JFK and the Masculine Mystique by Steven Watts

Author:Steven Watts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

EIGHT

CELEBRITY JOURNALIST: BEN BRADLEE

On the evening of the West Virginia primary in May 1960, an anxious John F. Kennedy waited for the returns to dribble in. This was a stringent test for the Democratic senator, who, as a Catholic candidate, had yet to prove that he could pull votes in a pervasively Protestant state. So he sought respite from the tension by corralling the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek, Ben Bradlee, along with their wives—the couples had enjoyed dinner together—to see a movie. They originally went to see Suddenly, Last Summer, a popular new film, but when it was sold out, Kennedy chose a stag film showing at a rather run-down Washington theater across the street. It was, in Bradlee’s words, “a nasty thing called Private Property, starring one Katie Manx as a horny housewife.” The journalist later discovered that the movie was on “the Catholic Index of forbidden films.” After the movie, the Kennedys and Bradlees returned to the senator’s home to learn that he had won a big victory. After a bottle of champagne was opened, JFK invited the reporter and his wife to fly down to West Virginia on his private plane, the Caroline, for a victory appearance, and the Bradlees happily accepted.1

This politically significant evening provided a glimpse of how Kennedy’s legendary libido lay intertwined with his political success. But the events of that night revealed even more about Ben Bradlee. They exhibited the bond of forthright male sexuality that linked the aspiring president and the up-and-coming young reporter. It also disclosed an unusually close friendship between a journalist and his subject, one that would eventually raise eyebrows over its impropriety even as it launched a fabulous career that made Bradlee the most famous and influential newsman in Washington, D.C., within a few years. That spring evening in 1960 captured the symbiotic relationship of two like-minded young men in the heady days of a new era in Washington, one held together with a bond of commingled affection and self-interest that would go far to burnish JFK’s masculine mystique.

Bradlee had met Kennedy two years before when they became neighbors in a Georgetown neighborhood and, along with their spouses, passed on the sidewalk pushing baby carriages. Stopping for a conversation, the couples ended up talking in the Kennedys’ backyard and discovered that they were attending the same dinner party later that evening, where they had been assigned to sit next to each other. Like their husbands, Jackie Kennedy and Tony Bradlee hit it off, and as they all uncovered many common interests, including the magnet of young children, the two couples soon became close friends. They socialized frequently, traveled together to campaign functions after the senator launched his bid for the Democratic nomination, and even spent time at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port and, later, Camp David. But the relationship involved more than friendship. It involved the entanglement of politics and journalism, two key parts of a larger culture of celebrity, information, and entertainment in America’s postwar mass society.

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