Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  71Reagan remained “a mystery to me”: Morris, Dutch, p. 579.

  71Ronald Reagan was the inverse of an iceberg: Reagan, My Father at 100, p. 13.

  71reported rescues occurred after 9:30 p.m.: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 31.

  71during a party for legislators and their families: Reagan, My Father at 100, p. 119.

  72too money-conscious to have a spare: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 21.

  72wouldn’t admit someone else had succeeded where they had failed: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 33.

  73weakness, which he wouldn’t acknowledge: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, pp. 36–37.

  73expression of loyalty on Kennedy’s part: O’Brien, Rethinking Kennedy, p. 19.

  73talk about what an interesting case: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 74.

  74looking at me very reproachfully these days: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, pp. 74–75.

  74fanatical in ensuring no one could see that pain: Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 32.

  74to increase his attraction to other”: Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, p. 312.

  75not portend well for his future development: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 38.

  75more about world affairs at sixteen than most adult men he knew: O’Brien, Rethinking Kennedy, p. 21.

  75president of the student body at the Northside campus his senior year: Morris, Dutch, p. 61.

  76“8 years from now?” Not many, as Reagan’s son Ron would note: Reagan, My Father at 100, p. 112.

  76Reagan gave “entertaining readings”: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 22.

  76was a matter of life and death: Morris, Dutch, p. 36.

  76distinction that he, too “badly wanted”: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 36.

  77a pro football quarterback than president: Reeves, A Question of Character, p. 87.

  77his failure to letter in football: Morris, Dutch, p. 67.

  Chapter 6: College Days during the Great Depression

  78high school graduates in America went to college: Reagan, An American Life, p. 44.

  78Eureka College in the town of the same name, still survives: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 22.

  78less dirt on a shovel than any human being I’ve ever known: Morris, Dutch, p. 54.

  79“lovelier than I’d imagined it would be,” he said: Reagan, An American Life, p. 45.

  79Jack and Nelle were “always well dressed”: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 58.

  79were reasonably spacious and comfortable: Reagan, My Father at 100, p. 90.

  80district representative of the Federal Reemployment Bureau: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 63.

  81in her U.S. Senate campaign against Republican Richard Nixon: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 63.

  81for fear of losing federal relief assistance: Reagan, An American Life, pp. 66–67.

  82sooner or later, things would get better: Reagan, An American Life, p. 54.

  82send some golf balls: Parmet, Jack, p. 28.

  82not learn about the Depression until I read about it at Harvard: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, pp. 30–31.

  83from birth is surrounded by rottenness and filth: O’Brien, Rethinking Kennedy, pp. 20–21.

  83minimal interest in his studies at Harvard: Parmet, Jack, p. 40.

  83take you to the White House with me: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 44.

  83I’m not bright like my brother Joe: Parmet, Jack, p. 44.

  84and gives promise of development: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 43.

  84a phrase that stuck in Kennedy’s mind: Parmet, Jack, p. 49.

  84get my tail as often and as free as I want: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, pp. 45–46.

  84that’s the end of the relationship: Clarke, Ask Not, p. 51.

  84he was more fun than anyone: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, pp. 45–47.

  85Kennedy still successfully seduced his date: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, pp. 45–47.

  85He did nothing halfway: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 43.

  86first Eureka degree was an honorary one: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 55.

  86the biggest mouth of the freshman class: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 48.

  87It was heady wine: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, pp. 28–29.

  87but Wilson insisted upon leaving anyway: Morris, Dutch, p. 75.

  87devotion to ‘Mugs’ was already a campus joke: Morris, Dutch, p. 65.

  87“relationship,” as Reagan described it, came to an end: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 45.

  87inability to distinguish between fact and fancy: Morris, Dutch, p. 121.

  88he should consider a career in acting: Morris, Dutch, p. 85.

  88“to throw a net over me,” he later explained: Morris, Dutch, p.109.

  Chapter 7: Early Success

  91earning $5,000 per year within five years of graduation: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 45.

  91“I just liked showing off,” he said: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 38.

  91show business closer to home . . . radio: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 44.

  92even sweeping floors, just to get in: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 45.

  93tell me about a game and make me see it: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, pp. 48–49.

  93in the real game he had missed his assignment: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 50.

  94Radio was theater of the mind: Morris, Dutch, p. 112.

  94could resume, quickly catching up on the real action: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, pp. 65–66.

  95sacrifice their individual quarrels for a common goal: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 94.

  95can see the game through his eyes: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 51.

  95Reagan is a daily source of baseball dope: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 110.

  96emulate Damon Runyan as a coiner of original slang: Morris, Dutch, p. 127.

  96a face that would make Venus look twice: Morris, Dutch, p. 128.

  96Are those your own shoulders: Morris, Dutch, p. 132.

  98before committing to a course of action against Germany: Leaming, Jack Kennedy, p. 37.

  98as “a glorified office boy”: Perret, Jack, p. 72.

  98Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt: Parmet, Jack, p. 62.

  98end of the world is just down the road: Nasaw, The Patriarch, p. 429.

  99Kennedy hoped he might make someday: Perret, Jack, p. 76.

  99paper now called “Appeasement at Munich”: Parmet, Jack, p. 67.

  99a deep thinker and a genuine intellectual: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 62.

  100weak in spelling and sentence structure: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, pp. 63–64.

  100in good stead for years to come: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 66.

  100a very welcome and useful book: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 65.

  101the book should have been titled “While Daddy Slept”: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 63.

  101supported by a family that defied outsiders: Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 73.

  102rather than dominating society much appealed to Kennedy: Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 74.

  102a democracy is always two years behind a dictator: Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 78.

  102for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957: Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, p. 27.

  103‘but what you can do for your country’: Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 83.

  Chapter 8: The War Stateside and Overseas

  105(fn)never bear arms in defense of the United States: Morris, Dutch, p. 1
11.

  105the backside of a horse: Wilber, Rawhide Down, p. 14.

  106with a bonus of romance: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 111.

  106“excellent” ratings for character and military efficiency: Morris, Dutch, p. 132.

  107(fn)“ the good guys won,” he said: Morris, Dutch, p. 185.

  107rapidly developing into a first-rate actor: Morris, Dutch, p. 189.

  107$75,000 more than Rita Hayworth’s salary: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 415n.

  107and actively promoted his career: Morris, Dutch, p. 163.

  108“much that is right in Hollywood,” she wrote: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 161.

  108and went off to join his regiment: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 167.

  108refreshed to a better job in an ideal world: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p 139.

  108for Reagan to positively identify it as friend or foe: Morris, Dutch, pp. 189–90.

  109Like I’d humiliated him: Morris, Dutch, p. 210.

  109believed in the greatness of his nation: Morris, Dutch, p. 268.

  110soldiers who did not see combat would never know: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, pp. 115–17.

  110and not responding to the gesture: Reagan, An American Life, pp. 388–89.

  110to accept those aggrandizements: http://blogs.reuters.com/talesfromthetrail/2008/12/24/to-salute-or-not-to-salute-thats-obamas-question.

  112don’t remember when he wasn’t in pain: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 88.

  112and a near-perfect 3.9 for command ability: O’Brien, Rethinking Kennedy, p. 39.

  113soldiers came home and told what they knew: Parmet, Jack, p. 99.

  113to be run with military efficiency: O’Brien, Rethinking Kennedy, p. 40.

  113the story of PT-109 was “fucked up”: Parmet, Jack, pp. 111–12.

  115They cut my PT boat in half: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 98.

  115the stories of Bataan and Wake: Parmet, Jack, p. 107.

  115seemed to get under his skin: Perret, Jack, p. 325.

  116military always screws up everything: Perret, Jack, p. 325.

  116“nodding, saying it would work,” he complained: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 103.

  116if Khrushchev were Secretary of Defense: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 345.

  116bring about a return to constitutional government: “Confidential Report No. 1,” Nov. 28, 1961, “The Radical Right” Folder, Box 12, Lee C. White Files, White House Staff Files, Presidential Papers, John F. Kennedy Library.

  116Algerian independence just two years before: Powers, Not Without Honor, pp. 299–300.

  116it won’t happen on my watch: Fay, The Pleasure of His Company, p. 190.

  117attempt to “muzzle the military”: Woods, Fulbright, pp. 284–25.

  117to harass right-wing organizations and their supporters: The most extensive study of Kennedy’s questionable use of the IRS and other federal agencies to blunt what was perceived to be a large and growing far-right movement in the United States can be found in two books by the late historian John A. Andrew III: The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), and The Power to Destroy: The Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2002).

  117political activities of some senior commanders: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 450.

  117professing to be political moderates dropped from 46 percent to 22 percent: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/05/does-the-military-vote-really-lean-republican.

  117Republicans in the South is also a legacy of the Kennedy era: www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0311.wallace-wells.html.

  118when the destroyer hove into sight: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 106.

  118“Kennedy’s body was ever found,” reported Doris Kearns Goodwin: Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, p. 688.

  118sure he’d be a teacher or a writer: Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, pp. 698–99.

  Chapter 9: Anti-Communists

  120studios played a major role in defeating: A wonderful account of Sinclair’s ill-fated campaign is Greg Mitchell’s The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (Random House, New York, 1992).

  120saving his future political career: Morris, Dutch, pp. 158–59.

  121little attention to developing a character: Morris, Dutch, p. 146.

  121and not even notice I was in the room: Morris, Dutch, p. 220.

  122would certainly have been loathe to do so: Wills, Reagan’s America, pp. 221–22.

  122I’ll name Johnny Belinda as a correspondent: Cannon, Governor Reagan, pp. 72–73.

  122no interest in hearing her own opinions: Morris, Dutch, p. 237.

  123“I don’t think I ever heard her say,” Reagan said: Morris, Dutch, p. 267.

  123his responsibility to run for Congress: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 118.

  123all these plans seemed forever destroyed: Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, p. 693.

  124the position of eldest Kennedy sibling: Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, pp. 698–99.

  124couldn’t picture him as a politician: Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, p. 699.

  124the one thing that seemed to brighten [Joe] up: Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, p. 701.

  125simplistic analysis to a complicated subject spiked it: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, pp. 113–16.

  125“then surely at the next,” Kennedy wrote: Parmet, Jack, p. 134.

  125He is not making it happen: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 120.

  125“fighting conservative”—not a liberal: Myer Feldman, Oral History, Jan. 23, 1966, p. 53, John F. Kennedy Library.

  126Only millionaires need apply: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 126.

  126coming of age for the entire community: Parmet, Jack, p. 146.

  126“embarrassed on the stage,” a Kennedy friend recalled: Parmet, Jack, p. 137.

  126didn’t come up the hard way: Parmet, Jack, p. 151.

  127“affection” unlike anything he had seen in politics: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 128.

  127charting an independent path: Perret, Jack, p. 153.

  127challenge facing America in the postwar world was the Soviet Union: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 143.

  128“and old-stock Protestants,” said Richard Gid Powers in his history of American anticommunism: Powers, Not Without Honor, p. 303.

  128imposed by a small militant group by subversion: Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 515.

  129Nixon shared an identical view on this subject: Parmet, Jack, p. 175.

  129between Congress and the American Communist Conspiracy: Parmet, Jack, p. 181.

  129the high cost of living: Parmet, Jack, p. 182.

  130led the local FBI office to maintain a file on him: Morris, Dutch, p. 230.

  130to endorse democratic principles and free enterprise: Morris, Dutch, pp. 230–34.

  131cliques that always voted the Party line: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 255.

  132also denying the studios had a blacklist in place: Cannon, Governor Reagan, pp. 98–99.

  132a grand world-wide propaganda base: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 162.

  Chapter 10: Wives and Other Lovers

  134as if it were his given name: Morris, Dutch, p. 154.

  134innocently sexy: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 152.

  134mad, bad, and dangerous to know: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 153.

  135a lovable guy . . . a really sweet fella: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 151.

  135tousled hair preserved
an adolescent look: Parmet, Jack, p. 84.

  135the All-American boy: Peretti, The Leading Man, pp. 3–4.

  135“my husband was going to kill me.” She was fifty-three years old: Peretti, The Leading Man, p. 1.

  136described him as a “boyish man”: Troy, Morning in America, p. 54.

  136“nice place you have here, ma’am” is a brothel: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 153.

  136even Humphrey Bogart genuine movie stars: Reagan, My Father at 100, p. 9.

  136Kennedy “gave off light instead of heat”: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 151.

  136and no threat to any virgin: Morris, Dutch, p. 154.

  137he knows how to get what he wants: Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 28.

  138no more than a minor irritant for him: Perret, Jack, p. 50.

  138till I’ve had her three ways: Reeves, A Question of Character, p. 241.

  138I get terrible headaches: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 290.

  138passed on to Kennedy’s brother, Robert: Perret, Jack, pp. 345–47.

  138fellatio with his aide Dave Powers while he watched: Alford, Once Upon a Secret, p. 102.

  139wonders what the hell happened to her,” explained Smathers, a notorious Lothario himself: Reeves, A Question of Character, p. 242.

  139Kennedy looked at his watch during the act: Perret, Jack, p. 347.

  139He wasn’t in it for the cuddling: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 151.

  139You see, I haven’t any time: Perret, Jack, p. 190.

  140he never knew next what gender would appeal to him: Clarke, Ask Not, p. 51.

  140What! No Sex Appeal: Morris, Dutch, p. 164.

  140genuinely and spontaneously nice: Morris, Dutch, p. 154.

  140he was “a bore in bed”: Morris, Dutch, p. 262.

  140“Ann Sheridan (a frequent costar), and she was luscious,” one said: Morris, Dutch, p. 154.

  141“He’s a people pleaser,” she said. “Always was”: Morris, Dutch, p. 128.

  141but the desire wasn’t there: Morris, Dutch, p. 268.

  141and made her and other women giggle: Morris, Dutch, p. 266.

  141and being unable to remember her name: Morris, Dutch, pp. 279–82.