the blog of author Colin Falconer

It is fifty years to the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, but his life - and death - continue to fascinate. He was certainly one of America’s most charismatic Presidents. But how much do you know about him?

1. He was a sickly child, often bed-ridden

He was hospitalized more than thirty times in his life. He had suffered from colitis since his late teens as well as a duodenal ulcer, Addison’s disease, frequent UTI’s, and hyperthyroidism. His medical records were largely kept hidden from the American public.

2. He flirted with death all his life

He almost died from scarlet fever when he was 3 and received the last rites no less than four times in his life.

The first occasion was on the ocean liner ‘Queen Mary’ in 1947 after becoming gravely ill in England; in 1951 while stricken with a high fever in Japan; and in 1954 after a urinary tract infection following spinal surgery.

The last time, of course, was on November 22 1963, in Dallas.

3. He was no coward

He could have avoided combat legitimately but chose not to. At the start of World War Two he tried to enlist but the Army disqualified him on medical grounds because of his intestinal and back problems. He used his father’s considerable connections to get accepted.

4. He was a genuine war hero.

When the PT-109 that he was commanding was sunk by a Japanese destroyer, he towed a badly burned crewman through the water with a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth. He later received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for extreme heroism.

5. He carved a rescue message on a coconut

After the sinking he and his crew were stranded on an island. He carved a message onto the husk of a coconut shell and gave it to two natives to deliver to the PT base at Rendova so he and his men could be rescued. He later had it encased in wood and plastic and used it as a paperweight in the Oval Office. It is now in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

6. He was not supposed to go into politics

His older brother Joe Junior was supposed to carry the family’s standard into the political arena but he was killed while serving the USAF during World War Two.

7. He won a Pulitzer Prize.

It was awarded in 1957 for his second book “Profiles in Courage,” although there is considerable debate about how much was written by his aide Theodore Sorensen.

8. He was beyond rich.

In fact, Kennedy was the richest man ever to take the oath of office and gave his entire $100,000-a-year White House salary to charity.

9. He is still the only President to ever receive a Purple Heart.

10. He was the first President to dance with a black woman at an inaugural ball.

11. He also bugged the White House.

No, Nixon wasn’t the first to do it.

Kennedy installed a secret taping system in the Oval office before Nixon did.

It recorded many historical discussions between JFK and his staff, including conversations during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

12. He bought 1,200 high-grade Cuban cigars the day before he ordered a ban on Cuban imports.

13. He wanted to share the moon with the Russians.

In September 1963, alarmed at the cost of NASA’s space program, he proposed partnering the Soviet Union on a joint expedition to the moon.

14. He thought Vietnam was an unwinnable war.

He escalated the Vietnam conflict even though he thought America could not win. In April,1963 he said, supposedly off the record: “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our butts out of there.” But he went ahead anyway, rather than risk electoral backlash.

15. He shared a mistress with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana.

Judith Exner was sleeping with the Illinois godfather and the President of the United States at the same time.

Sleeping with Monroe upset his wife. Sleeping with Exner severely compromised his government.

16. He smoked marijuana with mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer in the White House.

17. His back condition was so severe he was forced to wear a back brace.

On November 22, it kept him erect after the first bullet went through his neck so that he was unable to fall forwards. This would have prevented a second and fatal bullet from hitting him in the head.

18. He was the target of four assassination attempts prior to Dallas.

Just a month after he was elected President a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick followed the president-elect from Hyannis Port to Palm Beach. His car was loaded with dynamite and he intended to ram the president’s vehicle and blow it up. He was foiled by a routine traffic stop.

Two more assassination plots were uncovered, one in Chicago on the 2nd November 1963 and another in Tampa four days before Dallas.

19. The first physician to see Kennedy at Parkland had delivered Lee Harvey Oswald’s baby one month before.

20. The police captain who led the interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald had been with the Dallas Police Department for so long he had been part of the team that hunted down Bonnie and Clyde.

21. Some of the men in his cortege had just been in a fight.

Jackie Kennedy asked the Scottish Black Watch pipers to march in front of his funeral cortege. Some had cuts and bruises from a bar brawl in Kentucky where they had defended Jack’s name and reputation on the night of the assassination.

22. Kennedy was the only U.S. president whose grandmother lived longer than he did.

Having read through the list perhaps you came to the same conclusion that I did; beyond the gloss lay a man full of contradictions.

He may have been a legend. He was also very human …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O08SnHb_gCM&w=560&h=315]

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16 THINGS A WAR CORRESPONDENT WILL TELL YOU

War correspondents have existed as long as war, and that is a very, very long time.

The Valley of Death complete with cannonballs, Crimea 1855

Before modern war journalism, accounts were written at the end of a conflict, such as Thucydides account of the Peloponnesian Wars.

Dutch painter Willem van de Velde is credited with being the first modern war correspondent; in 1653 he used a small boat to row out from land and watch a naval battle between the Dutch and the English at close hand.

When newspapers became established, one Henry Crabb Robinson covered Napoleon’s European campaigns for the London Times.

One of history’s most famous photographers, Robert Capa, once said:

“I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.”

In fact he barely got a moment’s rest. In the thirties and forties he covered the Spanish Civil War, the second Sino-Japanese war, World War Two, the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and then the first Indochina war - in which he was killed.

Modern war correspondents aim to bring graphic images and reports of wars from around the globe right into our living rooms to show us what it’s really like.

And the last I heard there were no rumors of peace. The modern war correspondent’s job still appears recession proof.

What is their shocking truth about the shocking truth?

1.‘I have made arrangements for the correspondents to take the field .. . and I have suggested to them that they should wear a white uniform to indicate the purity of their character.’

- attributed to Union General Irvin McDowell during the American Civil War.

aftermath of Antietam

2. ‘By showing war in its stinking reality, we have taken away the glory and shown that negotiation is the only way to solve international problems.’

- Howard Smith, ABC news presenter

3. ‘Take the glamor out of war? I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that? … Can you take the glamor out of a Cobra, or getting stoned at China Beach? … War is good for you, you can’t take the glamor out of that. It’s like trying to take the glamor out of sex, trying to take the glamor out of the Rolling Stones!’

- Tim Page, combat photographer, Vietnam War, in his autobiography Page by Page

4. ‘If you have not seen a battle, your education has been somewhat neglected. For after all, war has been one of the primary functions of mankind, and unless you see men fight you miss something fundamental.’

- Herbert Matthews

5. ‘I just figured what with guns going off and things blowing up, there’d be plenty of deep truths and penetrating insights.’

- P.J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell

6. ‘When one’s nation is at war, reporting becomes an extension of the war effort.’

- Max Hastings

7. ‘I wouldn’t tell the people anything until the war was over - and then I’d tell them who won.’

- military censor at a meeting in Washington

8. ‘You see these things, these terrible things. But in an odd way they’re good stories.’

- Charles Mohr

9. ‘War is the ambulance chaser’s wet dream … the visions of misery and suffering can also provide a convenient reference point for putting aside one’s own damaged emotions.’

- Paul Harris. ‘Someone Else’s War.’

10. ‘Perhaps everyone who reports on war is in part sating their own dark curiosities. I know I will return soon.’

- Askold Krushelnycky, war correspondent

11. ‘Most wars literally, not merely photographically, go through people’s living rooms.’

- Charles Mohr, war correspondent

12. ‘Nothing makes an easier lead sentence than a stray mortar round hitting a starving baby in a typhus hospital.’

- P. J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell

Leningrad 1941

13. ‘Working as a war correspondent is almost the only classic male endeavor left that provides physical danger and personal risk without public disapproval and the awful truth is that for correspondents war is not hell. It is fun.’

- Nora Ephron

14. ‘It is not the bullet with my name on that worries me. It’s the one that says: “To whom it may concern.’”

- resident of Belfast

15. ‘The brave ones shot bullets; the crazy ones shot film.’

– quote from ‘Joseph Longo, founder of the International Combat Camera Association’

16. ‘Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitized language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers children. Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story.’

- Marie Colvin. Killed in Homs Syria February 2012 while reporting on the Syrian conflict.

From Vietnam to El Salvador, Sean Ryan and Hugh Webb share beers, lovers and slit trenches and photograph the worst that human beings can do to each other.

They think themselves above it. But are they?

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