evening, Mr. Dallek. You have a new book out about John F. Kennedy. It's called, "An Unfinished Life".
There has been so much written about President Kennedy, books and mini-series and movies, et cetera. What did you think there was left to talk about?
ROBERT DALLEK, AUTHOR: Well, as a historian, one always hopes that there are new files, new records, and I was not disappointed because what I know as a presidential historian is that 40 years -- 35, 40 years after a president leaves office or dies there is an abundance of fresh data that you can get at.
In this case, the medical files to me was really quite extraordinary. These have never been seen by a biographer before. We did know John Kennedy had a variety of medical problems but not the extent, the depth, the intensity of what he had to struggle with. In these records, I found that he was hospitalized nine times between 1955 and 1957, once for 19 days, twice for a week. He was on a great variety of medications. The deal with Addison's disease, which is the malfunctioning of adrenal glands...
COLLINS: And nobody knew about this.
DALLEK: Well, there was hints of it, some information, but the extent of it, the depth of it and the extend of the medications he was taking was rather startling.
But most important was I set these medical records down along side of the crises he faced, in particular the Cuban Missile Crises, and I found him lucid, cogent, as anyone could have been, as on top of things as anyone could possibly have been.
It was a very impressive achievement on his part. In fact, my medical friends tell me that if it were not for the medicines he probably couldn't have functioned all that well. They really helped him and allowed him to perform so effectively in the White House.
COLLINS: Well, let's talk about that for a moment. How did his sickness affect his actions in the White House?
DALLEK: Well, I don't think it distracted him from the crisis that he had to attend to. It may be that late at night out of earshot so to speak he would have his difficulties. I mean I do know that he had problems turning over in bed at night because of his back. He had difficulty pulling on the sock and shoe on his left foot. He couldn't go up the staircase the way you or I could. He'd have to kind of sidle up sideways.
But when there was a crisis he would take extra hydrocortisone because Addisonians have difficulty dealing with tension. They don't have the adrenal glands to secrete adrenalin and so they give them additional hydrocortisone, salt tablets, but there were terrible fundamental problems that he had.
His cholesterol was something like at one point in these records it was 410 and often 325, 350. How much longer he would have lived after his presidency who knows, but he had an iron will. The man really had a kind of strength of character that allowed him to soldier through the crises of his presidency.
COLLINS: Hum. Well, there's also been a lot of attention to JFK's so-called Monica. How did you find out about this?
DALLEK: Well, there was an oral history in the Kennedy library, authored by Barbara Gamerikian (ph) who had been in the Kennedy White House Press Office, and 17 pages of it were blacked out and I went to her and I asked Barbara if she'd let me read them. And, she said well it's going on 40 years since he died. She agreed to let me see them and I was a bit startled because what I found there was that he had an affair with a 19, 20-year-old intern. Now, this makes a...
COLLINS: But we hear so much about his character.
DALLEK: Yes.
COLLINS: How do we look at that from both sides?
DALLEK: Sure. Well, you know, these were flaws in his character. I think the man was a compulsive womanizer. There's something sad about not just a 45-year-old man who needs to carry on that way with a 19-year-old, but also to have been president of the United States.
What's so striking to me in all this, and particularly the three lines I have about this in my book, is the fact that in the 1960s the press did not report on a president's private behavior. It's a world apart.
Bill Clinton couldn't get away with this because there's such an aggressive media nowadays. But in Kennedy's days, I don't know if they knew about this Mimi, but they certainly knew about his womanizing. A lot of them did and if they didn't they suspected it but they didn't report on it.
And, as Kennedy said at the time, the right-wing press might put out stories about it but until it became front page news in the "New York Times," it really wasn't going to be a story that caught the public's attention.
COLLINS: But if it had been put out there, do you think that the public would have changed their opinion whatsoever about the popularity of JFK?
DALLEK: Well, I think it would have been disturbing to them but, you know, Heidi, what's fascinating is 40 years later, recently a poll asked the country who was the greatest president in American history. Abraham Lincoln number one, John F. Kennedy number two, and they've been hearing about his womanizing now for about 20 years since the 1970s, 30 years almost, and yet it hasn't had that much of an impact on their inclination to approve of him and judge him.
I think it's similar to what happened with Bill Clinton. There was a strong feeling in the general public that they didn't want him impeached and they didn't want him tossed out of office because they saw his transgressions as private, not in terms of breaking public laws or violating the Constitution.
Nobody holds a brief for what Clinton did and I certainly don't hold a brief for what John Kennedy did but the public seems to separate out the private from the public. Whether they would have done it in 1962, '63, is very questionable.
COLLINS: Is this part of the reason why you think then that JFK, his appeal to the American people is still so strong?
DALLEK: I think his appeal to the American people is still so strong, number one because he was assassinated and, on the other hand, William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Forty years later, hardly anybody remembered him.
But television has kept Kennedy's memory alive and also his charismatic qualities and, maybe most important, that he gave people a sense of hope of a better future, and I think people still cling to that.
They see him as so attractive, as someone who was so promising and that future in a sense was lost and as a consequence of his death we had Johnson and the credibility gap and Vietnam. We had Nixon. We had Watergate.
That does not suggest that John Kennedy would have brought us utopia. There surely would have been other problems but we wouldn't have had those problems, and so I think people maybe feel that what a pity, what a tragedy. He's frozen in our memory at the age of 46. No one can imagine now that he'd be 86 years old.
COLLINS: And hence the title of your book, "An Unfinished Life." Presidential Historian Robert Dallek, thanks so much for being us.
DALLEK: Thanks.
COLLINS: We appreciate it very much.
DALLEK: Thanks for having me.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
