The Presidency a Sly and Wry Humor

By Hugh Sidey

After 30 years the literature of John Kennedy is dominated by tortured accounts of assassination conspiracies and an insatiable sexual appetite. Some of these stories may be true. But often lost in this clamor is a calm and just view of the man, flawed, wondering, trying. Above all else there was his humor, the trait that helped lift him on the way up and gave him special luster when he got to the top.

"I don't have any money on me, can you pay?" he asked me one campaign day in 1960 after offering lunch at a Milwaukee counter. O.K., I paid. "Leave a tip," he instructed, grin showing. Ten percent plunked down. Kennedy counted every coin with his forefinger. "Pretty chintzy," he said. "Leave some more." The grin grew, and he was up and on his way to Omaha, trailing a low chuckle.

Once when he was courting delegates in a scruffy hotel, the prospects were lined up and run through his suite. He stuck his head out of a door during a pause. "Just like a whorehouse," he called. "They bring them into the front parlor, send them into the bedroom with me, and they go out the back door. Satisfied, I hope."

After he won the presidency, he calmed down -- sort of. He rarely roared with mirth but had a low, dry chuckle and a broad grin. His humor was sly and wry and almost never deserted him, no matter how grave the issue. Talking about the threat of nuclear war and his deep doubts about military technology, he once summed up his notion of the first nuclear exchange: "The Soviets will shoot off their missiles and hit Moscow, and we will respond and take out Miami or Atlanta."

After Bobby had been proclaimed by the media as the second most powerful man in the free world, J.F.K. took a phone call at his desk, listened, muffled the receiver and told a guest, "I am talking to the second most powerful man in the free world. Do you want to tell him anything?" More conversation, and Kennedy broke into laughter. "Bobby wants to know who No. 1 is."

All of us were aware of Kennedy's fascination with women, but when sex surfaced, it seemed more naughty than sinister. One holiday night in Palm Beach he put in a midnight call to a journalist, urged him to rush down to Worth Avenue the next day and do an article on an unknown fashion designer named Lilly Pulitzer, who had come up with a colorful gown for casual wear. "They're tearing them off the rack, they tell me," said Kennedy. "Off the women too."

One sardonic Kennedy scene still intrigues. After the summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, the weary President with an aching back had a few friends in for dinner in the old mansion where he stayed in Palm Beach. Frank Sinatra crooned from records in the background. There were daiquiris and pompano and deep talk about the Soviet menace. Kennedy weighed the Soviet leaders and their diplomats, then suddenly said, "You know that they have an atomic bomb in the attic of the Soviet Union embassy up on 16th Street? If war comes, they are going to trigger it and take out Washington." He had a kind of half-grin on his face. His guests looked incredulous. "That's what they tell me," insisted Kennedy. "The bomb was assembled from parts brought in in the diplomatic pouches. This thing goes up, and we all go." He never stopped grinning. I had always intended to ask him, You were kidding, right? But a lot of other things got in the way, and then came Dallas.