JFK Quotes

“Jack was lying in bed, very pale, which highlighted the freckles across his nose. He was so surrounded by books I could hardly see him. I was very impressed, because at that point this very young child was reading The World Crisis, by Winston Churchill.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“The politician, whose authority rests upon the mandate of the popular will, is resentful of the scholar who can, with dexterity, slip from position to position without dragging the anchor of public opinion…. The intellectual, on the other hand, finds it difficult to accept the differences between the laboratory and the legislature. In the former, the goal is truth, pure and simple, without regard to changing currents of public opinion; in the latter, compromises and majorities and procedural customs and rights affect the ultimate decision as to what is right or just or good. And even when they realize this difference, most intellectuals consider their chief functions that of the critic—and politicians are sensitive to critics—( possibly because we have so many of them). “Many intellectuals,” Sidney Hook has said, “would rather die than agree with the majority, even on the rare occasions when the majority is right.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“And she helped transform him into a better public speaker, coaxing him to abandon his high, nasal twang in favor of deeper, more sonorous tones. (A vocal coach had given Jack the same advice, and for a time he spent some minutes each morning barking like a dog to deepen his voice.)”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“Here he was, half a continent from home, surrounded by strangers and subjected to an endless string of tests, each one seemingly designed to damage his dignity. Yet his letters give little evidence of self-pity or of the other emotion that many teenagers in his condition—or adults, for that matter—would feel, namely, fear. He was sick and hurting but wouldn’t admit it, not even perhaps to himself. Instead he stood detached, a ceaseless observer of his own life, his letters suffused with his characteristic stoicism and a dark and richly inventive sense of humor.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“the U.S. economy had grown faster than any economy had ever grown before—by an astronomical margin—fueled in good part by the arrival of millions of enterprising immigrants who, uneducated and poor though they might be, had ambition, energy, and intelligence in abundance.6”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“This project saved his life,” Jackie said. “It helped him channel all his energies while distracting him from pain.”53”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“In short, we even support and sustain corruption and tyranny to maintain a status-quo wherever we find existing regimes anti-communistic”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“Rather than combating the irrationality of the charges of softness on Communism and subversion, the Truman Administration, sure that it was the lesser of two evils, moved to expropriate the issue, as in a more subtle way it was already doing in foreign affairs. So the issue was legitimized; rather than being the property of the far right, which the centrist Republicans tolerated for obvious political benefits, it had even been picked up by the incumbent Democratic party.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“Kennedy’s view was closer to that of Norwegian resistance fighter Knut Lier-Hansen: “Though wars can bring adventures which stir the heart, the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies, of grief, waste and sacrifice, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“Previous to that I had been somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and laying off. But with the chips down, that all faded away. I can now believe—which I never would have before—the stories of Bataan and Wake. For an American it’s got to be awfully easy or awfully tough.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“His usual approach in his young life—letting events come to him, being the detached if often perspicacious observer—would not suffice here, he realized. He had to seize control, had to bend destiny to his will.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“When he learned from home that “all the nuns and priests along the Atlantic coast” were “putting in a lot of praying time” on his behalf, Jack was comforted but said he hoped “it won’t be taken as a sign of lack of confidence in you all or the Church if I continue to duck.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“The work was all-consuming that winter, and friends recalled the long hours he spent in the Spee Club library, toiling away, surrounded by stacks of books and documents, his Underwood typewriter in front of him, as the fireplace burned orange and red and the snow fell outside. “How’s your book coming?” they would ask him—in jest, as no one really believed it would become a published work. He would respond with a disquisition on whatever section he was working on. “We used to tease him about it all the time,” one of them remembered, “because it was sort of his King Charles head that he was carrying around all the time: his famous thesis. We got so sick of hearing about it that I think he finally shut up.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“The Harvard diplomatic historian William L. Langer, with whom Jack took a course, marveled at the shift in popular attitudes since 1917, when so many people had bought Woodrow Wilson’s argument that the United States had a duty to make the world “safe for democracy.” Langer said, in a book he wrote with S. Everett Gleason, “Americans, having once believed, erroneously, that war would settle everything, were now disposed to endorse the reverse fallacy that war could settle nothing.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“Years later, one weary weekend visitor outlined the “Rules for Visiting the Kennedys”: Anticipate that each Kennedy will ask what you think of another Kennedy’s (a) dress, (b) hairdo, (c) backhand, (d) latest public achievement. Be sure to answer “terrific.” This should get you through dinner. Now for the football field. It’s “touch,” but it’s murder. If you don’t want to play, don’t come. If you do come, play, or you’ll be fed in the kitchen and no one will speak to you. Don’t let the girls fool you. Even pregnant, they can make you look silly. Above all, don’t suggest any plays, even if you played quarterback at school. The Kennedys have the signal-calling department sewed up, and all of them have A-pluses in leadership…. Run madly on every play, and make a lot of noise. Don’t appear to be having too much fun, though. They’ll accuse you of not taking the game seriously enough.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“In the winter of 1932, when two friends picked him up from the Bronxville train station, he remarked sardonically, “I want to stop by the house for a minute, and check the nursery and see if there’s anybody new in the family.” He came out and exclaimed, “By God, there is!” (It was Teddy, born on February 22.)”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“Although at one time or another all of the Kennedy kids hit their father up for an increased weekly allowance, no effort would be quite as stylish as Jack’s “Plea for a Raise,” issued to “My Mr. J. P. Kennedy” sometime during the first year in New York, and invoking a phrase from I Corinthians 13: My recent allowance is 40 ¢. This I used for aeroplanes and other playthings of childhood but now I am a scout and I put away my childish things. Before I would spend 20 ¢ of my ¢. 40 allowance and in five minutes I would have empty pockets and nothing to gain and 20 ¢ to lose. When I am a scout I have to buy canteens, haversacks, blankets, searchlidgs [sic], ponchos, things that will last for years… and so I put in my plea for a raise of thirty cents for me to buy scout things and pay my own way more around.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“In 1922, movies drew some forty million viewers weekly; by 1929 the number approached a hundred million—this at a time when the nation’s population was 122 million and weekly church attendance was sixty million.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“Like the journalist Walter Lippmann, who was two years ahead of him in the class of 1910, he did not fully realize how many Harvards there were, and how little they overlapped. 47 There was the Harvard of the privileged young men from proper families such as the Cabots, Bancrofts, Winthrops, Welds, Lodges, and Saltonstalls, with their “final clubs” such as the Porcellian, the A.D., and the Fly, who might or might not go to class and aimed only for a “gentleman’s C” average. There was the Harvard of athletes; the Harvard of intellectuals intent on an academic career; the Harvard of socialites focused mostly on having a good time and securing a gig on Wall Street; the Harvard of iconoclastic outsiders looking to find their way; and the Harvard of public school graduates, many of whom commuted from home every morning and returned home every night.”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956

“Alone among the older kids, he had a romantic imagination, a feel for the things of the spirit, for the intangibles in human affairs. (It’s what drew him to Churchill, a man whose appeal Joe Senior could never grasp.)”
― Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming Of Age In The American Century, 1917-1956