Pre-coverage of the vice presidential debate that’s about to occur in a few minutes, has included references to the notorious “You’re No Jack Kennedy” line during the 1988 debate between Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle. I have known about this exchange for a long time. However for the first time ever, when they talked about it on the news just now, I found myself wondering…“Jack Kennedy? Why did he call him ‘Jack’? Didn’t most people call him John?”
I know of course that Jack is a longstanding nickname for John. But not everyone named John actually uses this nickname. And I don’t recall seeing him called “Jack Kennedy” in anything that I can remember OTHER than the “you’re no Jack Kennedy” line. Whether it’s contemporaneous with his presidency, or stuff written or spoken decades after the fact, I feel like Bentsen’s line is by far the most common use of the phrase Jack Kennedy. (I know that it was Quayle who initially referred to him that way during the debate.) Was he routinely referred to as “Jack?”
Was that, perhaps, what he was called among Washington insiders, but not the general public? Was it sometimes applied to him ironically because his wife was named Jackie? Or was it a common thing that average people talking about him during his administration and the decades after, would have said?
He was “Jack” to his family and friends and this was widely publicly known. But at the time newspaper and broadcast reporting had quite a formal tone and his forename, when mentioned, would have been given as “John”. But I suspect in colloquial speech he was often called Jack Kennedy.
For some reason, there has stuck in my mind a couplet which was current in 1968, when Bobby Kennedy was seeking the Democratic nomination, which went something like:
“Jack was nimble, Jack was quick.
But Bobby makes me sick.”
Obviously, this was used by people who weren’t fans of Bobby Kennedy to compare him unfavourably with his (by then, sainted) brother. It suggests that both “Jack” and “Bobby” were current in colloquial speech to refer to the two men.
I did a newspaper database search for Jack Kennedy fro 1959 to 1963. It returned 89,340 hits. There will be many duplicates in those, from syndicated articles, and many false hits, from other people of that name.
But it was instantly clear that it was an absolutely common everyday matter for newspaper articles to refer to him as Jack Kennedy all the time, both before he was president and during his term. He was never John Kennedy except formally. He had been called Jack since he first became known and stayed that way until the end.
It was very common. I don’t think I ever heard him referred to as “John Kennedy.” I read somewhere that when he was with his family, they’d alternate between calling him “Jack” and calling him “Mr. President.” (BTW. He died when I was 15.)
I wasn’t old enough during his administration to notice or care what the grownups called him. But from what I’ve seen and heard, “Jack” has been much more commonly used than “John” for his first name. From what I’ve seen none of his friends or family called him “John” in day-to-day life. Perhaps when he was little and he’d misbehaved, the ensuing parental reprimand might have begun with “John Fitzgerald Kennedy!”, but I think that was about it.
As for writings about JFK, I think much depends on context and audience. In biographies of various members of the Kennedy family, I’ve invariably seen him referred to as Jack. In more formal writing, he might be referred to as John.
That number doesn’t mean much without some context. I concede that 89,340 proves that it did happen, but it does not prove it to be “an absolutely common everyday matter”.
Could you please search that same database for “John Kennedy” and “John F Kennedy” and tell us how many hits you get?
I watched the documentary on Frank Sinatra’s life and it covered his involvement with the Kennedy campaign in 1960. He recorded a jingle that was a takeoff on “High Hopes” that referred to Kennedy as Jack (“Everybody’s voting for Jack / 'Cause he has what all the rest lack.”)
A lot of us on this board were alive at the time and heard all the references on radio, television, film, and in discussion with others, all of that in addition to all of the newspaper and magazine articles. I think you should take our word for it on this one, the name ‘Jack Kennedy’ was in common use and instantly recognized at the time.
A couple of points. First, newspapers are far more likely to run the formal name of a Senator or President than a nickname. Second, John Kennedy is an extremely common name and since newspapers usually use the formal name of a person in the news, they would be far more likely to use that than a nickname. One would expect the formal use to far outnumber the nickname.
However, when you look at the articles themselves, it is clear that talking about Jack Kennedy was the norm.
The first hit is to a post-death article titled “The Boyhood of John F. Kennedy.” There are 18 references to Jack in the full-page article and one to John F. Kennedy. (All count as one hit.)
The second hit is from right after the election, and titled “The Life Story of John F. Kennedy.” Again, there are 16 Jacks in the article and only 1 John F. Kennedy
An article from mid-1963 on “JFK: The Man and the Myth” contains 12 Jacks and 4 Johns, three of those using the full formal John F. Kennedy form.
I think it’s beyond contention that whenever Kennedy was referred to beyond his formal full name related to his status, he was called Jack and every literate American would identify him as such before, during, and after his Presidency.
Exapno_Mapcase, thank you very much. Your argument is very convincing.
I was 6 years old when JFK was inaugurated, and 14 when LBJ left office. Meaning that when RMN took office, I had spent my entire politically-aware life in a world where the headlines referred to the president by his initials. (Not to mention that the guy before JFK was Ike, and a little before that we had FDR.)
I was stunned and confused when the headlines wasted two characters of space on spelling RMN’s name fully. I’m not sure if I ever figured it out, or just resigned myself to that reality.
Nixon was usually referred to as “Nixon.” The reason was typography.
Long names took up a lot of headline space. Thus Roosevelt became FDR; Eisenhower* became “Ike”; Kennedy, JFK; Johnson, LBJ.
But “Nixon” was short enough to begin with, so there was no need to come up with an abbreviation. Presidents after him also had short names, so headline writers didn’t use abbreviations.
*The NY Times designer a special slug for the name because they didn’t like “Ike.”
Hopefully this will be more of a detour than a hijack, but I have a question about Kennedy this thread recalled, and I don’t know if it warrants a whole other thread. Apologies if I am hijacking.
Anyway, a friend owns a pre-depression era house, and once he had opened a wall to do some renovation and found a perfectly preserved newspaper inside dating from the Kennedy administration. I was reading through it and there was a small, incidental article inside, well off the front page, about an appearance Kennedy had made, and there was a mention that reporters were asking Kennedy about rumors of affairs.
That surprised me because I thought that was an era when there was a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ not to talk about that, and I thought there was not a hint of a whisper about all the affairs he had until a good while after his death. So my question is, how common was talk or rumor about Kennedy’s affairs while he was in office?
