The President’s Playlist: the favourite songs of JFK
In December 2022, former President of the United States Barack Obama published a list of the songs he’d been listening to that year online.
It was a holdover from his time in office. He’d done the same every year as a way of (if you want to be charitable) showing his human side and uplifting a number of artists with the cosign of one of the world’s most famous and respected people. If you don’t want to be charitable, it was a pretty craven attempt to come across as “the cool president” so people would ignore all those war crimes he committed.
It was 2022 when it became clear that these were almost certainly cherry-picked by his staff and not the man himself, due to the presence of ‘American Teenager’ by Ethel Cain. To be clear, ‘American Teenager’ is one of the best songs of the decade; if he was listening to it and bopping along to that howitzer chorus, I wouldn’t be surprised.
However, Obama was nothing if not a smart man. He, of all people, would see that the song is partially about the way the American military chucks working-class kids it claims to fight for into a meat grinder for the sake of imperialism.
All this to say that whenever you hear about the music taste of a president, whatever president it may be, it is almost always a con. Whether it’s Clinton jamming along to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on the Arsenio Hall show on the sax, Reagan shouting out Bruce Springsteen on his campaign trail, or Nixon appointing Elvis Presley as an honorary Narcotics officer, hilariously enough. It is always something being deployed to make you think fondly about someone who does not give a shit about you, but that doesn’t mean there’s not something real hidden away in there.
In fact, the best examples of this come from the music taste of John F Kennedy, compiled from the testimony of a number of people who knew him best.
What were the favourite songs of JFK?
Most famous of all is arguably his love of the 1960 Broadway musical Camelot by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. JFK was an avid fan of the musical, according to his widow, Jackie, when interviewed after Kennedy’s death. This is verifiably true. In fact, JFK himself was a school friend of Lerner, who actually organised the 35th President of the United States’ final birthday celebration.
In the interview, Jackie said that he would listen to side B of the soundtrack album before bed most nights, with his favourite song being the closing title song, sung by Richard Burton.
Kennedy’s other great musical connection is to Frank Sinatra; JFK was an avid fan of The Rat Pack’s leader, seeing him perform live on many occasions and leaning on his friendship with Sinatra all throughout his presidential campaign. This was more than just canny campaigning, though (just about), because Sinatra had recorded a celebrated version of one of Sinatra’s favourite standards, ‘Blue Skies’. Perhaps that was why Kennedy himself tried to intervene personally when Sinatra’s casino license was revoked in the early 1960s.
However, it’s one thing to have a song you love to listen to, and quite another to have a song you love so much you sing it yourself. For Kennedy, that song was the Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson composition ‘September Song’. Fascinatingly enough, this is a song about an older man refusing to let life pass him by anymore. That it would appeal to a man who was the youngest president ever upon his election seems strange, until you remember that this was a man who saw some truly horrific stuff during his time in the war. He still felt the shadow of death upon him, no matter how much time elapsed after it.
He would never know just how justified he was to feel that way.