Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents

by Cormac O'Brien

  Eisenhower spent as many as 150 days a year on the golf course and even installed a putting green on the White House lawn (it was plagued by squirrels).

  Eisenhower grew up in a Kansas family as large as it was poor. After his father’s general store went belly up, he and his five brothers were lucky to have shoes on their feet. Dwight decided on a military career and went to West Point. Athletics always meant more to him than his studies, and he graduated in the middle of his class. After a knee injury demolished his dreams of being a football player, he resigned himself to a career in the army. (Thank goodness for the civilized world.) His mediocre academic performance belied an extraordinary intelligence, however. He proved so good at training troops during World War I that his superiors kept him back home, ruining his hopes for martial glory. He then went on to serve with General MacArthur in Washington, D.C., and the Philippines, where his uncanny organizational skills won him renown in the officer corps. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower’s star had risen high enough to catch the attention of the nation’s top soldier, General George Marshall.

  As commander of all Allied forces in Europe during World War II, Ike earned a reputation as a gifted conciliator. His American and British underlings were often as eager to pummel each other as they were to pummel the Germans, and Ike struggled to make them operate effectively against the Third Reich. It was the sort of brilliant leadership ability that many thought had “White House” written all over it.

  Many, that is, except Eisenhower himself. Determined not to be a “glory-hopper,” he did everything but run for office: He served as army chief of staff and president of Columbia University and even wrote a bestselling memoir of World War II. The pressure to run grew too great, however, and he finally ran as a Republican in 1952 against Adlai Stevenson. He won in a landslide.

  The last Republican to occupy the Oval Office had been Herbert Hoover, and Ike bent over backward to distance himself from the old Republican guard. His domestic agenda bore a striking resemblance to those of his Democratic predecessors. He expanded Social Security and spent lavishly on public works projects such as the interstate highway system. Though mostly silent on issues of race, he intervened forcefully to support the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was also just as disgusted as Harry Truman had been by Senator Joe McCarthy’s rabid anticommunist rabble-rousing.

  Not that communism didn’t keep him up at night. To the contrary: He continued Truman’s containment policy and bullied the North Koreans into an armistice. With communist rumblings in Southeast Asia and violent Soviet repression in Eastern Europe, it looked to many as if the U.S.S.R. was upping the ante. The launching of Russia’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 only made things worse, and Ike began the stockpiling of nuclear weapons that would define the Cold War.

  For a guy who made such a huff about not running for president, Eisenhower seemed made for the job. An economic boom during his first term helped him crush Adlai Stevenson again in 1956, and Ike maintained a high approval rating. But Eisenhower had planted a terrible seed whose blossom would loom large over his successors: Part of his containment policy involved sending a small group of military advisors to a little-known corner of the world called Vietnam.

  WHERE DID WE GO WRONG WITH THAT BOY?

  Eisenhower’s parents were members of a fundamentalist religious sect known as the River Brethren. They were strict pacifists. The couple who raised one of the most effective soldiers in history could not abide the taking of another life. The only time any of the Eisenhower brothers saw their mother cry was the day she left Ike at the train station to go to West Point.

  IN THE FLESH

  Ike’s lackluster academic performance at West Point may not have been the only reason he graduated 61st in a class of 164. He was also a notorious prankster. On one occasion, he was summoned by his commanding officer to appear in full dress coat. Ike promptly showed up dressed in his coat—and nothing else.

  PUTTERING AROUND

  Eisenhower was an inveterate card player. He and his wife, Mamie, were obsessed with playing bridge and canasta and even had friends flown in to the White House on occasion to make sure they had enough players. But golf was Ike’s first passion. Incredibly, he spent as much as 150 days out of the year on the links during his administration and even had a putting green constructed on the White House lawn. (It was constantly plagued with squirrels.) He loved to win and usually behaved poorly when he lost. After one particularly bad shot, he threw his iron at fellow golfer Dr. Howard Snyder, hitting him in the shin and nearly fracturing the doctor’s leg.

  Revving His Engine

  While he was stationed in England during World War II, Eisenhower’s personal driver was an attractive woman named Kay Summersby. Ike was impressed enough with Kay’s driving (ahem) to request that she be his full-time—er, driver for the rest of the war. It is widely believed that the two shared a physical relationship, though, according to Summersby, Ike’s stick didn’t shift too well. She claims he was impotent.

  CLOSE CALLS

  No spring chicken when he began his presidency, Eisenhower suffered a few serious physical setbacks during his two terms in office. In 1955, while golfing in Denver, he was called from the links four times in one day to take phone calls from Washington. Ike despised having his golf game interrupted, and he became furious. His anger took its toll—that night, he suffered a massive heart attack. Dr. Snyder, Ike’s personal physician, was so worried about the president’s condition that he broke down in tears. When the press learned of the information, all hell broke loose—the following Monday, the stock market lost $14 billion. Ike eventually recovered, but it was merely the first of many heart attacks he would suffer before his death in 1969.

  In 1956, while campaigning for his second term, Eisenhower was diagnosed with ileitis, an intestinal affliction. He had to undergo surgery—twice. But his scariest brush with death by far occurred in 1957. While sitting at his desk, he was overcome with dizziness and retired to his bed. He later rose, went downstairs, and—when asked by his wife, Mamie, what he was doing out of bed—stuttered out a bunch of incoherent words. He had suffered what doctors call a cerebral occlusion, which disrupts the part of the brain dedicated to speech. The president actually took to pounding his fists in frustration at not being able to enunciate his own thoughts. With several weeks of rest (during a critical period of the Cold War), he eventually recovered.

  THE PRICE OF GLORY

  After years as one of the most important men on the face of the planet, Eisenhower had grown accustomed to having the little people attend to details. While he was president, he even had someone dress him—among valet John Moaney’s responsibilities were putting Eisenhower’s watch on while the president held out his wrist and pulling up his boss’s boxer shorts. Such a lifestyle came back to haunt Ike once he left the White House. After leaving public office, he was almost completely ignorant of how to pay for things at a department store, adjust a TV set, get past a tollbooth on the highway, or dial a phone (yes, dial a phone).

  IKE ALIKE

  How did “Dwight” translate into “Ike”? Actually, it didn’t. Ike was an Eisenhower family nickname—all six of the Eisenhower boys were nicknamed “Ike” at one time or another.

  35 JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY

  May 29, 1917–November 22, 1963

  ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini

  TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1961–1963

  PARTY: Democratic

  AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 43

  VICE PRESIDENT: Lyndon B. Johnson

  RAN AGAINST: Richard Nixon

  HEIGHT: 6′1″

  NICKNAMES: “Jack,” “JFK”

  SOUND BITE: “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”

  How do you become one of the most beloved icons of all time after serving only three somewhat unproductive years as president? You begin by having a father who’s incredibly ambitious, utterly unscrupulous, and filthy rich. It also helps to have char
m, humor, and movie-star good looks. And it doesn’t hurt to get cut down by a sniper before your domestic legislation has a chance to get cut down by Congress. John F. Kennedy had it all—and no amount of truth, no matter how ugly, can remove the shining aura from his memory.

  Kennedy had wit, charm, good looks, money, and plenty of female admirers—especially after he made it to the White House.

  “Jack” Kennedy grew up in a Catholic Massachusetts household in which being frail and sickly—which he was—couldn’t be tolerated. His father, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., had amassed a ghastly fortune from Wall Street speculation, investment in Hollywood films, and bootlegging during Prohibition. He ran his household like a boot camp for future achievers. In the clan’s ubiquitous touch football games, winning was everything, and losers learned to hang their heads in shame. Joe’s wife, Rose, contributed to the healthy family atmosphere by keeping her mouth shut and withholding affection from their nine children. When Joe was appointed ambassador to Great Britain by President Franklin Roosevelt, he made an ass of himself by insisting that the British were going to lose the war with Hitler’s Germany. FDR fired him, and by backing the wrong horse, Joe Kennedy ruined his dream of becoming president.

  He then projected all his grandiose dreams on his sons. Joe Jr. was the eldest; unfortunately, his bomber got blown out of the sky over Europe, so Joe Sr. focused his energies on son number two: Jack. After graduating from Harvard, Jack joined the navy and saved the lives of his crewmen after the PT boat he commanded was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. By playing up his “war hero” status and playing down his chronic health problems and womanizing, JFK—with a lot of help from Dad—got elected to the House of Representatives and then the Senate. As the 1960 presidential campaign approached, the Democratic party was willing to overlook JFK’s lightweight congressional record and make the dashing and charismatic Jack their candidate.

  He beat Richard Nixon in one of the closest races in American history, becoming the first Catholic to occupy the Oval Office and the first president to be born in the twentieth century. Though Nixon had a better command of the issues, the new medium of television made the wisecracking, handsome, easygoing Jack into something of a prime-time celebrity. Image would continue to fuel the country’s love of their new president, and visions of JFK with his glamorous wife, Jackie, and their two irresistible young children flickered across TV sets and filled magazine pages.

  But if presidential yacht trips dominated the gossip columns, it was the Cold War that dominated front-page headlines. Just weeks into JFK’s administration, an invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba at the Bay of Pigs by American-backed Cuban exiles ended in disaster. It was an ill-conceived scheme that didn’t ease tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, which had begun cultivating a close relationship with Cuba. Just how close would become clear when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev started shipping missiles to Castro’s little Caribbean paradise. Faced with a nuclear threat just ninety miles from Florida, Kennedy challenged Khrushchev to remove them or face the consequences. An American naval blockade of Cuba made the Soviets back down, preventing World War III.

  Though Kennedy was forced by the Soviets to remove American missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis was Jack Kennedy at his best. A lesser man might have given in to the cries from the military for an invasion of Cuba and allowed the unthinkable to occur. It also led to a groundbreaking arms limitation treaty between the two superpowers. Unfortunately, Kennedy’s decisions weren’t quite as sound concerning South Vietnam, where an American-backed government became corrupt enough to warrant a violent coup d’état. It sent the region into a spiral of strife that would eventually compel America to commit itself to one of the most tragic wars in its history.

  But Kennedy wouldn’t live long enough to see the Vietnam War. On November 22, 1963, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Whether committed by Lee Harvey Oswald alone or by some nefarious conspiracy, it is this tragic moment—so vividly and horribly captured on film—that is frozen in time, the violent end to a young, vibrant life. Absent from that image is the dark side of JFK: the cocky, crooked rich kid who couldn’t keep his pants zipped.

  SLEPT IN THE ATTIC

  In 1957, Jack Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize for his history of leaders in action titled Profiles in Courage. It was mostly ghostwritten. Not that Jack couldn’t write a book of his own—after all, long before Profiles in Courage, he had written a book about England’s lack of preparation for World War II. It was originally a thesis paper for Harvard, cobbled together while he spent time in the United Kingdom during his father’s ambassadorship to that country. Joe Sr. thought it was good enough to be published and pulled some strings to get it in print. Entitled Why England Slept, it was poorly researched and even more poorly written. Nevertheless, it sold quite well. Why, you may ask? Because Joe Sr. immediately bought up 30,000 copies. They sat in the attic of the Kennedy household for years, unread.

  JACK’S BACK

  JFK spent much of his youth in painful physical misery. Whooping cough, tonsillitis, scarlet fever, and appendicitis are among the afflictions he endured as a youth. Unfortunately, his physical burdens continued into adulthood. During the PT boat debacle, he aggravated a back injury that would plague him the rest of his life. He had two operations to remedy it: one that put a metal plate in his back and another to remove it. Both nearly killed him, and until his death, he would resort to using crutches whenever the press wasn’t around. But his most serious malady was Addison’s disease, which impairs the body’s ability to fight infection. In addition to cortisone, JFK was regularly given shots by a doctor named Max Jacobson, popularly known as “Doctor Feelgood” by his numerous clients, many of whom were in show business. As John and Claire Whitcomb explain in their book, Real Life at the White House, the shots were a mixture of vitamins, steroids, amphetamines, and other bizarre substances that could lead to addiction. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” replied the president to his brother Bobby, who had looked into Dr. Jacobson’s concoctions.

  Jacobson lost his license to practice medicine in 1975 for creating and administering “adulterated drugs.”

  SHIP OF FOOLS

  Jack Kennedy was the first navy man to make it to the White House, and he probably couldn’t have done it without his dramatic experience as commander of PT 109. PT boats were tiny, wooden craft armed with torpedoes, and they depended on speed and maneuverability to survive combat with larger ships. After getting his father to pressure the navy into overlooking his physical problems, Jack became an officer, and he eventually weaseled his way into command of PT 109 in the Pacific. In the early morning hours of August 2, 1943, his boat was on patrol with a number of other PT boats, expecting the arrival of Japanese destroyers. They soon arrived all right, and with a bang—because visibility was so poor in the darkness, those aboard the tiny American vessels never saw the Japanese coming. The lead destroyer appeared out of the mist and ran right over Kennedy’s boat, slicing part of it off and sending Jack’s crew into the ocean. The next day, after spending hours in the water, Jack led what remained of his crew (the collision killed two instantly) to a nearby island—saving one man’s life by gripping the guy’s life jacket in his teeth and swimming him to shore. On August 7, the men were rescued. In the boat were reporters sent by Jack’s father to help spread the news of JFK’s exploit. Joe eventually got Reader’s Digest to publish a story about PT 109, and it turned Jack into a bona fide war hero.

  But wait a minute. PT 109 was the only PT boat to get rammed and sunk during all of World War II. And the navy isn’t in the habit of rewarding skippers who lose their ships. In fact, the young Kennedy committed several offenses for which he could have been court-martialed: He had secretly replaced PT 109’s only lifeboat with a heavy gun to increase the vessel’s armament; he had allowed two men to sleep in the hours leading up to the collision when combat was imminent; and h
e had repeatedly left his men on the island to go searching for rescue boats. An inquiry was made after the incident, and many officers believed that Kennedy’s career was finished. But the man responsible for writing the inquiry’s report was none other than Byron White, an old friend of the Kennedys. That—and the fact that Joe Sr. had more connections in Washington than anybody dared to count—got Jack off the hook. Indeed, he was awarded a medal for saving the lives of his crewmen. And that’s how a legend is born.

  MOB RULE

  Jack Kennedy had wit, intelligence, and personal magnetism. But he was no Washington heavyweight, and he needed all the help he could get in the 1960 presidential campaign. According to many historians, that help would come from some pretty shady characters. With the assistance of Frank Sinatra, a close Kennedy pal who rubbed shoulders with the Italian mob, Joe Sr. arranged a meeting in Chicago with none other than Sam Giancana, one of the nation’s most powerful mafiosi. As Seymour Hersh explains in The Dark Side of Camelot, the meeting took place in a Chicago courthouse and was organized by one William Tuohy, chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County and another Kennedy crony. In the meeting, Giancana pledged to Joe Sr. that the mob-controlled unions would turn out in force to make sure the election went Kennedy’s way. They would do it by ensuring that all their members voted Democrat and by spending money to buy votes. It is believed by many that Giancana was told that a Kennedy administration would take the heat off the Chicago crime outfit in return for the mafia’s help.

  In a victory with a margin of less than 120,000 votes nationwide, Giancana’s help proved invaluable. Though the scheme almost certainly tipped the balance in JFK’s favor in several states, nowhere was the mob’s influence more vital than in Illinois, whose twenty-seven votes in the electoral college were decisive. Though accusations of vote fraud were filed after the election, they failed to result in more than a few minor indictments. After Kennedy was sworn in, the matter went nowhere—after all, the president’s brother had become the new attorney general, the highest law-enforcement official in the country.