Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  The press at Nofziger’s briefing were now laughing, and the nation relaxed; how badly could the president be wounded if he was still cracking jokes?

  In truth, he was very badly wounded. He had come literally within an inch of death—the distance between his heart and where the bullet stopped moving. The bullet had mangled one of his lungs. Yet Reagan kept telling jokes, even when he had to write them down on paper because a tracheotomy tube prevented him from talking. Asked how he felt after surgery, Reagan stole a line from the comedian W. C. Fields and wrote, “All in all, I’d rather be in Phil[adelphia].” When a nurse comforted him by holding his hand, he cracked, “Does Nancy know about us?” As doctors and nurses hovered over him in the recovery room, he scribbled, “If I had this much attention in Hollywood I’d have stayed there.” And when he was assured that he should relax, the federal government was running just fine without him, Reagan said, “What makes you think I’d be happy to hear that?” Asked later why he had kept making jokes despite his pain, Reagan said, “There was a crowd standing round. Somebody ought to entertain them some way.”

  When Reagan was finally allowed visitors, one of the first was his political nemesis, Democratic House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, who walked straight to the president’s bed, kissed him on the forehead, and then knelt beside him as the two men recited the Lord’s Prayer with tears welling in O’Neill’s eyes. When Reagan was told his assailant was a troubled young man “who just happened to be crazy,” Reagan replied, “I had hoped it was a KGB agent. On second thought, he wouldn’t have missed then.”* The only time Reagan was left speechless was when he was told of Brady’s injury, which had caused brain damage. “Oh, damn,” was all Reagan could say, tears streaming down his face.

  * In June 1982, Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and he has since been confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the mentally ill.

  On April 28, about two weeks after he had been released from the hospital, Reagan gave his first public address since the shooting in a speech before Congress to advocate passage of his tax cuts package. “The place went nuts,” in the words of one reporter, and the realization struck Democratic leaders that the shooting had dramatically changed the nation’s political dynamics. Surveys showed 77 percent of Americans now had a favorable opinion of Reagan, up twenty points since his inauguration, and his favorable rating was at 64 percent even among Democrats. Reagan had come to personify courage, which Kennedy himself, quoting Hemingway, had defined as displaying “grace under pressure.”

  Reagan’s gallant behavior following the shooting had “cemented a bond with the American people that never dissolved,” his biographer Lou Cannon said. It was a bond that was continuously renewed because, as Reagan speechwriter and biographer Peggy Noonan noted, every public appearance by the president reminded Americans of the courage it took to “go out there again and continue being president, continue waving at the crowds as he walks to the car. Think of the courage that old man had!”

  Democratic leaders understood they now had little choice but to acquiesce to Reagan’s tax cut proposals, measures they had felt fairly confident of defeating just days before. “We’ve just been outflanked and outgunned,” Democratic House Majority Leader Jim Wright wrote in his diary, adding that Reagan deserved the label of hero given his demeanor after the shooting. O’Neill echoed the sentiment in meetings with his members. “The president has become a hero,” he said. “We can’t argue with a man as popular as he is. . . . I’ve been in politics a long time, and I know when to fight and when not to fight.”

  The Democrats did, in fact, fight a little more, but Reagan’s tax cuts were law by August. And while Democrats would continue to contest other Reagan proposals, in part by asserting he was insensitive to the less fortunate, they had a difficult time making such a charge stick. As Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote, “As long as people remember the hospitalized President joshing his doctors and nurses—and they will remember—no critic will be able to portray Reagan as a cruel or callous or heartless man.”

  In the years following Kennedy’s murder, writers as disparate as Theodore White and Norman Mailer concluded that the assassination had “undermined the optimism of the postwar era and introduced a negative mood into American life.” Following Reagan’s survival, there were those who hoped it was “an augury of a national turn for the better; it signaled the breaking of the skein of bad luck that had plagued the nation and its leaders for nearly twenty years.” Reagan himself, in his April 28 speech to Congress, indirectly confronted the issue of whether Kennedy’s assassination and his own shooting indicated there was something deeply wrong with America. “Sick societies,” Reagan said, “don’t produce young men like Secret Service Agent Tim McCarthy, who placed his body between mine and the man with the gun simply because he felt that’s what his duty called for him to do. Sick societies don’t produce dedicated police officers like Tom Delahanty, or able and devoted public servants like James Brady. Sick societies don’t make people like us so proud to be Americans and so very proud of our fellow citizens.”

  The shooting damaged Reagan’s health and left him noticeably less vigorous through the remainder of his presidency. The president had written in his diary shortly after the shooting that he believed God had spared his life because he had a special purpose in mind for him. Reagan would later conclude that God intended him to eliminate the possibility of nuclear war in the world.

  Reagan also understood how dramatically his survival had changed his immediate political fortunes. Despite his high level of popularity in the weeks and months after March 30, Reagan saw his approval numbers drop as the nation went into recession for much of his first term in office. When in early 1983, his pollster, Richard Wirthlin, apologized for having to tell him that his job approval rating had fallen all the way down to 35 percent, “the lowest ever,” Reagan reached over to pat Wirthlin’s arm and said with a smile, “I know what I can do about that. I’ll go out and get shot again.”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE MOST IRISH OF PRESIDENTS

  Twenty-two American presidents from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama have claimed at least some Irish lineage, yet it is Kennedy and Reagan who have each been labeled our “most Irish of Presidents,” in part because each was gifted with different forms of what is often described as “Irish wit.”

  Few presidents (only Lincoln and FDR come immediately to mind) have used humor to such advantage as Kennedy and Reagan. One may search bookstores in vain for tomes about the wit and wisdom of, say, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Jimmy Carter, but multiple volumes have been published on the wit (and wisdom) of Kennedy and Reagan.*

  * Some of our funniest politicians, such as Adlai Stevenson, Mo Udall, and Bob Dole, have been criticized and may have come up short in their bids for the presidency in part because their humor was considered too risky. Stevenson responded to the criticism that a time of global crisis was not time for a joke with a joke: “My opponent has been worried about my funny bone. I’m worried about his backbone.”

  Most presidents, indeed most politicians, shy away from humor, for it is a risky business. Dying is easy, they say; comedy is hard. The pitfalls are many. There is always the risk of offending or coming across as mean and petty rather than self-deprecating and generous. The humor must (or at least should) be appropriate to the occasion, or it can seem out of place and create more confusion than laughter. Garry Wills said, “Ronald Reagan is often accused of thinking in one-liners, but the art is in choosing the right line for each occasion.”

  The timing that makes a joke work requires not only practice but also, as Reagan biographer Edmund Morris noted, “a special kind of intelligence . . . a few syllables too many, a vital phrase misstated, and the humor dies.” And, of course, for humor to work it must also be truly funny, and to be funny a joke must state or expose some fundamental truth about the human condition. Express
ing truth is a high hurdle for any politician, but a large part of Kennedy and Reagan’s appeal is that they seemed sincere, in large part because they did believe what they were saying to be true, and each man was unusually candid for a politician.

  We admire people who make us laugh, not only because it is enjoyable but because, knowing all the pitfalls listed above, we admire the courage and confidence it takes for a public figure to try to make us laugh. By routinely using humor to make their points, Kennedy and Reagan exhibited the self-confidence that then instilled a deeper confidence among the people in their general abilities to govern. This use of wit and humor is a significant factor in their enduring popularity and influence, not merely because they made us laugh but because they made us believe that they possessed special gifts for leadership.

  Despite the real work it takes to be funny, those who have commented on Kennedy and Reagan’s humor have suggested that it came to them honestly by the fact of their Irish heritage. As Jay Dolan, a leading historian on the Irish experience in America, has noted, the Irish have long been associated with the positive attributes of “gregariousness, wit, charm”—attributes popularly associated with Kennedy and Reagan. Indeed, Kennedy and Reagan’s “Irishness” is key to their enduring appeal.

  It is, after all, as Dolan noted, “chic to be Irish,” as well as politically advantageous, for nearly a fifth of all Americans (as of 2013) claim Irish heritage. When Americans with multiple ethnic backgrounds have the opportunity to choose with which heritage they most identify, “Given a choice, people pick Irish.” As the Christian Science Monitor noted on St. Patrick’s Day in 2012, “Irish heritage is so widespread in the United States that in some ways a little wearing of the green emphasizes a politician’s American heritage.”

  Of course, it has not always been so. Few immigrants to America have arrived in such desperation as the Irish. During the near-genocidal Irish potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s, half of all immigrants to America were Irish. As if famine failed to provide enough misery, the Irish were subjected to a host of laws imposed by the occupying British inherently designed to push them off their land and decimate their culture and religion. The Irish had left behind conditions that Alexis de Tocqueville declared were worse than what he had observed among African-American slaves in the South—and de Tocqueville toured Ireland before the potato famine. All told, more than four million Irish immigrated to America between 1820 and 1930.

  For first-generation Irish immigrants, conditions were only slightly better in America. In the nineteenth century and a good deal of the twentieth, the Roman Catholic Irish were so foreign to the Protestant self-image of America that their social status was only marginally higher than African-American slaves and lower than that of free blacks. The Irish were scorned as a race of lazy and ignorant drunkards, thieves, and whores. Yet one hundred years later they would be considered exemplars of the American immigrant success story and one of their own would be president.

  While few immigrant families produced a president, the paths followed by the ancestors of Kennedy and Reagan who immigrated to America were similar to the millions who came.

  Patrick Kennedy, the great-grandfather of John F. Kennedy, was a twenty-five-year-old farm laborer facing a bleak future in his home of Dunganstown in County Wexford, Ireland, when he decided to immigrate to Boston in 1848.* Once settled, he became a cooper and married Bridget Murphy, also from County Wexford, whom he had met while they shared the forty-day passage to America. By 1858, the year Patrick died of cholera, the couple had five children, whom Bridget then supported by working as a hairdresser and operating a small store. Her youngest child, Patrick Joseph, known as “PJ,” dropped out of grammar school to work on the docks and saved enough money that by age twenty-five he was able to purchase an East Boston saloon, which in short order he grew into a profitable wholesale liquor business.

  * The Kennedy ancestral home is sometimes listed as New Ross, the largest town nearby, but Patrick Kennedy’s farm was located three miles away in the much smaller village of Dunganstown.

  Saloons were often the center of urban political activity, and so PJ, having already demonstrated his shrewd judgment in building his business, became a ward boss and state legislator. He would serve eight terms in the Massachusetts Legislature, and he became an important enough figure in the Democratic Party that he was granted the honor of giving one of the presidential nomination seconding speeches for Grover Cleveland at the 1884 Democratic National Convention. PJ’s oldest child, Joseph P. Kennedy, would become John Kennedy’s father. Kennedy’s maternal ancestors, the Fitzgeralds, also Irish immigrants, initially enjoyed an even more remarkable climb to prominence, with Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, becoming mayor of Boston.

  Although the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds had been farmers in Ireland, the families’ decision to settle in urban Boston was typical of most Irish immigrants. Eighty percent of all Irish immigrants to America lived in cities, a far higher percentage than most immigrant groups, a fact that helped them retain their ethnic identity. Being packed together in the same urban neighborhoods allowed the Irish to “sustain the same dense web of parish influences” they had known back home, albeit in much smaller communities. German immigrants, by contrast, primarily settled in rural areas, making it more difficult to sustain their traditions. There was also a remarkable balance between the number of male and female Irish immigrants, which made it easier to marry within the Irish community and further maintain traditions. In contrast, many Italian immigrants, for example, came to American in male work gangs.

  Perhaps most important in terms of promoting the Irish identity in the United States was the Irish domination of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States—and the world, for that matter. As Charles R. Morris notes in his history of the Catholic Church in America, “With the need [because of the potato famine] to find a profession for so many young men who could not survive as farmers, the Irish began to meet the worldwide need for Catholic priests.” During a fifty-year period in the nineteenth century, one single seminary in Ireland, All Hallows, sent more than six hundred priests to the United States. An example of the global influence of the Irish on the church is that at the First Vatican Council of 1869, 20 percent of all attending bishops were either Irish born or of Irish descent.

  When Polish and other Central Europeans immigrants began arriving in large numbers to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “the spiritual style of the American Church had been firmly established,” so that except in a few cities such as Chicago, these newer Catholic immigrants were “forced to accommodate to a church that was run mostly by Irish Americans.” This domination was reinforced in popular culture, where in any film that featured Catholic priests, the priests were Irish, such as Spencer Tracy’s Father Flannigan in Boys Town or Bing Crosby’s Father O’Malley in Going My Way. Irish Americans were the subjects of so much positive attention for their patriotism in films like The Fighting 69th or Yankee Doodle Dandy that a Czech woman longed for “an American name like . . . the Kellys, or O’Briens, or Sullivans.”

  Another reason Irish remains a popular ethnic identification, and why being Irish is part of Kennedy and Reagan’s charm, is that the Irish do not burden their descendants with the collective baggage of colonialism or imperialism; the Irish have always been the oppressed, not the oppressor. America has never been at war with Ireland, nor has Ireland ever been a major world power whose interests have conflicted with the United States. The Catholic Irish arrived late to America, so they are not identified with the maltreatment of Native Americans or with the institution of slavery. Other ethnic groups have more complicated histories.

  To be Irish, then, means not having to say you’re sorry, and even Ireland’s status as the backwater of Europe is now celebrated. Thomas Cahill’s book How the Irish Saved Civilization, about how Irish monks preserved ancient texts, sold 1.2
million copies in hardcover alone. The Irish have even taken their grinding poverty and hardship and found in it not only pathos but humor. Books such as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which sold an astonishing 2.5 million copies, or Daniel Day-Lewis’s Academy Award–winning portrayal of the poor and physically challenged Irish artist Christy Brown in the film My Left Foot, or Roddy Doyle’s modern tales of working-class Dubliners win wide audiences in printed or cinematic form.*

  * The notion that the Irish are so familiar with hardship that they can joke about it was underscored by an oft-repeated remark made by future New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination: “. . . I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.”

  Despite this now deep affection for all things Irish, both Kennedy and Reagan were slow to embrace their Irish roots. In fact, neither emphasized his Irish heritage until political considerations made it desirable, even necessary. In Kennedy’s case, that was when he ran for Congress from a largely Irish-American district in East Boston, while Reagan said little about his Irish heritage until he became president.

  In Reagan’s defense, which he gave himself in a 1981 address to the Irish American Historical Society, it was not apathy that prevented him identifying with his Irish heritage, it was ignorance of his family’s history (although the fact that his mother was not Irish and that he was not raised a Catholic are also factors). As Reagan noted, his father had been orphaned at the age of six, so he was able to pass on little of the family history. Beyond a single, old photograph of his grandfather and grandmother, Reagan said he had “no knowledge of that family history.”