Life Is Unfair - The Life of JFK

     Life is Unfair


       On a grey November Friday in 1963 I came out of a drama class at McGill University In Montreal. Horrible news floated in the air of the gloomy second floor of the old Arts building.
     "Haven't you heard?" some one asked me in effect. "President Kennedy's been shot in Dallas, Texas. He may be dead."
    U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was indeed dead, killed by a sniper's bullet on November 22,1963. On that grey afternoon, many women at McGill University broke down and cried. Young men wandered around the campus in shock. All over the world, millions, maybe billions of people lamented the death of this young, telegenic president.
    "How could this great man die?" a friend of mine asked. "This is a tragedy."
     Yet only ten years later, public opinion changed its mind on America's 35th president.  For new information on President Kennedy revealed a very different president than many had thought of, when he was alive and in power.
     He and his wife Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (later Onassis) really had an open marriage. "It was a new blonde every other week," a British journalist who covered Kennedy's White House told a friend of mine about the president's sex life.
    Nor was President Kennedy running a squeaky clean administration. He certainly help plan attempts to kill Cuba's president Fidel Castro. Kennedy at the time of his death may or may not have been planning to plunge his country further into the disastrous Vietnam War. And though Kennedy projected a young, vigorous image, he was in fact plagued by illnesses.
      Addison's disease, a rare endocrine disorder nearly killed Kennedy at least once. He also suffered from hyperthyroidism. In his 40's, exactly when he was president, Kennedy was swallowing up to ten pills a day for his various ailments. He also suffered from terrible back pain which came from injuries he got during the Second World war.
     After his death, a Kennedy book industry took wing. Authors claimed that Kennedy's supposed assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, was part of a conspiracy to murder the president. Some specialists blamed Kennedy for the Cuban Missile Crisis  that in October 1962 could have incinerated the world. Canadian nationalists pointed out that JFK (as Kennedy was often referred to) helped defeat Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in the 1963 Canadian general election.
     Here I don't want to discuss these issues or others like them. Really I remember John F. Kennedy for mainly one thing and that was his reflection on life. "Life," he once said, "is unfair." Perhaps Kennedy's speechwriter Ted Sorensen wrote this. Yet for me this rings true, not only for many people in the world but also for John F. Kennedy. And when he said this he didn't realize he was describing not only his own fate, but the fate of others in his big family.
     (To be continued on my next blog).