Gore Vidal on JFK and Cold War, etc. from "History of The National Security State" (transcripts of Vidal's interviews with Paul Jay)

What did Jack really believe in? I don’t know what he really believed in . . . He was romantic in that he saw himself as a kind of—he knew he was going to die very young. He had been sick all of his life. I mean, the number of things wrong with him. I remember my half sister, who was Jackie’s stepsister, describing this when she was about twelve years old: Wherever he was, in whatever household, there was a sickroom, and there were ice boxes with needles; and she remembers opening an ice box—and she’d never seen so much medicine in her life—just to keep him alive. He had Addison’s disease—he had no adrenal function. So the clinic thought up a special operation, in which they would put a kind of false adrenal gland under the flesh of the thigh, and they’d put it under there and put some scotch tape over whatever it is to hold it in place, and that would feed him enough adrenaline for a month or so, and have to change it. This was dangerous. This affects your judgment, lack of adrenaline. And then, so many other things were wrong with him. He knew time was short. That’s why people wonder why he was so bold in his private life. Well, he wasn’t going to live very long. He wanted to have a very good time as quickly as possible, so he did. . . . Well, you can’t take chances like that. Suppose the press gets onto it . . . “When I’m alive,” he said, “they don’t dare print it.” In those days they didn’t, particularly if a president is warlike; and he was getting more and more warlike. “They won’t print it. And when I’m dead, I don’t care.” So he had it covered. I would think he was a guy who enjoyed life, who didn’t expect to live very long, who wanted to make his mark, believed in the Cold War, or he believed in the White Knight versus the Wicked Knight, and he was going to be the White Knight, and he was going to win. So I think he was more tolerant of the idea of war.

The missile crisis really scared him. Also, I remember talking to him when he came back from the Vienna conference with [Premier of the Soviet Union] Khrushchev, and I was full of the usual liberal complaints, and I said, “But, you know, there seems to be so really little at issue between our side and their side.” I said, “It’s pretty clear Khrushchev isn’t marching anywhere,” and Jack quite agreed to that, even though he had to pretend how dangerous the Soviet Union was, and they’re getting ahead of us in firecrackers and popcorn and this and that . . . He said, “No.” But he had one line which was very interesting about these things. They said something about . . . I think it was apropos putting the missiles in Cuba – and, of course, we didn’t know they had atomic weapons – and somebody said: “Well, what does that do to the balance of power? It doesn’t change anything. United States is a huge country; that’s a little island down there. So they might knock out some cities, and that might be very unpleasant for the people knocked out, but we’re not going to be defeated by some Russian missiles.” And he said, “No.” But he said, “In this kind of politics, it is the appearance of things that matters.” So in the long run, we go back to my notion that the only art form the United States has ever created is the TV commercial. That is our art form, and that’s how we control people. Which is a normal response to somebody who was a creation of advertisers, as was Eisenhower, as was everybody else, as was Khrushchev. And it’s a world of illusions, and it’s a world of false claims. . . . Khrushchev made the joke to Jack at Vienna – they were talking about Eisenhower and the spy plane, which had been such an embarrassment to the previous administration, and Khrushchev had made a joke at the time – he said: “I wanted to propose to the President of the United States that we’d both save a lot of money if we hired the same people and paid for them as spies, ’cause they come to both sides, anyway. So we’d just save, each of us, fifty percent of what we now spend on spying.” And the Americans gave pretty sick laughs to that, but Khrushchev got the point to that.