JAMIE RICHARDSON: If you picture John F. Kennedy, you'll probably imagine him at the helm of a boat, confidently steering it, or maybe smiling and laughing with other heads of states, or even playing some flag football with his family. In short, you picture him looking cool. What many don't know is that JFK was also, well, kind of a nerd. We'll tell you more about this in this week's episode of JFK 35.
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JAMIE RICHARDSON: Welcome to this week's episode of JFK 35, a podcast by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. I'm Jamie Richardson. I'm hosting solo this week, but Matt Porter will be back next time.
So as we mentioned at the top, a popular image of JFK is that he's really suave. His hair is just so. He's wearing those sunglasses, effortlessly sailing or taking on questions from the press. In general, just being really charming.
And he was. You can hear him, actually hear him-- there's audio on our website-- at press conferences, switching between clever comebacks and thoughtful answers to reporters' questions. And well, those sunglasses are iconic for a reason. But there was another side to him, a let's say nerdy side. But what actually constitutes a nerd? Usually, it's someone who loves to study and read a lot, who has specific interests, and gets or got good grades in school.
And as we'll find out later, a lot of those labels apply to JFK, all but one. He was not a good student. In the archives here at the JFK Library, we have a number of his report cards and letters from teachers and the headmaster of Choate, where he went to high school. In an average semester, JFK would have classes in English, Latin, French, algebra, and public speaking. And he was a pretty solid C student, with the occasional D in French or Latin, or a B in a course like English or history.
And notably, he got C pluses, and even a C minus, in public speaking. We think of President Kennedy as a great orator, but in his younger days, this was definitely not the case. Even in his early days in office, he got some criticism from Eleanor Roosevelt, but that's another story for another episode. And though he was fighting some serious illnesses in high school, which may account for some of these bad grades, comments from teachers show a student who had potential, but lacked discipline, organization, and sometimes just plain old interest in his studies.
This note comes from his French teacher. "Jack has, so far, very little sense of organization. His papers are generally chaotic, and he used to arrive at class almost daily having forgotten to bring his book, his written work, pencils, or paper."
And maybe my favorite from his algebra teacher. "Jack has not yet reached the point where he puts his work first all the time. He must be anxious to do well. He must be, because he spends so much of his time telling me of the fact time which might be better spent improving it by deeds."
And if you want to read more of these, we'll have some links to JFK's report cards on these episodes page on our website. So this is also all to say, if anyone is out there having a hard time in school or know someone struggling in school, JFK was right there with you. And now that we've determined that he wasn't a good student, how was he a nerd?
I spoke with the reference archivist Stacey Chandler to find out. We are here again with Stacey Chandler, reference archivist at the JFK Library. Stacey, welcome back.
STACEY CHANDLER: Thank you.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And so we're excited to have you here to chat with us today about how JFK was actually a nerd and not quite as cool as everyone thinks he is. So if this is even possible to explain, is there an origin story, or a starting point, for where JFK nerdiness may have come from?
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah. I mean, I think there is. So JFK, as a kid, he's sick with a lot of these standard illnesses that kids got in the early 20th centuries, like scarlet fever and mumps and measles. But a lot of them were things that other kids weren't necessarily dealing with. He had a ton of allergies. He had a really sensitive stomach.
And he just seemed to be constantly sick. He was always in bed when his siblings were out playing. And his mother said, in her memoir, that she thought he always had a natural bent toward reading, but that constantly being sick and not having anything to do really encouraged that, and that he was making his way through the family library at a much earlier age than the other kids.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Awesome. So do we know what some of the titles are that he was reading or what level he was reading at?
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah. So according to Rose, JFK's mom, she wrote in her memoir that people were constantly asking her, once her kids were grown, what she made them read when they were little, because they turned out to be pretty successful. So she had all these lists of books, and JFK had some favorites on those.
His favorite was a series called Billy Whiskers, which was about a Billy goat who goes on a lot of adventures. And he also liked this series called The Adventures of Ready Fox. And rose said that the author gave him an inscribed copy once he was president, and he was just delighted by this, as an adult, to receive his signed copy of Ready Fox. He liked King Arthur, Arabian Nights, Robert Lewis Stevenson books.
So really, anything that was bent toward kids, but he started reading Churchill pretty young, too. He would read anything that was around. And Rose wasn't the only person who said that. His secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, said she would have like a paperback romance novel or something on her desk and he would just walk by and grab it.
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And then she'd see it on his desk as he's just reading it. Huh, I wonder if we have photographs of any the White House Oval Office with Evelyn Lincoln's romance novels there.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Oh, that would be amazing. Any eagle-eyed listeners want to check that out, please do.
STACEY CHANDLER: You can see copies of his own books on his Oval Office desk, but they're more like presentation copies there. So I don't know how often you see books that he might have been reading, but Mrs. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, said that they were just all over the president's bedroom all the time, whatever he happened to pick up. And that's where he would drop them at the end of the day.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And I think we also see, in a lot of his speeches, he makes lots of reference to Aristotle and Goethe and all these sort of highfalutin type of references that, maybe in the '60s were common, but now seem a little high-minded. So I mean, it shows where his brain was at and the references he was able to make.
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah. He was what I would call a really big quote guy. He's one of these guys, and just people in general, who really love a quote. And he would be reading something and it would stick out at him. Even just a nice turn of phrase or just a few words in a row that spoke to him, he would jot them down. We have a ton of examples of this in the archives.
And he also kept a quote notebook that is now in Mrs. Kennedy's papers. A lot of Churchill in there, but also just random quotes from fiction, a lot of historical writings of the founders, philosophical writings. He would just jot down little things that he liked. And we can see those come up sometimes in his speeches later, even just off the cuff sometimes, where he's like, oh, this would be a good time for my Churchill quote that I found five years ago. Yeah, my Bismarck quote that I remember reading in college.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And every time I talk to students, I'm going to use this quote.
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah. He repeated a quote here and there. That was a favorite thing for him to do. But that was a family trait. I mean, we know our RFK could also quote the Greeks off the cuff like a pro.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: No big deal. You know, totally normal. And in terms of the reading, if he was reading so much, plus being president, plus having a family and just a life, where do you find time for that? How do you do all of this?
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah. So people would ask that. We have constituent mail that asks that, because he was kind of known for being a big reader, even during the campaign and when he got into the presidency. So people would write letters being like, when do you find time to read? I read that you follow six newspapers. When do you read all of those?
And the response was always, well, he does newspaper reading in the morning, and then throughout the day, if something comes up, he'll check those out. And we always send him clippings, if there is anything really important he needs to read. And then at night would be when he does his fun reading.
But he also had massive amounts of reading to do just as President of the United States. He got what we call weekend reading. So his staff would compile the most important documents they thought were produced by different agencies throughout the week into a big packet for him to then take on Air Force One to go to the cape or down to Florida. And he would read those on his way, too. So he had plenty to read.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Yeah. No shortage there. And then he was also a speed reader, is that right?
STACEY CHANDLER: He was. Yeah. He took a speed reading course and everything.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Wow.
STACEY CHANDLER: He took one around 1955, his staff estimated. And his reading speed, he reported it to constituents as around 1,200 words a minute. So he could get going, yeah, pretty fast.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Yeah, OK. And then I think you said that folks here have recently, in the course of their work, found this recording between JFK and his brother, Edward M Kennedy. Would you mind reading a bit of that, if I could you do some dramatic acting here?
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah, it's pretty great. So JFK and his younger brother, Ted Kennedy, both took speed reading courses. And Ted Kennedy had just started taking his right when they were about to have this phone conversation. So JFK had been through his years ago. He's a speed reading pro.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: He's a pro.
STACEY CHANDLER: So Ted Kennedy calls him. First of all, he calls him Johnny on the call, which I think is really sweet. And then he starts talking about his speed reading course. JFK says, oh, are you reading more? Ted says, I'm reading about 325 words per minute. I can go fast, but I'm only comprehending about 40% of what I'm reading.
So this makes JFK laugh and he says, oh, but is it working? And Ted's like, yeah. It's working. The problem is I had to take a couple week break. And JFK says, yeah, you don't take a break. It's hard to go back. And he says, it's like doing push-ups. You need to do it every day, which I think is good advice.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Good advice. Keep at it. Yeah.
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah. And Ted's like, yeah, it's really helpful, but it's just a matter of going right down the page. JFK says, yeah, you go down the page and hang on. And once you read it, you have to keep your mind on it. And then they go on to talk about other things, like whether JFK should take a trip to Boston College to deliver a commencement speech there.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Which he later did, correct?
STACEY CHANDLER: Yes.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Very good. So just a normal brotherly conversation about big brother advice on how to speed read. Totally normal.
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah. It's one of the nerdier things I've come across here. It's pretty great. I really like reading about their speed reading abilities. [CHUCKLES]
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Yeah, that's so weirdly charming.
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And in other aspects of JFK's personality, even outside of-- well, maybe this does tie into the reading-- but he's accounts from other White House staff, he's always dropping by and asking like to the White House florist, oh, what kind of flowers are you buying? What is this? So there's a lot of that getting in the weeds-- very bad pun-- with all this daily life in the White House.
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah. So we have a lot of oral history interviews that touch on that, which are great, with the White House Domestic staff, where the florist is a really good example. There's a room for the florist where they're preparing flowers, usually for a state dinner or a luncheon.
And their oral history talks about JFK driving by and being like, what kind of flower is that? Why are you choosing that? What are the flowers that are outside in the Oval Office? He took a great interest in the rose garden when it was being redesigned.
We have a lot of materials back and forth between him and Bunny Mellon, who was helping with the redesign. It's unexpected, his level of curiosity, sometimes about some of these really mundane things that are happening around him.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Right.
STACEY CHANDLER: But a lot of people on the White House domestic staff spoke to that. They commented about it a lot. He would just drop by and ask a hundred questions, and then just be like, OK, bye and move along with his day. So a lot of curiosity.
And people who knew him all his life said that was just a lifelong trait of his. I think he was always a big reader and he was always curious, but he wasn't always interested in his grades.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Right. That's another interesting thing, is that he wasn't a good student, per se. And you have this guy who was president, a person who's a voracious reader, clearly very curious. But then you have his report cards online and they're not great.
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah, they're not great. Well, he didn't have a lot of patience for some of the subjects that, I mean, I identify strongly on this. He did not like physics. He didn't like math. So he's not doing well in those, really under any circumstances. There are other subjects where he's would rededicate himself.
We have this letter, this well-known letter to his dad, where he says, dad, this is the year. I'm going to stop messing around. I'm going to get my grades up. I'm really serious. And there's maybe an improvement, but he's, by no means, a straight A student. Definitely. He even, kind of famously now, got a C minus in public speaking.
And he loved history. He loved reading, but he didn't do exceptionally well in those subjects, either. I think he really liked to do his own reading. He's one of these people where I think a lot of his teachers were commenting that classic thing of like, oh, he has so much potential, but he's not doing the work.
So Lem Billings, his best friend, said that he was the only student at Choate, his boarding school, who subscribed to The New York Times. And he did the entire time he was there and he read it every day. So he had more of an interest in current affairs, I think.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Yeah. And also, it's interesting because some of these things-- so the idea of being a nerd is, I guess, being passionate about something. Then there's also being a geek or a dweeb. And being the only person with a New York Times subscription seems pretty geeky.
I mean, he had the Muckers Club, we've talked about before, who were also pretty popular. So there was this, I guess, balance of deep curiosity, playfulness, and then I'm going to go read The times, guys, so I'll see you later.
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah, he was. And his friends from then, Lem Billings, in particular, but several other people who knew him then, describe him as the most fun person I've ever met. So he definitely knew how to go and have a good time, but Lem also said when he was reading, it was like you weren't even in the room. You could just be trying to get his attention and he was like in sort of a concrete--
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--walled room and you weren't even there and you couldn't access him at all.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Oh, wow.
STACEY CHANDLER: So he had several, I think, dimensions to his life, and his intellectual life was just one of those, a compartment that he maintained all his life.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: So then we're talking a lot about his interior life, reading, absorbing lots of material. And as president, we know in his speeches, he's making lots of references to things, reaching out to people. And how did that also manifest in an outward-facing aspect? Did he regale people with poetry or presents, or how did this very specific interest in history manifest?
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah, it came up in all different kinds of ways. He really liked to incorporate a historical aspect into any given thing. So a really great example, one of my favorites, is when he was president, early in his presidency, he threw a dinner for President Harry Truman. And he actually asked the piano player, who had played piano at the conference between Truman, Stalin, and Churchill in 1945, he asked that same piano player to come and play at this dinner, which I think was just a thoughtful--
JAMIE RICHARDSON: That's very sweet.
STACEY CHANDLER: --nice, touch. And Harry Truman actually noticed and mentioned it in his thank you letter. He said, that was the fellow that was with me at Potsdam. So he noticed, and he thought that was a really great touch. And that's just a good example of JFK having a little nod to a historical event. And then, of course, giving gifts.
He was a great antique collector himself and he loved historic documents, but he also gifted them to other people. So Mrs. Kennedy told a story, in her own oral history, where JFK had presented her with several options for a tenth anniversary gift.
I guess he picked out a lot of things. One of them was this gold bracelet, an Egyptian gold bracelet, from about the 3rd century BC. And Mrs. Kennedy said, maybe it wasn't my favorite, but I could tell he loved it. He was nerding out about it. And he wanted me to choose it, so I chose it.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Aw.
STACEY CHANDLER: And we actually have the bracelet in the collection here now. And another option there was she also mentioned an antique Persian horse bit. And he was very excited to go and try it on Caroline's pony to see if it still worked.
[LAUGHTER]
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Well, Stacey, thank you so much. We are out of time, unfortunately. I think there's a lot more to delve into this very delightful part of JFK. Thank you so much for coming by, and we look forward to having on again at some point.
STACEY CHANDLER: Yeah, thanks for having me.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Thank you.
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Thank you for listening to this week's episode of JFK 35. We'll have links to all of the documents we mentioned in this week's episode on our website. And stay with us next time as we bring you more stories from the JFK Library. If you have questions or story ideas, email us at jfk35pod@jfklfoundation.org or tweet us @jfklibrary using the #jfk35.
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