CULT OF PERSONALITY:

Stop the Worship: The Kennedy cult does a disservice to history. (THOMAS C. REEVES, December 29, 2002, Wall Street Journal)

With the stampede over revelations about John F. Kennedy's medical problems now a memory from several weeks ago, this veteran historian would like to make some sober observations. Many journalists seemed to be encountering this issue for the first time. JFK was sickly? He was dependent on drugs? This was news?!

In fact, historians have long known in some detail about Kennedy's poor health, and of the fact that he, his wife and several aides were routinely taking amphetamines administered by a quack physician. That the White House physician, Dr. Janet Travell, gave him injections of procaine for his pain is old news. So is the coverup by Kennedy aides, family members and sympathetic historians, who claimed that JFK was the embodiment of the vigor and action needed by the country after the allegedly sleepy and feeble Eisenhower administration.

However, I did not see a single story on the medication flap that linked the medical coverup with the sexual-escapade coverup, documented, among other places, in my "A Question of Character: A Life of John F.Kennedy, and by Seymour Hersh's highly revealing interviews with Secret Service agents in "The Dark Side of Camelot." The truth is that no other presidential administration can begin to compete with this record of recklessness and deceit. Bill Clinton, bad as he was, was no match for JFK.

Mr. Reeves excellent biography, which came out around the same time as the equally devastating The Crisis Years by Michael Beschloss, set a rather high bar that JFK apologists need to clear before they start telling us how great his presidency was and what a swell guy he was personally. From consorting with Nazi spies and mafia molls to being whacked on painkillers (prescribed by a quack) when he met with Khruschev, the by now undisputed facts about JFK paint a picture of a man who was not only every bit as irresponsible as Bill Clinton but whose irresponsibility may have had an even greater influence on world affairs at a time when the world was a far more dangerous place. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 22, 2003 8:29 AM