JFK's summer as a journalist
"A reporter is reporting what happens; he's not making it happen."
Did you know that eighty years ago, at the sunset of World War II, JFK spent ~three months—from the end of April to the beginning August 1945—as a special correspondent for the Hearst newspapers, an assignment that took him to San Francisco for the founding conference of the United Nations; to England for the British elections that ended Churchill’s prime ministership; and to Germany for the Potsdam Conference that carved out Europe’s postwar order?
I only stumbled upon this brief but influential chapter in Kennedy’s biography somewhat recently. So I wrote a script about it as my latest for iHeartMedia’s VERY SPECIAL EPISODES podcast, with a bit of narrative assistance from the Pulitzer-winning historian/Kennedy biographer Fred Logevall, and the legendary director/WHO KILLED JFK? co-host Rob Reiner.
Here’s a preview:
And here’s the full episode, which you can also listen to at your podcast player of choice:
And here are a few cool extras. First up, footage of JFK’s “The President and the Press” speech at the Waldorf Astoria in April 1961, a scene that kicks off the episode:
Kennedy’s business card for Hearst’s International News Service, via the digital archives of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum:
A prescient dispatch from London, published in Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, in which Kennedy bucked the conventional wisdom by arguing for the plausibility of a Churchill defeat:
And lastly, click here for a rare recording—courtesy UVA’s Miller Center—of JFK circa 1960, dictating notes for the memoirs he expected to write one day. It includes the following snippet (which we used in the podcast) about his preference for politics over journalism:
A reporter is reporting what happens; he’s not making it happen. Even the good reporters, the ones who are really fascinated by what happens and who find real stimulus in putting their noses into the center of action. Even they, in a sense, are in a secondary profession. It’s reporting what happened, but it isn’t participating.
Thanks as always to the team at iHeart Originals, especially Jason English and Josh Fisher for their astute editing/producing, and Dana Schwartz for her flawless narration.