by Scott Farris
When Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s 1996 survey did not rank Reagan even in the top half (Kennedy was ranked twelfth in that survey), Reagan’s admirers were outraged. To counter this perceived liberal bias within academia, in 2005 the Wall Street Journal and the Federalist Society surveyed an “ideologically balanced” group of prominent professors of history, law, political science, and economics who ranked Reagan as the sixth-greatest president in American history, behind Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt. (Kennedy was ranked fifteenth.)
Despite such controversies, the various surveys of historians have been remarkably consistent: Washington, Lincoln, and FDR are the three truly great presidents in American history, followed closely by Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. Scholars have also been consistent in their judgment as to our worst presidents: Warren Harding, James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, and Andrew Johnson.
Time and perspective, of course, can alter these assessments, and Kennedy himself argued in a 1962 letter to historian David Herbert Donald, “No one has a right to grade a President—even poor James Buchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made his decisions.”
Despite Kennedy’s admonition, the assessments and rankings continue. In one 2000 survey, which had an unusually large number of participants—seven hundred professors of history from colleges and universities across the country—Kennedy was ranked fifteenth out of then forty-one presidents under consideration, while Reagan ranked twenty-sixth, lower than the generally considered failed presidencies of men like John Quincy Adams, Herbert Hoover, George H. W. Bush, and in what must be the unkindest cut of all, Jimmy Carter.
Reagan received high marks for his political skills and leadership qualities, but detractors charged that Reagan had made poor appointments in office and lacked integrity. Yet while some scholars labeled Reagan an “emperor with no clothes,” or a man who had inflicted serious and long-lasting “fiscal damage” on the United States, there were others who did indeed ask the question, “Why isn’t he on Mount Rushmore yet?”
Cut short by assassination, Kennedy’s presidential record offers less to assess. Some scholars complained Kennedy was “all style, no substance,” and another said the “Camelot legacy [was] voided by reality and [Kennedy’s] sex life.” But presidential scholar Richard Neustadt, who informally advised Kennedy before and during his presidency, agreed with those who said that Kennedy’s two years and ten months as president did not provide enough time to gauge what kind of president he might have become. “If one were to assess Franklin Roosevelt on the basis of his performance before January 1936, or Harry Truman on his accomplishments before enactment of the Marshall Plan, or Eisenhower if he had not survived his heart attack, or LBJ before the 1966 congressional elections—or Lincoln, for that matter, if he had been assassinated six months after Gettysburg—one would be most unlikely to reach judgments about any of these men resembling current judgments drawn from the full record of their terms.” Of course, Neustadt wrote that in 1968, unaware that the light of Kennedy’s thousand-day presidency would grow brighter not dimmer with time.
Historians rank our presidents based on the whole arc of the nation’s history. The public is generally focusing on how Kennedy and Reagan compare with other more recent presidents of whom the public has personal memories. If the focus is narrowed to the past fifty years only, the views of historians and the general public are much more aligned. Both groups perceive that most of the nine men who have served since Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 were failed presidents. Johnson was so deeply unpopular because of the Vietnam War that he did not seek reelection in 1968; Nixon resigned from office due to Watergate; Ford, Carter, and George H. W. Bush each failed to win a second term; Clinton’s image has been greatly rehabilitated in recent years, but he was impeached, though not convicted, while in office; and George W. Bush served two full terms but left office with a job approval rating below 30 percent. As of this writing, the jury is still out on Barack Obama.
There is one other factor to consider when assessing Kennedy and Reagan’s legacies that no politician should seek to imitate: They were each shot. For Kennedy, this meant an untimely death and martyrdom barely one thousand days into his presidency. For Reagan, it meant a narrow escape from death and a burst of popular approval that led to some of his greatest policy achievements, which some labeled “a Reagan revolution.” The two incidents together, one extraordinarily tragic, with the other literally restorative, are bookends to a turbulent era that one shooting is sometimes credited with creating and the other has been credited with ending.
CHAPTER 2
MARTYRDOM AND NEAR MARTYRDOM
The murder of one man and the near-fatal wounding of the other may seem misplaced at the beginning of their stories, but the circumstances of Kennedy’s assassination and Reagan’s near assassination are essential to understanding why each man became a beloved president. Without these horrific events, Kennedy and Reagan might not be remembered as even successful presidents, let alone two chief executives rated by public sentiment as among our greatest. But it was not simply their having been shot that is so memorable—we hardly remember some other presidents who have been shot—it was the rare courage and grace shown by Kennedy’s widow, Jackie, and by Reagan himself.
The shooting of a president is a rare and traumatic event. Five sitting presidents have been shot. Four—Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and Kennedy—died; Reagan is the only one to have survived his wounds. Because of this happy result, the impact of Reagan’s shooting is less appreciated and far less controversial than Kennedy’s. Who shot Reagan is uncontested, while one thousand books have been written about the Kennedy assassination, with many of those books laying out yet another conspiracy theory to reveal “who really killed Kennedy.”
Despite their different outcomes, the shootings of Kennedy and Reagan have multiple parallels and similarities, and viewed on a timeline they frame a tumultuous and often disturbing period in American history. “No other event in the postwar era,” said one student of the impact of Kennedy’s assassination, “not even the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has cast such a long shadow over our national life.” Conversely, Reagan’s survival was a break in the gloom, which historian Gil Troy has called “a welcome bookend to Kennedy’s traumatic murder.”
Kennedy’s murder was the first in a series of tragic events that dismayed the nation in the 1960s and 1970s, shocking incidents that included the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. In our collective consciousness, even though each killer had a different motive, the murders of the Kennedy brothers and King are seldom considered unrelated acts. They are instead viewed conspiratorially, as though they were meant to frustrate liberal hopes, especially for a more racially just society. Again conversely, less than two months after Reagan’s shooting, Pope John Paul II also survived an assassination attempt likely approved if not orchestrated by the KGB. Compared to the previous two decades, when it seemed as if nothing could go right, the survival of first Reagan and then the pope made it seem as if the world’s luck had suddenly changed for the better.
Unlike Lincoln, who was killed at the pinnacle of his presidency, the very week of the Union victory in the Civil War, neither Kennedy’s nor Reagan’s shooting occurred at a moment of triumph for either man. Kennedy’s death in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, and Reagan’s wounding in Washington, DC, on March 30, 1981, both occurred at moments when their presidencies seemed to be adrift, even flailing. The passage of each man’s legislative agenda in Congress was far from guaranteed. But each shooting then provided the impetus for creating presidential legacies: Kennedy’s “Camelot” and Reagan’s “Revolution.”
As Kennedy prepared for his trip to Texas, primarily to raise funds for his 1964 reelection campaign, he was in a difficult spot politically. His job approval rating,
primarily due to his identification with civil rights and the subsequent loss of Southern white support, had dropped to 56 percent in the fall of 1963, the lowest level it had reached during his presidency. His entire legislative package languished in Congress, despite the 259–175 margin Democrats held in the House along with a 62–38 majority in the Senate. And it was not just the civil rights legislation but also proposals for tax cuts, health insurance for the elderly, federal funding for education, foreign aid, and even many routine appropriations measures that were stalled and seemingly going nowhere, blocked by a coalition of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats.
Nationally syndicated columnist Marquis Childs wrote that it “has seemed impossible” that the congressional logjam would be broken. Fellow columnist Walter Lippmann added that the “delay and stultification” in Congress was so bad that “[t]his is one of those moments when there is reason to wonder whether the congressional system as it now operates is not a grave danger to the Republic.” It can never be known with certainty whether these bills, particularly the civil rights legislation, would have become law had Kennedy lived (they almost certainly would have been delayed a year at best), but what we do know, New York Times White House correspondent Tom Wicker said, is that these bills were “bogged down and stalled on the day of his death. . . . In the time allotted him, Kennedy was never able to lead Congress effectively.”
Kennedy had no immediate plan for breaking through the impasse. Always aware that he had won the presidency in 1960 by a razor-thin margin and with less than 50 percent of the popular vote, Kennedy’s best hope was to win reelection by a much larger margin so that he would have a “more powerful mandate” for his program. Yet as he began preparing for the 1964 campaign, Kennedy fully expected to lose the entire South and many western states. Kennedy worried in October 1963 that “we’ve got to carry Texas in ’64 and maybe Georgia” to ensure reelection. At about the same time, Look magazine previewed the 1964 election under a banner headline that said, JFK Could Lose.
Reagan, of course, had won election just five months before the attempt on his life. He had been president for less than ten weeks when he went to the Washington Hilton to deliver an address to the annual convention of the AFL-CIO labor union. Yet he was also at the nadir of his young presidency. Like Kennedy, Reagan had not won a great mandate in his first election to the Oval Office. He had won by a large margin in the Electoral College because of the third-party candidacy of John Anderson, but Reagan had won just 50.75 percent of the popular vote.
Further, according to pollsters, his election was not a result of voters’ broad support of his conservative views. A CBS News–New York Times poll conducted after the election found just 11 percent of the electorate had voted for Reagan because they agreed with his conservative principles; 38 percent voted for him simply because “he was not Jimmy Carter.”
While Republicans had won control of the Senate in the 1980 elections for the first time since 1953, Democrats held a fifty-three vote majority in the House and no political fear of the new president. As with Kennedy before his death, Reagan had seen a drop in his job approval rating in late March. In fact, his 59 percent job approval rating was the lowest of any president at such an early point in his term since such surveys began in the 1940s. He was being criticized by Democrats and the news media for being indifferent to the poor, for proposing steep cuts in federal programs, and for sending military advisors to El Salvador, “which, some felt, might become another Vietnam.” Rowland Evans and Robert Novak had a syndicated column published on March 30 that was headlined, The Reagan honeymoon is truly over.
Waiting for Kennedy in Dallas and waiting for Reagan outside the Washington Hilton were two equally disturbed young men, neither of whom intended to make some great political statement in shooting a president; they only wanted to be noticed by a world that had long ignored them. Each one had thought about killing other prominent men before he turned the focus of his evil intent onto the president. The senseless absurdity of each shooting is demonstrated by the facts that Kennedy, the liberal icon accused by the John Birch Society of being a Communist stooge, was shot by a man who professed to be a Marxist, while Reagan, the conservative icon whose policies were considered “racist” by a majority of African Americans, was shot by a man who claimed to be a white supremacist.
Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was a troubled twenty-four-year-old ex-Marine whose father had died two months before he was born. A man of above-average intelligence, Oswald suffered from untreated dyslexia, which made him a poor student. Raised by a self-absorbed mother who generally ignored her two sons, Oswald was described by a social worker as “an emotionally starved and affectionless youngster” who admitted to fantasies “about being powerful and sometimes hurting or killing people.”* Oswald’s self-professed Marxism, friends said, was more a game of “Let’s Pretend” than a serious personal philosophy, and his supposed hatred of America and its capitalist system did not prevent Oswald from joining the Marines and becoming qualified as a sharpshooter.
* Secret Service agent Jerry Parr, who would later save Reagan’s life during that assassination attempt, had been sent to Dallas after Kennedy was shot to guard Oswald’s wife and mother, and he never forgot how Marguerite, instead of expressing regret, boasted about having become “a mother of history.”
Always the alienated outsider, Oswald came to hate both the Corps and the nation it served, and so he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. Finding the supposed workers’ paradise drab and boring, Oswald returned to the United States in 1962 with his Russian-born wife, Marina, and their infant daughter. For a time, he flirted with a pro-Castro Cuban group, and he made one of his many efforts to get the world to notice him with an unsuccessful assassination attempt in April 1963 against retired ultraconservative Air Force general Edwin Walker, then a leading figure in the far-right John Birch Society, which had actively opposed most of Kennedy’s domestic and foreign policies.
Seven months after failing to kill General Walker, at around 12:30 p.m., on Friday, November 22, 1963, using a rifle he had purchased through a mail-order catalog, Oswald fired three shots in five seconds from a window on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, the building where he worked, down at Kennedy’s presidential motorcade below. Two shots struck the president, who was eighty-eight yards away, riding in an open car that had slowed to about ten miles per hour as it made a sharp turn just below the Depository Building.
The identity of Kennedy’s killer, when it became known, caused extraordinary confusion—confusion that remains to this day. The near-unanimous initial assumption had been that the assassin had to have been a right-wing extremist, for Dallas was a center of activity for the radical right, and Kennedy had been engaged in an ongoing feud with ultraconservative extremists. In fact, two Kennedy speeches scheduled for later that day, one in Dallas and another later in Austin, were intended, according to the prepared remarks, to challenge and condemn “fanatics” who were “preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the Sixties . . .”
When Richard Nixon first learned of the assassination, he immediately called FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and asked, “What happened, was it one of the right-wing nuts?” Angry protestors shut down the Washington, DC, office of the National Draft Goldwater Committee with cries of “Murderers! Murderers!” A young and then-unknown journalist named Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “The savage nuts have destroyed the great myth of American decency.” Even some members of the radical right assumed one of their own was to blame. In Kentucky, the chair of the Young Americans for Freedom resigned his post, stating, “I am now satisfied that the climate of political degeneracy and moral hysteria masquerading as ‘true Americansim’ bears substantial culpability for the murder of the President of the United States.” More than a dozen years later, that sentiment still prevailed. The Church Committee investigating clandestine operations conducted by the U.S. government
concluded that Kennedy’s assassination was due, not simply to one deranged individual, but to a “conspiratorial atmosphere of violence.”
It was as if the real identity of Kennedy’s killer was so absurd that Americans could not mentally process it, which is likely why so many conspiracy theories began to sprout up.* As the author of a study of the assassination’s impact on liberal American politics said, “If President Kennedy had been shot by a right-wing fanatic whose guilt was established by the same evidence as condemned Oswald, there would have been no protracted controversy about ‘who killed Kennedy?’” As former Los Angeles district attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who has affirmed that Oswald acted alone and who has done the most comprehensive debunking of the many and various conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s death in his 1.5-million-word opus, Reclaiming History, noted, “there’s the instinctive notion that a king cannot be struck down by a peasant.” Lincoln scholar Reed Turner said, “Somehow it is more satisfying to believe that a President died as the victim of a cause than at the hands of a deranged gunman.” No one was more chagrined about the motives of the killer than Kennedy’s widow, Jackie, who lamented that her husband “didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little Communist. It even robs his death of meaning.”
* Ronald Reagan joined the chorus of conspiracy buffs in a radio commentary he made on February 13, 1979, when he criticized the Warren Commission for not more thoroughly investigating whether the Soviet Union might not have been behind Kennedy’s murder. Noting Oswald learned Russian before he defected in 1959, Reagan said, “Someone must have helped him do this.”