Bond-ing: the bizarre meeting of John F Kennedy and Ian Fleming
By this point, it’s fairly common knowledge that the knack Ian Fleming had for spy stories came from the fact that he was an actual spy for years. He worked at the forefront of counter-intelligence during World War II, but at this point, that fact is more part of the James Bond mystique than a signifier that the novels are anything more than boys-own hokum. What isn’t common knowledge today is that in his time, Fleming was a celebrity, something that the Bond mystique greatly contributed toward.
He was a natural raconteur, a glass of brandy and a cigar never far from his hands and a witty rejoinder never far from his lips. Though the James Bond novels were successful from the moment they were published, his profile went through the roof when President John F Kennedy talked up From Russia With Love as one of his favourite novels. What neither of them knew was that they had a mutual friend in the form of socialite Marion Leiter, whose surname Fleming would crib for CIA agent and frequent Bond ally Felix Leiter.
In fact, it was Mrs Leiter who introduced Kennedy to the novels in the first place. Fleming, ever the embellisher, claimed that the first time he was introduced to Kennedy in 1960, the senator for Massachusetts exclaimed, “The Ian Fleming?!”. Fleming’s fan fiction aside, Kennedy was taken by the author, and when Mrs Leiter proposed that the four of them get back together for dinner that evening, he was thrilled at the prospect.
Which is when things get interesting. Legend has it that during that meal, Kennedy asked Fleming how he would depose Fidel Castro. Fleming’s response was worthy of its own Bond subplot. He proposed humiliating Castro out of office with a bizarre mix of air-dropping fake dollar bills all over the country, along with pamphlets claiming that beards made men impotent.
Thus, the facially fuzzed Castro and his cabinet would have to field questions about their impotency, which would lead to them either resigning or being hounded out of office by their disgusted populace. Look, no one reads Bond novels for the plot, OK?
Credit where it’s due, he was almost certainly joking, and Kennedy took it as such. However, we now know that once Kennedy took the presidency, some of his ideas for subduing Castro made Fleming’s dinner party bon mots look like John Le Carré-esque sophisticated sophistry. It’s not entirely impossible that Fleming was being serious, either. As the smash-hit West End musical Operation Mincemeat shows, there were crazier ideas were being thrown around M16 during the Second World War.
Whatever Fleming’s intentions were, Kennedy liked the cut of his jib. The public endorsement of his Bond novels came soon after, and Fleming was catapulted from being a best-selling author to becoming an international celebrity. The film adaptation of Dr No came the following year, and while the Bond movies today are bigger and more expensive than they’ve ever been, there’s an argument that they’ve never had the level of cultural ubiquity they had in those early 1960s years.
No matter how much Fleming thought of himself as a military man, that kind of celebrity was precisely what he was made for, as his encounters with JFK show.
