* I wish to acknowledge the contribution to this project of seven talented former students of political science at Queens College of the City University of New York: Richard Allinson, Harold Cohen, Steven Goldberg, Ralph Nurnberger, Adolph Schifrin, Simeon Soterakis, and Miss Susan Reardon. It was their deep interest in John F. Kennedy that stimulated me to undertake this study.

¹ Greenstein, Fred, “The Impact of Personality on Politics,” American Political Science Review, 61 (1967), 634.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² The most complete and informed discussion of the principle of strategic intervention is to be found in Kotarbinski, Tadeusz, Praxiology: An Introduction to the Science of Efficient Action, (Warsaw, 1965).Google Scholar

³ The term “resonance” denotes deep personal significance. A discussion of the term can be found in Greenstein, “The Impact of Personality on Politics.”

⁴ These decisions were selected from a sample of sixteen which were originally examined because they seemed intuitively representative of the salient aspirations of Kennedy administration. The sixteen were classified along foreign/domestic and command/consent dimen sions, yielding four categories (s = success, f = failure, and d = delay): I. Foreign consent: Test ban treaty (s), Alliance for Progress (s), Trade expansion (s) and Peace corps (s); II. Foreign command: Cuban missile crisis (s), Berlin crisis (s), Postponement of nuclear testing (s), Bay of Pigs (f); III. Domestic consent: Medicare (f), Aid to higher education (f), Department of Urban Affairs (f), Civil rights (d); IV. Domestic command: Steel crisis (s), Racial ban in federal housing (s), Wage/price guidelines (s), Meredith case (f). The four decisions examined were in the command category, as stipulated by the model; each decisional area is represented by one case. The existence of failures in both the domestic and foreign categories would appear to rule out “decisional arena” as a significant causal variable.

⁵ The concept of personality adopted here is basically sociological (or organizational) and can best be described as an integrated model because it attempts to bring some rather disparate strands of modern psychology together into the same framework. Motivation, cognition and perception, ego structure, performance and learning are viewed as internal parts and processes of a cybernetic system. The use of these concepts in this way is consistent with the description of personality put forward by McClelland, David C., Personality (New York, 1961).Google Scholar

⁶ Data used to describe Kennedy's personality and decisional behaviour were drawn from the following sources: (a) Kennedy, John F., Why England Slept (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; (b) Kennedy, John F., Profiles in Courage (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; (c) Whalen, Richard, The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York, 1964)Google Scholar; (d) Burns, James McGregor, John Kennedy: A Political Profile (New York, 1960)Google Scholar; (e) Cutler, John Henry “Honey Fitz”: Three Steps to the White House (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; (f) Fay, Paul Jr., The Pleasure of His Company (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; (g) Kennedy, Rose, John F. Kennedy: As We Remember Him (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; (h) Sorensen, Theodore, Kennedy (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; (i) Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston, 1965)Google Scholar; (f) Lincoln, Evelyn, My Twelve Years with JFK (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; (k) Dinneen, Joseph F., The Kennedy Family (Boston, 1959)Google Scholar; (l) White, Theodore, The Making of the President, 1960 (New York, 1961).Google Scholar

⁷ Kleinmuntz, Benjamin, Personality Measurement: An Introduction (Homewood, 1967), 8.Google Scholar

⁸ Although somewhat mechanical in structure and operation, the cybernetic model is consistent with the conception of man as a complex information-processing system found in March, James and Simon, Herbert, Organizations (New York, 1958), 9–11.Google Scholar In my model, concepts like motivation, perception and cognition, ego structure, and skill traits provide a convenient method of classifying items of information about personality in terms of functional relationships. The model and the way in which information about Kennedy is classified are purely speculative. A readable discussion of cybernetic systems can be found in Khun, Alfred, The Study of Society: A Unified Approach (Homewood, 1963), 42–7.Google Scholar

⁹ For a formulation of the principle of least effort in terms of economic exchange, see Curry, R. L. Jr., and Wade, L. L., A Theory of Political Exchange: Economic Reasoning in Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, 1968).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Skinner, B. F., Science and Human Behavior (New York, 1963).Google Scholar

¹¹ The distinction between “sign conditioning” and “latent learning” (thinking) is found in Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York, 1964).Google Scholar

¹² This classification was borrowed from Fuller, John L., Motivation: A Biological Perspective (New York, 1964), 42–53.Google Scholar

¹³ For an analysis of sentiments see Homans, George Casper, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (New York, 1961), 164–80.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Biogenic and neurogenic needs are presumably functional for the maintenance and efficient operation of the vegetative and associational systems: see Altman, Joseph, Organic Foundations of Animal Behavior (New York, 1966)Google Scholar, chap. 15. Emotional needs are “implanted’ by the surplus sentiments that habitually accompany material values and activities during the socialization process. When a child is finally capable of improved discrimination, sentiments become independent sources of motivational arousal. McClelland, Personality.

¹⁵ Horney, Karen, The Neurotic Personality in Our Time (New York, 1937).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Definitions of infavoidance and succorance were borrowed from Henry A. Murray, “Variables of Personality,” in Murray, Henry A. ed., Explorations in Personality (New York, 1965), 182–91.Google Scholar Concealment of disfigurement is taken as evidence of infavoidance: a person hampered by a fear of failure is apt to present himself to others in ways that encourage them to believe he is perfect and whole. Kennedy (a) underplayed the seriousness of his Addison's Disease; (b) never discussed his back injury with even his most intimate colleagues; (c) frequently hid his crutches from constituents; (d) always took his pills in private; (e) avoided his glasses in public and in the presence of photographers; (f) refurbished his tan with a sun-lamp when the beach was unavailable. Sorensen, Kennedy, 38–49; Lincoln, My Twelve Years with JFK, 53, 234; Burns, John Kennedy: A Political Profile, 154.

Helplessness is taken as an indicator of succorance: a person who wishes to be cared for is apt to feign helplessness and dependence to elicit nurturant responses. Kennedy: (a) became notorious for his lack of order and sloppiness at Choate; (b) could not remember names, telephone numbers, and appointments in the presence of his Senate secretary, Evelyn Lincoln; (c) took his boyhood nanny (Margaret Ambrose) with him to Washington as housekeeper. According to Lincoln, Mrs. Ambrose “babied him like a mother hen with her brood” and she wondered whether Mrs. Ambrose “had as much difficulty picking up after the Senator at home as I had at the office.” Whalen, The Founding Father, 166–7; Lincoln, My Twelve Years With JFK, 21–6.

¹⁷ These included scarlet fever, diphtheria, an appendectomy, a chronic allergy of the stomach, two bouts with jaundice, and a serious back injury. His illnesses typically struck while he was away attending school: Choate, the London School of Economics, Princeton, and Harvard. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 80.

¹⁸ Bucklew, John, Paradigms for Psychopathology (Chicago, 1960), 34–6.Google Scholar

¹⁹ See White, Robert W., “Motivation Reconsidered: The Concept of Competence,” Psychological Review, 66 (1959), 297–333.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

²⁰ Ausubel, David, Balthazar, Earl, Rosenthal, Irene, Blackman, Leonard, Schpoont, Seymour, and Welkowitz, Joan, “Perceived Parent Attitudes as Determinants of Children's Ego Structure,” Child Development, 25 (1954), 173–183.Google ScholarPubMed The authors have produced suggestive experimental evidence for the dichotomy between the satellizing and what I have chosen to call the deviant ego. My derivations are purely speculative.

²¹ Kennedy sustained his second spinal injury when PT 109 went down in the Solomons. During early convalescence prior to being discharged from the Navy, he contracted malaria and sciatica. After his first unsuccessful operation, he acquired Addison's Disease. He nearly died from hepatitis during a Congressional junket to the Far East in 1951. A staphylococcus infection after the second spinal operation became so serious that he was given the last rites of his church twice. Subsequent novacaine treatments to ease his pain caused anemia. Orthopedic shoes and a back brace brought his spinal difficulty under partial control (his left leg was almost an inch shorter than his right and produced spinal pressure when he walked). Nutritional supplements cured his anemia, and cortisone kept the Addison's Disease in check. Sorensen, Kennedy, 38–42; Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 95–6.

²² Not only was he Catholic, but he was only forty-two. Among “realistic” contenders (Stevenson, Humphrey, Johnson) he was the least distinguished.

²³ Kennedy thought of his years in the House as “boring” and was offended by the unpromising committee assignments allocated by the Senate leadership. Sorensen, Kennedy, 27,43.

²⁴ Kennedy permitted publication of a poorly written bachelor's thesis a year after his graduation from Harvard. He ran for the House at twenty-nine, the Senate at thirty-five and the vice presidential nomination at thirty-nine. His impulsive entry into the VP race seems to have been partly motivated by the loss of his seat on the Harvard Board of Overseers in 1955, a seat highly prized by the clan because his father had failed to acquire it in 1936. Kennedy's drive for the vice presidential nomination was so hastily organized that it collapsed when his supporters discovered that Stevenson preferred a Protestant running mate. When Stevenson unexpectedly turned the decision over to the convention, Kennedy plunged back into the race with less than twenty-four hours to regroup his forces. Whalen, The Founding Father, 222; Sorensen, Kennedy, 18, 78–92.

²⁵ Instead of relaxing after the 1956 election, Kennedy launched his own drive for the White House immediately, subsisting on “hamburgers and milkshakes” as he travelled the country for the next three years in a gruelling search for the support of potential delegates. Sorensen, Kennedy, 99–106.

²⁶ His first back injury at Harvard ruled out continued competition in contact sports, so Kennedy turned to swimming. He practised the backstroke secretly while confined to the infirmary with influenza; his friend Torbert McDonald drove him to and from the pool because he was too weak to walk. He managed to graduate cum laude from Harvard in spite of two earlier years of marginal work. And when his back injury caused him to fail the Army's physical examination, he exercised until he could pass the Navy's. Rose Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, 22; Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 85–6.

²⁷ Whalen, The Founding Father, 402–4; 425–6.

²⁸ Burns, John Kennedy, 28.

²⁹ Kennedy could remember liking Ivanhoe, King Arthur, Scottish Chiefs, and The White Company. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 80, 105.

³⁰ Especially Marlborough, Melbourne, Quincy Adams, Lincoln, Calhoun, Talleyrand. Ibid., 80, 105.

³¹ The original title, Appeasement at Munich, was changed to Why England Slept when the thesis was published. His central theme was that in struggles with totalitarian regimes, democracies are handicapped by institutional weaknesses which can only be compensated for by superior leadership. This could easily have been a restatement in political terms of the conclusions Kennedy had reached about the solution of his own problem, namely that disciplined and learned self-management, based on merciless self-criticism, was the only way to supress his destructive succorant tendencies and finally rival the accomplishments of an insensitive and “pugnacious” brother. The book's projective title should have been Why Jack Kennedy Slept. Kennedy's Inaugural Address is also full of metaphors that appear to have projective meaning. For example, “Ask not what Kennedy can do for you, but what you can do for Kennedy.”

³² This meant having the family near when he was away from home, or if this was not possible (as during the war) to create a surrogate family. During the war and for most of his life thereafter, the surrogate was the PT Rat Pack. The personal significance of the Rat Pack is demonstrated by the fact that “Shafty” Kennedy appointed “Bitter Bill” Battle Ambassador to Australia, “Red” Fay Under Secretary of the Navy, “Jim Jam Jumping” Jim Reed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and Byron “Whizzer” White Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. All were undoubtedly able public servants, but Kennedy's motive in bringing several of them to Washington was primarily personal. See Fay, Jr., The Pleasure of His Company.

³³ My treatment of cognition represents a modification of a line of thought first developed by Rokeach, Milton, The Open and Closed Mind (New York, 1960).Google Scholar The distinction between operational and ontological beliefs contradicts the descriptive orientation in cognitive psychology which generally fails to identify beliefs in terms of functions performed. The implication of my analysis is that the cognitive system can be altered in highly selective ways, which means that some beliefs (operational) can change without affecting others (ontological). A person can alter some aspects of his political behaviour without making corresponding adjustments in his basic values. Thus, conflict is possible at the operational level without disturbing the ontological or normative consensus of a group.

³⁴ Kubzansky, Philip, “The Effect of Reduced Environmental Stimulation on Human Behavior: A Review,” in Biderman, Albert and Zinner, Herbert, eds., The Manipulation of Human Behaviour (New York, 1961), 51–95.Google Scholar If beliefs are acquired through conditioning, then they can only be maintained through continual reinforcement. Stimulus deprivation curtails reinforcement and creates the necessary conditions for “brainwashing.”

³⁵ Sorensen, Kennedy, 32.

³⁶ Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 94.

³⁷ McGeorge Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Dillon, Taylor, Bell, Heller, Ball and Murrow acquired important assignments in the administration solely on the basis of distinguished reputations for excellence.

³⁸ These conclusions accord well with assessments offered by Sorensen and Schlesinger, Jr.

³⁹ For an analysis of the psychology of performances, see Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, 1959).Google Scholar For the relationship between performances and attractiveness, see Blau, Peter, Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York, 1964), 34–42.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ As his record of failure in domestic/consent politics clearly indicates, Kennedy was not overly successful in manipulating people who were not attached to him emotionally. In a sense he was an overspecialized political actor, capable of demonstrating his attractiveness but incapable of translating attraction into policy payoffs.

⁴¹ Kennedy's external skills have been excluded because they have very little bearing on the decisions examined, although his ability to keep routine political engagements during the height of the Cuban missile crisis without alerting his audiences or the press to the situation played a major role in the successful execution of the blockade scenario. Research after the assassination indicates that his efforts at image building were successful. Children and adults remembered him as a person of immense drive and self-confidence; altruism, modesty; intelligence, wit, and competence. See Kaiser, Henry F., “Image of a President: Some Insights into the Political Views of School Children,” American Political Science Review, 62 (March 1968), 208–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar These images were precisely the ones Kennedy wanted his external audience to acquire.

⁴² Kotarbinski, Praxiology.

⁴³ A fifth decision (postponement of nuclear testing) was also examined, but space limitations require its exclusion here. In many ways, this decision fits the abrogation syndrome more closely than the two reported. The bargain was explicit, deception was clearly involved, Kennedy was angry and disappointed, and made an instantaneous decision to postpone the American resumption in order to encourage the Soviet Union not to finish the test series. He justified his decision in terms of preventing a testing race that could upset the nuclear balance of power. His choice eventually mushroomed over a long period of time into the strategy of gambling the American testing option at Geneva in order to give the Soviets an incentive to sign a test ban treaty. The high state of technical knowledge in the field of nuclear weaponry and Kennedy's operational regulations (especially his persistent questioning of the experts) were primary factors in the evolution of the Geneva scenario. Schlesinger, Jr., 451–95.

⁴⁴ McConnell, Grant, Steel and the Presidency: 1962 (New York, 1963), 5–6.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 801. Schlesinger's view is supported by that of an “insider” (Hugh Sidey), who reports that Kennedy not only reacted hastily in the choice of a value alternative, but also opted immediately for the use of armed force before consulting his military advisors. The implication is that the surgical strike scenario originated with Kennedy rather than some of his “hawkish” and impulsive advisors, as Sorensen and Schlesinger suggest. When McGeorge Bundy “told Kennedy that there was unmistakable evidence of nuclear offensive weapons in Cuba, the Celt in J.F.K. stirred first. After a few choice expletives, he, like Bundy, with vision narrowed by shock and danger, declared that armed forces would have to strike Cuba to remove the threat. From that perilous summit of passion there was a long slope of restraint and deliberation that led to the remarkable solution,” (Italics mine). Sidey, Hugh, “The Presidency: A Classic Use of the Great Office,” Life, 65 (Nov. 22, 1968), 4.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Sorensen, Kennedy, 295.

⁴⁷ Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 940–1.

⁴⁸ Sorensen, Kennedy, 483, for the costs of the Meredith case, and Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 238–9, for the costs of the Bay of Pigs.

⁴⁹ Sorensen, Kennedy, 294–309; Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 233–86.

⁵⁰ Sorensen, Kennedy, 483–8; Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days, 940–9.

⁵¹ Sorensen, Kennedy, 484.