Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  Finally, rather than offer gratitude for the federal assistance that perhaps saved his family from the poorhouse, in his memoirs Reagan writes that Jack’s employment at FERA instead proved how welfare programs “destroy the human spirit”—not his father’s or brother’s, of course, for they honestly earned their pay and had no part in any “boondoggles,” but that of unidentified others whom Reagan claimed turned down jobs and work for fear of losing federal relief assistance.

  The Depression left no deep scars on Ronald Reagan. In his memoirs, he struggles to find examples of how the Depression directly impacted his family until Jack lost his job that Christmas in 1932. Then his mother was forced to earn some additional money as a seamstress, and his parents moved to a smaller apartment (though this was also after Reagan and his brother had moved out to attend college). The year Jack lost his job, the family decided they could not afford a Christmas tree, and once, after he was employed, Reagan sent his mother fifty dollars to help pay some bills. But Reagan never went hungry or homeless.

  His nostalgia ran so deep that he actually extolled the Depression as an event that “brought people together in marvelous ways. There was a spirit of warmth and helpfulness and, yes, kindliness abroad in the land that was inspiring to me as we all clung to the belief that, sooner or later, things would get better.” Reagan professed to be blissfully unaware of the social and political upheaval that swept much of the nation during the 1930s, though as we will discuss in a later chapter, he was actually not completely unaware. There was a brief period when Reagan himself might have self-identified as a radical leftist.

  If Reagan was unscarred by the Depression, Kennedy was almost completely unaware it occurred. Even taking into account that Kennedy was six years Reagan’s junior, his ignorance of the Depression is startling. In the fall of 1930, at age thirteen, while attending his first boarding school, Canterbury, Kennedy sent a letter remonstrating his parents for not informing him of the stock market crash that had occurred a full year before. He asked that they send him “the Litary [sic] Digest because I did not know about the Market Slump until a long time after.” In the letter, Jack also requests his parents “send some golf balls.”

  Kennedy later freely admitted, “I have no firsthand knowledge of the Depression. My family had one of the great fortunes of the world and it was worth more than ever then. We had bigger houses, more servants, we traveled more. About the only thing that I saw directly was when my father hired some extra gardeners just to give them a job so they could eat. I really did not learn about the Depression until I read about it at Harvard.”

  Although Kennedy had no direct knowledge of poverty, and he would have trouble relating to the poor and working class most of his political career, he was fully aware of his privileged position in the world. In his last year at Choate, he wrote an essay that questioned whether a person’s social status determines whether a person leads a moral life; and if that is true, then how can God be just when people are born into circumstances that make moral choices difficult? Kennedy contrasted the fates of “a boy . . . born into a rich family, brought up in [a] clean environment” who receives an excellent education, inherits a family business and “dies a just and honest man,” with “a boy born in the slums, of a poor family, [who] has evil companions, no education” who becomes a “drunken bum, and dies, worthless.” Kennedy said it was not merit that necessarily led the rich boy to be a success and the poor boy to be a failure; “how much better chance has [the] boy born with a silver spoon in his mouth of being good than the boy who from birth is surrounded by rottenness and filth.”

  These ruminations at boarding school did not stir Kennedy’s social conscience, however. At Harvard, Kennedy did not participate in any campus activism around poverty, the Depression, university issues, or anything else. In his studies, he expressed little curiosity about the Depression, its causes, effects, or cures, and surprised his professors, who knew Kennedy’s grandfather had been mayor of Boston, by exhibiting no interest in local politics. He also continued his pattern of disinterest from Choate, where he had rigged the voting as a joke to get himself voted “mostly likely to succeed,” by taking minimal interest in his studies at Harvard.

  Kennedy had initially enrolled at Princeton with his friend Billings, primarily to get out from under Joe Junior’s shadow. Joe was a star at Harvard, so obviously gifted and focused on a political career that he was already telling friends and classmates, “When I become president, I will take you to the White House with me.” But health issues forced Jack to withdraw from Princeton, and when he recovered and returned to school, he enrolled at Harvard.

  His freshman and sophomore years, he received mostly grades of “B” and “C,” though he also got a “D” in a European history course, which in theory was a subject that should have held his interest. Whether he truly believed it or used it as a crutch to avoid studying, Kennedy told Payson Wild, his dorm master his sophomore year, “Dr. Wild, I want you to know I’m not bright like my brother Joe.”

  He so often failed to keep up with class work that he regularly hired tutors to help him “cram” for exams. One of his tutor’s evaluations read, “Though his mind is still undisciplined and will probably never be very original, he has ability, I think, and gives promise of development.” Wild agreed that Kennedy was underperforming and was, at heart, an inquisitive student capable of thinking deeply and in theoretical terms.

  Kennedy, Wild recalled, was particularly interested in the answer to the fundamental political question, “Why do people obey?” Wild also recalled a discussion with Kennedy about the closing of America’s physical frontier meaning that the “new frontiers are the political and social ones.” It was a phrase that stuck in Kennedy’s mind.

  If academics remained on the back burner for Kennedy, two things immediately captured his interest at Harvard; one was, like Reagan, a continuing quest for athletic glory; the other, unlike Reagan, was the ongoing quest for fun and the opportunity to bed women—lots of women, just like his father. In a letter to his friend Billings, Kennedy wrote that at Harvard, “I am now known as a Play-boy,” and he boasted, “I can now get my tail as often and as free as I want.” Kennedy later told his valet, George Thomas, that his style of “dating” required that “I always make it on the first night. If not the first night, then that’s the end of the relationship.”

  Kennedy admitted to Billings that he worried about getting one of these many young women pregnant, but such worries did not slow him down. Billings speculated that sexual conquests were important to Kennedy because, like reading, it was something he did better than his brother Joe—something he did better than anyone else because “he was more fun than anyone.”

  A classmate at Harvard, the future economist John Kenneth Gal­braith, remembered Kennedy as “handsome . . . gregarious, given to various amusements, much devoted to social life and affectionately and diversely to women.” Because of his father’s enduring business ties to Hollywood, Kennedy often enthralled his dates with firsthand gossip about movie stars. But he bristled at the suggestion that it was his father’s wealth that made him attractive to women, despite his essay at Choate on the advantages of being born into a rich family. On a bet, he and Billings double-dated but switched identities so the girls thought Billings was Kennedy and Kennedy was Billings; Kennedy still successfully seduced his date.

  In other pursuits involving physical gratification, Kennedy was less successful. Even though women found Kennedy attractive, he weighed just 150 pounds at Harvard while standing six feet tall. This scrawniness prevented him from making anything more than the football team’s sophomore junior squad. He tried hard to gain weight; one of the Harvard social clubs to which he belonged even purchased an ice-cream machine to help him. But ultimately he was too small and too slow to make varsity, though he was admired for his scrappy style of play and did earn a letter. His football coach said, “He played for keeps. He did nothing halfway.
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  Like Reagan, Kennedy had better luck at swimming. His freshman swim team went undefeated, and he won an intercollegiate sailing championship as a sophomore. But, according to family lore, Kennedy injured his back during a practice football scrimmage and that was the end of his playing football. Fortunately, Kennedy found a new interest through his father.

  Midway through Kennedy’s sophomore year, his father, who had served as Roosevelt’s first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, was named Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the first Irish-American Catholic to be the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. The appointment changed the lives of most of the Kennedy clan, but none more profoundly than Jack; his father’s new posting opened up a larger world that caught his interest and allowed him his first truly great personal achievement—the first time he would really emerge from his older brother’s shadow, as will be discussed in the next chapter.

  Reagan had also undergone some life-changing experiences at Eureka, though he, like Kennedy, considered academics a secondary reason for attending college. Reagan majored in economics but barely eked out passing grades because he seldom studied and devoted most of his time to extracurricular activities. He performed in seven school plays, lettered in two sports, was a cheerleader for the other sports, worked one year on the school newspaper and two years on the yearbook, and was president of the Booster Club and Student Senate. When he later received an honorary degree from his alma mater, Reagan joked, “I thought my first Eureka degree was an honorary one.”

  It would be hard to imagine two schools more opposite in almost all things than Eureka and Harvard would have been in the 1920s and 1930s. Harvard, founded in 1636, was the oldest and most renowned American university, with a student body composed almost exclusively of the sons of America’s wealthiest and most prominent families. Eureka was founded in 1885, from its beginnings a coeducational school with women students, and it was very small; during Reagan’s freshman year, it had only about two hundred students.* Like many small colleges, especially during the Depression, Eureka was perpetually broke. This circumstance led to a chain of events that Reagan partially credits for his later interest in politics.

  * In 2010, Eureka still had fewer than eight hundred students; that same year, Harvard had more than twenty thousand.

  Eureka had a faculty of only twenty, but it was offering courses through twenty-eight departments. To cut costs and avoid tuition increases that would have been the death of the school, Eureka president Bert Wilson proposed consolidating the programs into just nine departments and eliminating home economics entirely. Even though Wilson assured students that the changes would not impact either their choice of majors or their chance to graduate, Eureka students, egged on by faculty who were disenchanted with Wilson’s leadership, began organizing a strike and demanded Wilson’s resignation and a repeal of his reorganization plan. Reagan, who as governor of California would crack down on student radicals at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of the students chosen to speak at a rally in favor of the strike.

  Reagan later said he was chosen to represent the freshman class, and a classmate added that was because Reagan, a cheerleader, after all, was known to have “the biggest mouth of the freshman class.” News accounts of the rally make no mention of Reagan’s remarks, but Reagan recalled his speech as being the turning point in the rally, and in its success he unearthed a hidden talent. “I discovered that night that an audience has a feel to it,” Reagan said, “and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together. When I came to actually presenting the motion there was no need for parliamentary procedure; they came to their feet with a roar—even the faculty members present voted by acclamation. It was heady wine.”

  If Reagan’s speech was a success, the “strike” was not; it ended up being no more than an extended Thanksgiving weekend. The school trustees backed Wilson, the consolidation plan went through, faculty members who had helped foment the attempted strike were disciplined, and three student leaders (but not Reagan, indicating he may have inflated his role in the affair) were asked to withdraw from campus. The rout of the students was so complete that they even dropped their demand that Wilson resign and issued a pledge of respect that was almost an apology. The trustees begged him to stay, but Wilson insisted upon leaving anyway.

  With his first brush with political activism over, Reagan could return his attention to the three things he cared about most: athletics, theater, and his relationship with Margaret Cleaver. If Kennedy was a libertine, Reagan was a serial monogamist. Foreshadowing his later relationships with Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis, Reagan’s “devotion to ‘Mugs’ was already a campus joke.” They would date for six years, and he owed her and her family a great deal. At Eureka, Mugs had gotten her sister’s boyfriend to ensure that Reagan was accepted into the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. They became engaged while at Eureka but had agreed to postpone setting a wedding date until Reagan was employed. After graduation, Margaret left Eureka for a teaching job and their “lovely and wholesome relationship,” as Reagan described it, came to an end. Margaret was aware that Reagan intended to pursue an acting career, and she had no intention of raising her children in Hollywood. Decades later, asked about the end of their engagement, Cleaver said she had no bad words for Reagan, whom she described as a “nice man,” though she added, “He had an inability to distinguish between fact and fancy.”

  Reagan, of course, had been acting in skits developed by his mother for their church congregation since he was a small child, and he had been in school plays at Dixon High School. But it was at Eureka that he learned he might have real acting talent. At a campus theater tournament held in Chicago, the Eureka troupe performed Edna St. Vincent Millay’s avant-garde antiwar verse drama Aria de Capo. Reagan was named one of the tournament’s six best actors for his portrayal of a Greek shepherd who is murdered. One of the tournament’s judges, the director of Northwestern University’s School of Speech, told Reagan he should consider a career in acting.

  Reagan had already had such thoughts but had not expressed them out loud. “I didn’t want them to throw a net over me,” he later explained. But he was stumped: How does a boy from a small out-of-the-way town in central Illinois get into show business? Oddly enough, though it would be a circuitous route, it would be through his other passion at Eureka: sports.

  With shoulders broadened from summers of swimming and lifeguarding, Reagan had hoped to excel at football at Eureka in a way he had not at Dixon, but Eureka’s coach thought Reagan was too small, too slow, and too blind, and he did not like how Reagan had exaggerated his football accomplishments at Dixon. Reagan was relegated to fifth string and never played a down his freshman year. When team-picture day came, Reagan was one of the few to wear an unlettered jersey. The humiliation was so great that he almost didn’t return to Eureka for his sophomore year. But he did return and stayed with the football team, though there was salt poured in his wounds when Neil arrived and not only started as a freshman but made the most spectacular play of the season, a miraculous reception that he turned into a sixty-yard touchdown. But Neil dropped off the team his sophomore year, while his little brother, who had already lettered in swimming, kept plugging away and became a solid performer at guard for three years, earning his letter in football too.

  What his teammates remembered most about Reagan, however, were his high spirits and his extraordinary memory of virtually every play of every game the team played. Using this ability of near-total recall, Reagan liked to entertain teammates by holding a broom handle like it was a microphone and broadcasting an imaginary football game, perhaps based on a real game but with the results of the plays altered to create heroics in the mind that were unseen on the field. Remarkably, though Reagan could not have known it, he was a dress-rehearsing for what would eventually lead to a career in radio, then movies, and finally politics.

  CHAPTER 7

  EARLY SUCCESS<
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  As politicians, Kennedy and Reagan would become known as men who refused to wait their turn. They had learned as young adults that they did not need to.

  Kennedy first ran for Congress at age twenty-nine, was a leading contender for his party’s vice-presidential nomination at thirty-nine, used political primaries in a way that was new to capture the Democratic Party presidential nomination, and became the youngest man elected president at age forty-three. Reagan did not run for political office until he was fifty-five, but when he did he swung for the fences, vying for governor of the nation’s most populous state, California—and winning. But even before he had taken the gubernatorial oath of office, he was planning his first run for president, mounting a poorly conceived challenge to party elder Richard Nixon in 1968. Eight years later, the man who popularized the so-called “Eleventh Commandment” (“Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican”) happily challenged an incumbent president from his own party and nearly won.

  Together, Kennedy and Reagan established a new standard for presidential preparedness: You are qualified to run for president if you think you are qualified to run for president.

  The chutzpah it took for each man to take their bold political steps was at least partly rooted in the fact that, after unremarkable childhood achievements and undistinguished academic careers, they enjoyed extraordinary and unexpected personal success as very young adults. Both were national figures in their twenties, Kennedy as an author, Reagan first as a sportscaster and sportswriter and later as a movie star. Fortune smiled so brightly upon them that those who began to follow them concluded that they each led charmed lives, and these followers adjusted their own lives accordingly so that they might serve men whom fate seemed to bless.