WELCOME
A tale of two backbones, one physical and one metaphorical. JFK used his multitude of physical illnesses, near death experiences (receiving last rites at least four times) and lifelong horrific back pain as a form of ju-jitsu, by which he transformed his physical weaknesses and defects into the psychological steeliness he demonstrated as a presidential decision-maker. Doctors thought he would die in childhood; then they predicted that he would never live to be thirty years old. And so on. But all during his formative years (including his service in WWII), he seems to have been using his periodic isolation in hospitals and his overall frailty to construct, from scratch, JFK’s metaphorical backbone that he exhibited as president. Its components were: (1) his unwillingness to take the advice of his hawkish advisers to go to war; and (2) the steely spine it took to keep saying no to the hawks over and over again. Out of weakness, strength; from a disfigured, collapsing, painful, physical backbone arose a leader with a metaphorical backbone that bent when necessary, but never broke, never caved in to what we now know would have been the disastrous advice of his hawkish advisers.
BIOS
At a press conference on 11 October 1961, President John F. Kennedy said: “we happen to live in the most dangerous time in the history of the human race.” For nearly thirty years, James G. Blight and janet M. Lang have spearheaded efforts to understand why that critical moment in the early 1960s was so dangerous and how, despite the presence of tremendous momentum pushing the world toward war, Armageddon was avoided. Beginning in 1989, Blight and Lang have published fifteen books and dozens of articles devoted to this question. Their work also informs many of the best documentary films ever made on questions of nuclear danger, including Errol Morris’s Academy Award-winning The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, on which they served as the principal substantive advisers to Morris and to his subject, McNamara.
The key to understanding how we survived the early 1960s without Armageddon is to grasp the character and decision-making of President John F. Kennedy. The great poet of sickness, darkness and death is Kennedy’s fellow New Englander, Emily Dickinson. She wrote: “I see thee better in the dark/I do not need a light.” A better two-line summary of JFK’s outlook you will never encounter. From a very early age Kennedy’s experience and mindset was very dark indeed, and it darkened progressively over the years. He looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked back at him.
TAKEAWAYS
New Statesman “Acts of Agony” [read here]
The Daily Beast “JFK’s Weak Body and Strong Spirit” [read here]
Huff Post Live [watch here]
CIGI Paper “What the Superbowl Teaches us about Crisis Management” [read here]
BE KENNEDY
From The Armageddon Letters – a transmedia project (multiplatform storytelling) launched on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis – takes visitors behind the scenes during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the most dangerous crisis in recorded history.
