Jack Kennedy Quotes

“It was his detachment that saved us. Another man would have reacted with force to the Soviet treachery. He would have shared the righteousness of the cause, been stirred to attack by the saber rattling. Jack resisted. He was not moved by the emotion of other around him. He knew his course and stayed to it. Thank God. The boy who had read alone of history's heroes was now safely on of them. He had done it not winning a war, but by averting one far more horrible than any leader in the past could have imagined.”
― Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

“Then he [JFK] got a phone call. "I heard the voice on the other end of the line say, 'Young man, this is Phil Graham.' I'd never met Phil Graham before in my life." Of course, he know who the Washington Post publisher was.
"And he said, 'I just want to say one thing to you. Don't tear something apart in such a way that you can never put it back together again.' I said, 'Okay,' and hung up the phone. Of course, it immediately dawned on me what he was trying to say to me. It was that there was a chance of a Kennedy-Johnson ticket." Graham, it turns out, was pushing Johnson to accept the vice presidency if Kennedy offered it, and was pushing the idea of the ticket to LBJ as being for the good of the country. p280”
― Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

“In aiming high and refusing to be satisfied with even the governor's job- when what he wanted was to be a senator- Jack was showing how much his ambitions paralleled his father's. Joe Kennedy refused to settle for what his fellow Boston Irish regarded as good enough achievement, an upper-middle-class level of success. Joe wanted more- and allowed nothing to stand in his way. In his own words: "For the Kennedys, it's either the castle or the outhouse." p122”
― Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

“As he had all his life, Jack found refuge from his health worries in the power of words and ideas. Reading remained his salvation, and not just the daily newspapers that are the daily fare of most politicians. p108”
― Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

“Kennedy picked Clark Clifford, who’d been President Truman’s counselor, to be his liaison with the outgoing Eisenhower staff. An astute observer of men and power, Clifford recognized early on John Kennedy’s ability to detach himself from himself. You’d see him sitting at meetings, Clifford once told me, and you could almost imagine JFK’s spirit assuming a form of its own and rising up, the better to look down on the group and assess its various members’ motives and agendas. It was the same uncanny detachment Chuck Spalding had seen in Jack on his wedding day.”
― Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero