What's Come Out About JFK Since His Death

We observe today not a rehash of a tragedy but a celebration of discoveries — symbolizing fame as well as infamy, signifying cover-ups as well as candor. For we have sworn to explore John F. Kennedy's life, just as our forebears did after his death in 1963. The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to read internet articles like this one. Yet JFK remains a towering figure in U.S. history and pop culture.

Kennedy captivated a nation in flux. After the ravages of World War II and the Korean War, with the Cold War heating up and the Civil Rights Movement making headway, Americans chose the charismatic Kennedy to lead, inspire, and protect them. He never got to finish that mission, and we have not finished learning about him. Over the years fascinating, scandalous, and ridiculous details have emerged, lighting a flame of curiosity that can truly light the World Wide Web. And so, our fellow readers, ask not what this article can do for you — ask what's come out about JFK since his death.

She was more like a beauty queen as she crossed the scene. In fact, she was a beauty queen in her native Denmark. Her name was Inga Arvad, but to JFK she was "Inga-Binga," and he was her "Boston Bean." According to Kennedy scholar Nigel Hamilton, Inga-Binga "was the great love" of the Boston Bean's life. Arvad was a journalist and worked at the same paper as JFK's sister, Kathleen. When Arvad first met the future president in 1941, she was married to one of the world's richest men. Four years older than Kennedy, Arvad would act as a sort of mentor, according to author Barbara Leaming. She critiqued his writing, dispensed political advice, and gave very hands-on lessons about the birds and the bees. While serving in World War II, Kennedy wrote to her: "Knowing you has been the brightest point in an already bright twenty-six years." Unfortunately, Hitler also enjoyed knowing her. Arvad had interviewed Hitler, who called her "a perfect example of Nordic beauty." She was extremely chummy with the fuhrer, and her husband may have been a Nazi agent.

Suspecting that Arvad was a spy, FBI agents watched her like voyeuristic hawks. They even eavesdropped on her pillow talk with JFK. Kennedy's father understandably didn't want him sleeping with a possible enemy, so the Kennedy patriarch put a stop to the romance.

The 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion was a huge black eye for the Kennedy administration. In that massively bungled effort the U.S. used obsolete bombers to attack Cuba and missed bombing targets badly. Forces weren't coordinated, and men were captured or killed. After that stinging failure, Communist dictator Fidel Castro became JFK's white whale — or maybe red whale. Tapping into his inner Ahab, Kennedy put his brother, Robert, in charge of Operation Mongoose, which aimed to harpoon Castro once and for all.

Mongoose involved many plots, many of which were utterly crazy. One in particular wasn't so much Moby Dick as Old Man and the Sea — or as the Nation put it, "Old Man and the CIA." Per a memo uncovered in 1997, JFK and Robert greenlit an idea to somehow use Ernest Hemingway's Cuban farm in an attempt to assassinate Castro. And because Castro loved freediving, the CIA also proposed killing him with an exploding seashell or tampering with his diving suit. In an especially weird leap of logic, U.S. officials also thought they could trigger a revolt by tricking Cubans into thinking Christ had returned — a feat they hoped to achieve by illuminating the sky with pyrotechnics. Other ideas sounded more like trolling, like the plan to offer Cubans literally 2 cents to assassinate Castro. The CIA even sought the mafia's help.

People often associate JFK with vim, vigor, and other V-words, like "virile" and "venereal." But they probably don't think of vomiting, which is one of the many symptoms associated with an adrenal disorder called Addison's disease. Kennedy grappled with Addison's and other ailments throughout his life while projecting an image of physical robustness to the public. Biographies and medical records reveal that at age 2 he contracted scarlet fever. He matured into a frail and sickly teen who chronically lost weight. At age 15 JFK weighed just 117 pounds. Doctors thought leukemia might be the culprit, but it was colitis.

Kennedy spent much of his presidency in physical misery due to severe back trouble and Addison's disease, which causes infections, fatigue, joint and muscle pain, depression, skin discoloration, and various abdominal problems on top of the vomiting. The Atlantic reported that during the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban missile crisis "Kennedy was taking an extraordinary variety of medications."

With the help of his family, JFK mostly hid his abysmal health. However, political rivals caught wind of his condition and tried to expose him. During the 1960 presidential race Democratic hopeful Lyndon B. Johnson told the press — via his aides — that JFK had Addison's disease. But the revelation was dismissed as a smear. During that year's general election, Richard Nixon supposedly orchestrated a Watergate-style break-in to obtain JFK's medical records, but failed.

Well before Kennedy became president, the U.S. inserted itself into the Vietnam War. But as History detailed, it wasn't until the uber-dubious Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 that America opted to wage a full-tilt military campaign against North Vietnam. Had Kennedy still been president then, that escalation may never have happened.

Per the New York Times, "Pentagon documents declassified" in 1997 showed that in October 1963 JFK ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel from Vietnam by the end of the year. Publicly, Kennedy called withdrawal "a deep mistake." Behind closed doors, however, he rejected the joint chiefs' advice to take "overt action" and instructed them to take decidedly less action by leaving. Chagrined, his generals lobbied for covert CIA operations.

Roughly a month after JFK's withdrawal order, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem — who had fallen out of favor with the U.S. military — was assassinated. JFK was killed three weeks later, and his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, bolstered both military and CIA operations almost immediately. CIA sabotage missions seemingly instigated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Experts heatedly disagree on whether Kennedy would have followed through with the exit plan, but according to LBJ's former deputy national security adviser, Kennedy definitely planned to have most U.S. forces out of Vietnam by the end of 1965, and on the day JFK died it was the "actual policy" of the U.S.

In the words of philosopher king Mel Brooks, "It's good to be the king." Obviously, America doesn't allow monarchs, but Jackie Kennedy famously linked her husband to the Camelot myth during an interview. And the president used his lance a lot with maidens. Citing Seymour Hersh's 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, the Atlantic described the tawdry debauchery JFK engaged in when Jackie was away, which was often.

Kennedy frequently skinny-dipped in the White House pool with two young secretaries nicknamed "Fiddle" and "Faddle." When he wasn't fiddling with them, he did unsavory things with a teenage intern named Mimi Alford. As Alford recounted in Once Upon a Secret, she got sucked into an 18-month affair with Kennedy when she was 19. It started on her fourth day of work. Per the New York Post, she recalled one of JFK's buddies giving her daiquiri after daiquiri before the president led her to his bedroom and began undressing her. She "was in shock" and he seemed completely unbothered by what he was about to do. Alford also attended JFK's pool parties, fearing that if she refused her coveted White House dream job would "slip away forever." While partying at Bing Crosby's place, the president allegedly forced her to take some kind of drug.

Thanks to the 2016 U.S. presidential race, the phrase "Russian meddling" probably elicits exhausted sighs from many Americans who've glutted their eyeballs and brains with stories about it. Don't worry, we won't relitigate that issue here. But we will say that Vladimir Putin is proof that history repeats itself in the darnedest ways. As the Washington Post noted, in 2017 Putin, a seasoned world leader, and President Donald Trump, a political newcomer, met face to face for the first time in Germany. Fifty-six years earlier, the more politically equipped Nikita Khrushchev met the much less experienced JFK for the first time in Austria. More bizarrely Khrushchev, who created the KGB, and Putin, who was in the KGB, were meeting presidents whose elections they interfered in.

Khrushchev was heavily invested in the outcome of the 1960 presidential race because he really didn't want Richard Nixon, a staunch anti-Communist, in the White House. Initially Soviet operatives reached out to Democratic politician Adlai Stevenson, urging him to run for president and offering propaganda assistance. But Stevenson "politely declined." The Soviets also offered to assist JFK's campaign, but Robert Kennedy delivered a "polite rebuff." So Khrushchev took matters into his own hands after the Soviets captured two U.S. pilots in 1960. Because Nixon was then vice president under Eisenhower, the Soviets refused to return the Americans in order to inflict political damage on Tricky Dick. Khrushchev even bragged about it in his 1970 memoir.