Letters disclose aversion of liquor in JFK White house.
Presidential shifts are always a little complicated. Evidence in point: At JFK White House events, some researchers found a cache of letters from Americans opposing to JFK’s embrace of cocktails at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
The hoard of letters casts new insight into President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s handoff to Kennedy at the beginning in 1961. The people remarkably held diverse approaches wherein alcohol at formal get-togethers.
Booze risks lives
“Liquor dulls the brain and loosens the tongue,” one frustrated immigrant, Kenneth P. Kennedy of Sparta, Illinois, who had no connection with JFK addressed to the nation’s newly minted 35th president. “Can we risk our national and international security on such potential incompetence?” he asked.
Enter Kennedy, who had already raised some eyebrows as the first Roman Catholic to be elected president. The random archivists say Eisenhower had controlled over a widely cocktail free White House. However, he was no teetotaller.
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library archivists say the letters of protest started arriving after newsletters proclaimed on Kennedy’s first official event and assemblings honor the new president’s nominees, which is held in January 1961.
Few missives that reveal aversion on booze
The Washington Post recorded in its statement, “There was a bar for the first time, in the State Dining Room that brought up with waiters to mix martinis or pour vodka, Scotch or champagne, and bourbon.”
The U.S. people that followed was a low-key Liquorgate, and letters sent were some penned, others typed that expressed apprehension. They worried that the U.S. would lose its worth fame and specific reach in the world.
“Dear Mr. President, I think many feel humiliation and disgrace over our nation today when we learn of our White House turned into shameful drunken all-night carousal and dancing,” reads one from Edith Fritz, of Idaho. “Dignity previously engendered — gone. May God pity your poor soul.”
“Our nation was founded by men of Christian ideals. Let’s keep it that way,” reads another from Ruby Turner, of Dunkerton, Iowa.
Another person from Louisiana, whose name and hometown are unreadable, written a letter that reads: “The White House is a national shrine to us — all those who love America and we would like to have it presented to other nations as a dignified, respectable home, not ‘a well-stocked bar, with scotch, gin and vodka flowing freely.'”
The Presidential Library said the cache of letters was buried deep in the vast White House Public Opinion Mail collection and marking its word “could easily have been lost to its history.”
Unless Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic opponent in November, doesn’t drink. Similar to Trump, the retired vice president has tended to insobriety in his family as to describe why he refuses.
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