How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (29 page)

It took six heart attacks to eventually kill Ike, and it’s still not clear if the heart attacks did it or Eisenhower simply willed himself to death. On what would turn out to be his deathbed, his last words were “I want to go; God take me.” The message was clear: wars, diseases, and heart attacks don’t stop Eisenhower;
he
decides when he’s good and goddamn ready to die, and then you’d better do as he says.

Make sure you work that weak knee; he injured it playing football in college and it’s never been the same since. He is without a doubt a better strategist than you are and has likely looked at your fight from three or four different angles, as he did every problem, but a lifetime of
planning
battles doesn’t mean he’ll be prepared to defend himself in a street fight to the death. Anyone can sit in an office and say “Now go kill Hitler,” but it takes a different person entirely to walk up to a president and kick him in the nuts. I want you to
be that kind of person
.

From 1961 until 1963, the United States of America was a high school football team, and John F. Kennedy was the dreamy quarterback that we all respected and lusted after. Plenty of presidents have been as good as Kennedy, and many have been
better
, but he is the only president that made the American people, in unison, say, “What a cool dude. I’d let him have sex with my girlfriend, if she was into it.”

The Kennedy chapter shouldn’t be entirely about boning, but it should be
mostly
about boning, so let’s start by talking about how good Kennedy was at boning: Very. Or, if not very, then
thoroughly
. Kennedy admitted to friends and visiting diplomats that he wouldn’t be satisfied if he didn’t have sex at least three times every day, and he once told the prime minister of the United Kingdom that, if he went more than three days without at least one woman, he’d get terrible headaches. Kennedy talked about having threesomes with the kind
of casual dismissal that we normal folks reserve for talking about getting gas before work. “Gas prices sure are getting high,” we’ll say. “Having sex with two women at the same time is a neat thing that I do very often,” Kennedy would reply.

Kennedy’s list of sexual exploits include Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Angie Dickinson, Brazilian actress Florinda Bolkan, and, if you happen to have a grandmother who was an intern during Kennedy’s presidency then, sorry, but your grandma. In all statistical likelihood, John F. Kennedy had sex with your grandmother. It’s nothing personal, he was just a handsome robot that needed vagina to fuel his engines, and that’s okay, because his engines were running the country.

According to interviews with some of the many, many interns Kennedy slept with during his presidency, there was no passion or emotional connection in sex for Kennedy; he simply wanted to do it, nap, do it again, nap, do it again, nap, be president, do it again, and on and on until there were no more women left for him to sleep with. As a matter of fact, the only times that Kennedy actually
did
get emotional came, according to his sister, “when he loses.” Kennedy’s father, Joseph Kennedy, taught his sons the “Kennedy standards,” which referred not to helping people or leading a good life, but to
winning
. Kennedy boys were told not to play a sport “unless [they] could be captain,” and that “second place was a failure.” Little Jack would respond, a few decades later, by becoming captain of both fucking and America.

JFK was our most James Bondian president, and not just because he had an impossible amount of sex that he approached with the haunting detachment of a sociopath; he also had a proven track record of badassedry to boot. Kennedy had a back injury that disqualified him from serving in the army, but instead of just seizing the opportunity to avoid getting shot at by bad guys without looking like a coward, he used his influential father’s connections to sneak his way into the navy. That’s right. While most overprivileged kids use their rich daddies to get out of speeding tickets or get into good colleges, Kennedy begged
his
father for a favor that would result in
people trying to
shoot and kill him
, because Kennedy is a breed of real-life action hero we simply stopped making.

In August of 1943, Kennedy’s boat (the
PT-109
) was ripped in two by the Japanese destroyer
Amagiri
. The boat was unsalvageable, the crew was disoriented, and there were flames everywhere, but Kennedy, even on his worst day, could not be flapped. He addressed his crew and asked if they wanted to fight or surrender. “There’s nothing in the book about a situation like this,” Kennedy said. “What do you want to do?
I have nothing to lose
.” (Sidebar: whoever made the Hollywood movie based on the attacks on Kennedy’s boat and crew should be shot for titling it
PT 109
instead of
Nothing to Lose
. Come on, Hollywood.)

Kennedy, despite that chronic back injury and a newly ruptured spinal disc, swam four hours to an island with his crew. If you’re not impressed by that, you should know that he did it while towing an injured crewman by the life-jacket strap. And if you’re not impressed by that, you should know that he did the towing with his
teeth
. And if you’re not impressed by that, you should know that when they realized there was no food on the island, they swam to a
new
island, with Kennedy
again
towing an injured crewman with his teeth. And if you’re not impressed by that,
bullshit
, of course you are.

In your fight with Kennedy, try not to have sex with him, as it will only make him stronger. Second of all, despite all of the badass things written about Kennedy in books, including and especially this one, he was actually a much weaker man than most people knew. Kennedy acted the part of a healthy, young, virile man of power, partly because he never wanted to dwell on or grant credence to any of his illnesses, and partly to inspire the American people with a leader they could really get behind (and vice versa,
if you know what Kennedy’s sayin’)
. He was plagued by various illnesses (including Addison’s disease), and was born with the left side of his body smaller than the right, which is where all of his back problems came from. Kennedy’s back was so bad that he wore a metal back brace and, when he was out of view of the press, would often use crutches or even a wheelchair to get around. The truth is that Kennedy was
sick and in pain his entire life; he just refused to accept it because he didn’t want it to hold him back (and because “Kennedy boys don’t cry” was another one of the infamous “Kennedy standards”). He was in denial. He presented an image of vitality, but make no mistake: Kennedy was always hurting.

Still, he’s going to try to use his injuries and poor health to his advantage just as much as you will. Constantly sick and accident-prone
as a child, Kennedy thrived on the idea that death was constantly around the corner, waiting for him. He’d had so many surgeries, so many life-threatening illnesses—he was on what many believed to be his deathbed no less than
three separate times
in his life—that he lived every day like it might be his last. His personal secretary said that he tried “to crowd as much living as possible into every single hour.”
That’s
why he told his crew he had “nothing to lose” and was prepared to go into battle even after his boat was torn right in half, and that’s why he drove himself to become the youngest president in his lifetime. Hell, it’s arguable that he accomplished as much as he did in his brief presidency because the specter of premature death loomed over his shoulder at every waking minute.

So, you know, work the back and all, but prepare for a long, bitter, and stubborn fight. “Expect death at every turn” and “Second place is a failure” are the two principles that guided Kennedy through everything he did in life.

Also: “I fuck for fuel.” That was another one of his principles. Probably less relevant to his fight with you, but it’s important to point out, all the same.