John F. Kennedy appears in The Bob Zadek Show’s excerpts less as a topic than as a recurring reference — a name invoked to make a point about impeachment, war, diplomacy, racial classification or FBI power. No episode in the excerpts is devoted to Kennedy himself, and the show’s treatment of him is therefore fragmentary: a book attributed to him, a war attributed to him, a crisis managed by his administration, an executive order signed by him, and a vulnerability exploited by J. Edgar Hoover.
Profiles in Courage and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
Two episodes invoke Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage in the context of presidential impeachment. In the earlier, Frank H. Buckley raises the book while discussing the two-thirds Senate vote required to remove a president, noting that the requirement has been met only once in American history, in 1868, when a president of one party faced a Senate and House controlled by the other. Bob Zadek identifies that president as Andrew Johnson, and Buckley continues that Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage to celebrate the one senator who switched his vote to save the presidency. Buckley then adds two qualifications: that the senator in question appears to have been bribed, and that Kennedy did not write the book — Ted Sorensen did Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? (2014).
A later episode returns to the same book and the same impeachment. John Rothmann, discussing the meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” cites Gerald Ford’s formulation that impeachment is whatever the House of Representatives says it is, and offers Andrew Johnson as the best example: the charges rested on the Tenure of Office Act, passed by Congress in order to get him, and Johnson was saved by one vote — that of Edmund Ross of Kansas — which Rothmann says can be read about in Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage Withholding Judgment on Impeachment with John Rothmann (2020). The two guests agree on the book’s subject and its relevance; only Buckley disputes its authorship.
Vietnam
Kennedy’s record on Vietnam is treated in a single excerpt, and it is Bob Zadek, not his guest, who raises it. Closing a segment with Jonathan Bydlak on Afghanistan, Zadek asks the audience to remember that the memory of presidents Johnson and Kennedy is tarnished by starting and prosecuting the war in Vietnam, while Nixon’s memory, tarnished though it may be, has as one of its bright spots that he ended the war. Zadek’s framing is that a president will be remembered favorably if all he does is end the wars in the Middle East Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020). Bydlak’s own argument in the excerpt concerns Vietnam only as an operative example of withdrawal — that the United States left regardless of an imperfect outcome, and that the relationship between the two countries decades later is much different than it would have been with troops still on the ground. He does not attribute the war’s conduct to Kennedy.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The most detailed Kennedy material in the excerpts comes from Chris Preble’s discussion of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis as a parallel to the situation in Ukraine. Preble describes the Kennedy administration discovering that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba, a shock the administration had not anticipated, and notes that over the course of the crisis the administration was reminded that the United States had placed missiles in Turkey, at a comparable distance from Russian territory. He calls it one of the great unknown truths of the crisis that while the Kennedy administration imposed a blockade on the island, it also privately and secretly agreed to withdraw the missiles in Turkey — a concession the administration had already concluded was not necessary to U.S. national security. A second concession was not to attempt a repeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 to overthrow the Castro government by force. Preble draws from this the lesson that even in a tense military confrontation, diplomacy and negotiation should not be foreclosed Chris Preble on Ukraine (2022).
Bob Zadek adds that Kennedy requested and obtained complete secrecy from the Russians regarding the missile withdrawal, not wanting to appear to have made a concession, and Preble agrees, adding that the Russians were not the first to reveal it — it was disclosed decades later by Kennedy’s National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.
Executive Orders and Racial Classification
In a discussion of the historical origins of government racial categories, David Bernstein identifies federal executive orders from the president in the 1950s — first Truman, then Eisenhower, then later Kennedy — prohibiting government contractors from discriminating based on race and other qualifications. Bernstein places these orders as the first group of laws in question, and explains that to ensure contractors were not discriminating, each contractor was asked to fill out a form reporting how many employees it had of different minority groups. Because religion and ethnicity were difficult to enumerate under state law, contractors fell back on visible minorities, and those classifications, Bernstein says, are the origin of the categories now called Asian American, Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino Exploring the Borderlands of Legal Whiteness with David Bernstein (2022). Kennedy is named only as the last in the sequence of presidents issuing such orders; the excerpt attributes no specific order to him.
J. Edgar Hoover
Harvey Silverglate names Kennedy in his account of J. Edgar Hoover’s accumulation of power. Silverglate says Hoover blackmailed John F. Kennedy because of Kennedy’s affairs, and that this was part of how an FBI director came to be able to blackmail the President of the United States — which is why, in Silverglate’s account, nobody ever fired him The FBI: Our Uninvited Federal Police Force (2022). The Kennedy reference functions as one item in a list of Hoover’s targets that also includes Martin Luther King Jr. and members of Congress.
Across episodes: no developed treatment
Five episodes touch on Kennedy — the 2014 impeachment discussion, the 2020 impeachment discussion, the 2020 Afghanistan episode, the 2022 Ukraine episode, the 2022 racial-classification episode and the 2022 FBI episode — but the excerpts show no development of a single question about him across them. The two impeachment episodes both cite Profiles in Courage and Andrew Johnson’s acquittal, and the only change between them is Buckley’s added claim that Kennedy did not write the book; the remaining episodes invoke Kennedy for unrelated purposes and do not engage one another.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Kennedy’s dates of birth or death, his title at any point other than as president, the name of any bill he signed, or the content of any policy other than the executive orders Bernstein describes collectively. They do not say which amendment any impeachment turned on, what the Tenure of Office Act provided, or how the Cuban Missile Crisis ended. Buckley’s claim that Sorensen wrote Profiles in Courage is stated once and not examined; the excerpts contain no response to it.