John F Kennedy The World's Most Photographed

On November 8th 1960, John F Kennedy was elected President of the United States of America.

At the core of his appeal was his image.

Kennedy was highly photogenic.

He also understood the power of the photograph

and exploited it more effectively

than any other politician before him.

Kennedy was a totally new kind of president, glamorous and informal,

a patriot with a glittering war record,

and a loving father and husband.

But while he seemed to be exposing his whole life to the camera,

in fact he was concealing two secrets -

secrets so explosive they had the power to destroy his presidency.

In the summer of 1937, John Kennedy went travelling in Europe with one of his best friends.

Their holiday snaps show the 20-year-old Kennedy relaxing

and enjoying his first taste of independence.

He's already emerging as a handsome playboy and a daring risk-taker,

seen here scaling the walls of a French medieval town.

But these pictures are deceptive.

Away from the camera, Kennedy was fighting a daily battle against a debilitating mystery illness,

an illness that would become one of the Kennedy family's most closely-guarded secrets.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born into a family of Irish-Catholic immigrants in 1917.

His father, Joe Kennedy, was a multimillionaire

who made his fortune playing the stock market in the 1920s and from bootlegging during Prohibition.

He had huge political ambitions for his family.

He'd even made up his mind that his eldest son, Joe Junior, would one day be president.

John, known to everyone as Jack, was his second son.

From infancy he had suffered from extreme fatigue, weight loss and mysterious pains all over his body.

Joe Kennedy hired the best doctors in America,

but no-one could diagnose what was wrong with his son.

Whatever it was, it was getting worse as the years went by.

Jack's childhood battles against illness would have a huge impact on his personality.

Life for him became a kind of competition.

He loved sport, you see, and overcoming these illnesses

was a kind of sport, was a kind of a way...a means to prove himself,

to be the best, be the first, be top dog.

This competitive drive won Jack a place on the Harvard swimming team.

He'd always been a keen swimmer, a skill which would one day

help to establish him as a courageous leader.

When the US joined the Second World War in 1941,

Jack Kennedy was desperate to fight for his country.

But he was now suffering from chronic back pain and failed the army medical.

He finally got into the navy through his father's influence and soon saw active service in the Pacific.

In August 1943,

Jack was commanding a patrol boat when it was hit by an enemy torpedo.

He and his crew found themselves fighting for their lives in the middle of the ocean.

A man who's badly burned, one of his uh...ship mates,

one of the men under his command,

Kennedy puts his teeth around the life preserver that the man is wearing and pulls him along.

Kennedy was a strong swimmer, but remember he's got all these ailments,

and he has these back problems,

and what an act of courage to be able to carry this off.

After his heroic rescue, Jack had to be invalided home.

While he was recuperating, the Kennedys received tragic news.

Jack's elder brother, Joe Junior, had been killed piloting a bomber over Europe.

Now Jack would become the focus of his father's political ambitions.

But there was a problem, Jack's health was deteriorating.

His back pain was now almost constant, and doctors decided he must have an operation.

In surgery, they made a shocking discovery.

The cartilage in Jack's spine was disintegrating.

After years of tests, doctors finally diagnosed him with Addison's Disease,

an incurable condition which devastates the nervous system.

But Jack refused to let his illness hold him back.

Undaunted, he threw himself into Washington politics.

Kennedy soon began to establish himself as a dynamic and charismatic politician.

But at the age of 36, he was still single,

a handicap for anyone wanting to get ahead in politics.

In 1951, he was introduced to a stylish young woman called Jacqueline Bouvier.

He was immediately attracted to her

and realised that she would be the perfect partner for a future president.

The nation was enthralled by photographs of their high-society wedding in September 1953.

The following spring a young photographer called Orlando Suero

was sent by a women's magazine

to shoot a feature introducing the new Mrs Kennedy.

Suero soon discovered that Jack Kennedy never missed an opportunity to be photographed.

Jack's never seen a camera he doesn't like.

Yes, he just kept sneaking in on the pictures!

The story originally was about Jackie,

but it turned out to be about THEM.

Suero spent the next few days with the Kennedys.

One morning, he caught the couple stepping out on to their balcony unprepared for a photo session.

I thought they would object, because he had a T-shirt on, you know,

the senator and all that sort of thing, but he didn't, I mean he...

He was just plain Jack in a T-shirt, and he enjoyed being there, and there was no rigmarole about,

"Oh, I'm a senator and I should be with a shirt and tie on." Nothing like that.

Kennedy was already establishing the easy-going image for which he would become famous.

His informality in front of the camera was unprecedented for a 1950s politician.

When his younger brother Bobby and his wife came to visit,

Suero was again surprised by how relaxed the Kennedys could be.

I said, "Can we go and have a little walk?"

and the walk turned into a touch-tackle football game!

The future president threw himself into the game with his usual vigour.

But two of Suero's photographs reveal that Kennedy

was still struggling to keep his illness under control.

Beneath his sweater, you can just detect the outline of something bulky and uneven.

We now know that it was a back brace, a device he was forced to wear to support his crumbling spine.

I never noticed Jack had a bad back.

Somebody said to me, "Do you know that Jack had a brace on?"

I didn't even notice it, because it didn't appear to me while I was shooting the action shots.

Jack Kennedy was far from well.

The condition of his spine had continued to deteriorate,

and he was now often forced to rely on crutches to get around.

But he was increasingly aware of the need to play down his illness.

and wanted to present himself as an energetic and dynamic young man.

In 1957, Jack's father Joe Kennedy

was given some photos of his younger son Bobby and his children

taken by photographer Jacques Lowe.

Joe realised that spontaneous family photos like these could give Jack's image just the boost it needed.

He arranged for Jacques Lowe to visit Jack Kennedy.

But when Lowe turned up, Kennedy hadn't been informed that he was coming.

Jack Kennedy was wearing a suit, he was really stiff,

he was annoyed, he didn't really want to be doing this.

The last person he wanted to see was a photographer, erm...

and my father really did the best that he could but wasn't comfortable with the way the session had gone.

Lowe was convinced he'd never hear from the Kennedys again.

But to his surprise, he got a call from the senator a few weeks later asking him to return.

This time he had a very different reception.

He was greeted at the door by a...

by a scantily clad Jack Kennedy wearing a bath towel,

and Jackie was in the bath with the door slightly ajar, and you could hear her splashing about.

Jack Kennedy was very apologetic about his behaviour on that first meeting.

He apologised for being in a bad mood

and said, "You know, these photographs, Jacques,

"are really wonderful and beautiful, and I'd like for us to select one for our Christmas card and..."

And that was really the beginning of the trust

and the working relationship that developed between... between these two men.

Jacques Lowe became Kennedy's most trusted photographer.

Over the next four years, his work would help to establish the trademark Kennedy image.

His pictures portrayed the Kennedys as the perfect couple,

and Jack as the ideal husband - healthy, happy and loyal.

You could almost, by osmosis,

sense that this was intelligence,

this was propriety, this was grace,

this was beauty, uh...

in that family. And it showed in the pictures,

and Jacques was able to capture that, get those right moments,

and of course the Kennedys, at least in front of HIM,

didn't do anything that really was that bad.

But away from the cameras, it was a very different story.

Kennedy was notorious in Washington circles for his countless infidelities.

So far he'd always managed to keep his promiscuity out of the press.

Then in the early hours of an autumn morning in 1958, Kennedy was ambushed by a woman with a camera.

Florence Kater, a Washington landlady,

had discovered that he was having an affair with one of her tenants.

Outraged, she was trying to gather photographic evidence of his scandalous behaviour.

Kater turned the shadowy image into a placard

and brandished it at the 1960 West Virginia Primary,

a crucial stage in the bid to become

the Democratic candidate for the presidency.

Jack Kennedy's political future was in the balance.

A photograph of her protest was even published in the Washington Evening Star.

But no-one took her story seriously.

John F Kennedy, one of the most popular presidential candidates in history,

was untouchable.

PERKY MUSIC

# Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy Kennedy, Kennedy, Kenn-edy... #

Confident that his secrets were safe,

Kennedy won the Democratic nomination and began his battle for the presidency.

Dynamic, informal and spontaneous, he let the American public

get closer to him than any other presidential candidate in history.

Kennedy decided that Jacques Lowe was the only photographer

who could capture the spirit of his new style of politics and asked him to join his campaign.

No photographer had ever had such unrestricted access to a presidential candidate.

Up until Jacques took over, I'm unaware that there was any...

presidential candidate who allowed a photographer this close in, uh...

All of the pictures that I remember in my years before that, were kind of set shots,

and they had these big bulky Speed Graphic cameras,

and the candidate would say, "Well, all right, we'll have a..."

They didn't call them photo opportunities back then,

said, "We'll just... We'll meet at so and so and you can take your pictures."

Lowe's trailblazing style of photography

was the perfect mirror for Kennedy's new style of campaigning.

His lightweight 35mm camera allowed him

to respond quickly to any situation and get close to the action.

One of my favourites is one of those motorcade pictures,

in which Kennedy is in the back of this open car, grinning, wonderful,

with just a sea of people pressing in around him

and lapping over the back of the car, and he's shaking hands.

One of the great pictures of political campaigning of all time.

But there was one story about the campaign trail that Lowe's camera would never tell.

A dangerous cocktail of drugs had become an essential part of Kennedy's daily routine.

He was on penicillin for infection, cortisone for Addison's, Paregoric for colitis,

testosterone to counter weight loss, and Ritalin to help him sleep.

He was also regularly injected with steroid-based painkillers

and amphetamines which enabled him to stay off his crutches.

Without them, he would never have been able to put himself through his punishing schedule.

Those around him knew he was taking painkillers,

but the extent of his dependency remained a closely guarded secret.

During the campaign of 1960, the medical kit was misplaced,

and he called up the Governor of Connecticut,

a man named Abraham Ribicoff, and he said, "Abe,

"there's a medical kit that's been misplaced.

"It'll be murder if we don't find it."

They did indeed find it and return it to Kennedy,

but what he feared was that if this were...

found by some hostile political...operatives,

it could have sunk his campaign.

Lowe's photographs show a healthy, vigorous man

with nothing to betray his secret illness.

This was mainly due to the side-effects of his medication.

The steroids had bulked him up, and other drugs gave his complexion

the appearance of a healthy all-year tan.

He looked every inch a future president.

This image would now prove to be a more crucial asset than ever.

For the first time in US history, the presidential candidates

were invited to battle it out

in a series of debates on live television.

Nearly 60 million people, over a third of the American population,

sat down to watch the first of four confrontations

between Richard Nixon and Kennedy.

Nixon was exhausted from the campaign

and recovering from an operation.

He'd refused professional help with his make-up.

Kennedy was much sicker but had primed himself on drugs

and let the studio experts make him up.

Now the opening statement by Vice President Richard M Nixon.

Nixon, of course, his make-up ran, he was sweating.

He had gone through an illness and he was gaunt, very thin.

Somebody said with his five o'clock shadow that he looked like a sinister chipmunk,

and Kennedy, by contrast, didn't look at Nixon.

He looked at the camera and spoke to the public out there, you see?

Hugh Sidey was in the press room listening to the debate on the radio.

There were four or five of us in there, and we, to a man, thought Nixon had bested Kennedy,

and yet it was just a matter of a few minutes when it was over with

and we got with the other reporters who had watched it, and they said,

"No, no, it's the other way around," and it was.

The margin of victory was visual,

that Kennedy appeared more confident, and it was judged his victory.

A month later, on November 8th 1960,

after one of the closest elections in American history,

John F Kennedy was declared President of the United States.

So help you God.

So help me God.

WILD CHEERING

Kennedy was the youngest, most glamorous American president ever.

The public's appetite for pictures of their handsome young leader and his family was insatiable.

The Kennedys swept away the grey political formalities of the past

and seemed to create a new age of equality, openness and progress.

Kennedy wanted the public to feel that they were in touch with the intimate workings of government.

He decided to appoint the first official White House photographer

and was eager to give Jacques Lowe the job.

But Lowe had already tired of taking endless shots of dignitaries

shaking hands with the new president and turned the job down.

The position went to a senior army photographer, Captain Cecil Stoughton.

I had an office underneath the President's office.

If he wanted to, he could stomp on his floor and call me,

but we got a little more sophisticated than that,

and we had a buzzer arrangement with Mrs Lincoln,

the President's secretary's office.

She would buzz me, and when I heard the buzzer on my desk,

it meant in words, "He is waiting for you in the middle of the office."

Stoughton was also encouraged to photograph the President's young family.

One day and I hear this god-awful noise coming out of the Oval Office,

and I looked in at Evelyn and I went, you know, querulously, "What's happening in there?"

And she said "Come on in and make some pictures."

So she invited me in with my super-wide Hasselblad,

black and white film, available light, and here's the children bouncing around the Oval Office,

trying to outdo each other while the President is sitting by his desk

clapping and doing what he laughingly called singing.

And the following morning it was four or five or six columns wide

in nearly every metropolitan daily around the country and eventually around the world.

The Oval Office, traditionally the hidden heart of presidential power,

had now been thrown open to the press for the first time in history.

When New York Times photographer George Tames

was invited into the Oval Office, he captured a haunting image of Kennedy standing at his desk.

The shot seemed to define the overwhelming responsibility

of the presidency and was captioned, "The loneliest job in the world."

Kennedy loved it.

But once again the photo was deceptive.

The truth is the President was now in such pain

that he found it difficult to sit down for any length of time.

Whenever he was reading, Kennedy felt more comfortable standing up, relying on his arms for support.

In October 1962, it became more important than ever

for the President to project the image of a powerful and commanding leader.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, a tense military stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union,

brought the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.

Kennedy's reputation was enhanced by his handling of the crisis.

But if the extent of his illness and dependence on drugs had been revealed,

the public's confidence in his presidency would've been destroyed.

Well, it was just something that was not only hidden from the public, but even from close aides.

I don't think that Pierre Salinger, who was the press secretary, had a clue as to how many problems he had.

Certainly, Lyndon Johnson didn't know, who was the Vice President, so it was a well guarded secret

that was kept very close to the vest, as they say, or the chest, uh...and

held in camera, held in secret by the family.

Despite his fragile state of health,

entering the White House had done nothing to curb Kennedy's promiscuity.

He continued to have countless casual affairs.

He was, I think, extraordinarily promiscuous.

The man was...

so compulsive in his womanising.

He once said to the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan,

when they met in Bermuda, "If I don't have a woman every three days, I get a headache."

Americans would have been appalled if they'd known the truth about the President's secret sex life.

But they loved his charismatic, youthful, playboy image,

and Kennedy was happy to play up to their expectations.

That summer, Bill Beebe, an LA Times photographer,

heard that Kennedy was staying by the beach in Santa Monica.

He staked out the house, hoping to get some candid shots of the President.

One afternoon, he saw Kennedy go down for a swim in the sea.

As he began to emerge from the water,

the largest contingent of beachgoers recognised who he was, mostly women.

And they went out clothes and all, as I had.

For a man with a weak back, he sure didn't look like he had a weak back to me.

Broad chest and flat belly and, uh...

he looked like a picture of health.

And I'm sure the ladies who went out there wanted to take advantage of that, too!

Bill Beebe's shot captures Jack Kennedy at the height of his popularity and power.

If details of his sex life and the truth about his illness could be kept secret,

he had every chance of winning a second term in the White House.

But the idyllic days of the Kennedy era were about to be brought to a sudden and violent end.

On November 22nd 1963, Jacque Lowe was in Manhattan

when he noticed the city had come to a standstill.

People looked incredibly solemn, and he knew something very, very serious had happened.

So he stopped someone and he said, "What's going on? What's happened?"

And someone shouted out, "The President's been shot!"

He said, "What president?" never fathoming for a moment that Jack Kennedy could've been assassinated.

As Kennedy's motorcade passed through Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald had fired three shots.

The first shot missed the President.

The second struck him in the back of the neck.

The third, fatal bullet entered the back of his head.

Kennedy was gone.

Waves of shock and grief went round the world.

Jacques Lowe attended the state funeral with his camera.

He followed Jackie from the White House to Arlington Cemetery and recorded the Kennedy family's grief.

Lowe took one last picture of Kennedy's casket before it was lowered into the ground,

the final image in his chronicle of the most popular president of the 20th century.

The official investigation into John F Kennedy's assassination

failed to stop the explosion of conspiracy theories and speculation after his death.

But it did clear up one puzzling detail.

When Kennedy was struck in the back of the neck by the second bullet, he had remained upright.

Anyone else would have slumped forward.

Kennedy had been held in place by his back brace.

Without it, he would have been propelled forward, out of range of the third, fatal bullet.

The back brace which had helped Jack Kennedy

to conceal his secret illness for so long

was now implicated in his violent death.

Subtitles by BBC Broadcast 2005

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