JFK's Silly Bastard
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March 11, 7pm. NYPL in Bryant Park: In conversation with Bob Crawford.
April 12, 1pm. Mills Mansion in Staatsburg, NY: Keynote on Anne Morgan.
April 14, 5pm. Miami University in Oxford, Ohio: The Annual McClellan Lecture, cosponsored by the History Department and the Menard Family Center for Democracy.
April 15, 6pm. The Mercantile Library in Cincinnati, Ohio: The 1835 Lecture.
“He’s a silly bastard!”
On the morning of July 25, 1963, President John F. Kennedy called Air Force General Godfrey McHugh and lost his goddamn mind.
The Air Force, in a fit of misguided chivalry, had spent $5,000 refurbishing a maternity suite at Otis Air Force Base for Jackie Kennedy, the heavily pregnant First Lady. They had gone to Jordan Marsh, a department store, to buy new rugs, a color TV, and furniture.
When Kennedy saw a photography of an officer standing by the bed in the Washington Post, he went apoplectic—but he sounds less like the leader of the free world than a mob boss who who fears all of his capos are morons who belonged to a division of the army devoted to “stabbing me in the back.” And Ernest Carlton, the Public Affairs Officer who appeared in the photo, was a “silly bastard.” Kennedy, with[out] the same seriousness he would give to a Cabinet-level appointment, declared him unfit to “run a cathouse.”
The aftermath of the call was surprisingly bloodless. For General Godfrey McHugh, it was just another Tuesday; he absorbed the blast, wrote the memo, and moved on. McHugh remained by Kennedy’s side until Dallas and later retired a Brigadier General. Carlton knew nothing about it for decades; after he retired, a filmmaker played him the clip. The only casualty was the Air Force’s interior design budget.
Learn about JFK’s White House Recordings at the JFK Library.
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First time I have ever heard JFK on a recording using the F-word, too.
Imagine, a Harvard-educated President talking in such a fashion. He might set a bad example!