Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  Subtitled “The Inevitable Result of the Slowness of Conversion of the British Democracy from a Disarmament to a Rearmament Policy,” Kennedy’s thesis ran to 148 pages (about twice the typical length) and represented, Kennedy said, the hardest work he had ever done. The paper was judged magna cum laude, the second-highest possible honor and a grade higher than Joe Junior had earned on his senior thesis two years before.

  Jack’s reviewing committee was divided as to actually how good the paper was. One professor called it “badly written,” but also an “interesting and intelligent discussion of a difficult question.” Another professor complained that the “fundamental premise was never analyzed” and that the writing was “wordy, repetitious,” but a third professor declared that the paper demonstrated that Jack was “a deep thinker and a genuine intellectual.”

  When the thesis was turned into a book, Laski said it was clear Jack was “a lad with brains,” but said the thesis was “very immature. . . . In a good university, half a hundred seniors do books like this as part of their normal work in their final year.” Twenty years later, historian James McGregor Burns, who was writing a campaign biography on Kennedy, reviewed the original thesis and found it “a typical undergraduate effort—solemn, pedantic in tone, bristling with statistics and footnotes, a little weak in spelling and sentence structure”

  Of course, a typical undergraduate, then or now, did not have Joseph Kennedy as a father. Aware of Jack’s hard work, perhaps anxious to do something for Jack to show he was as loved as Joe Junior, perhaps believing the thesis vindicated his own foreign policy views, and always interested in promoting the Kennedy “brand,” Joe pulled strings to have the thesis published as a book. As Joe told Jack, “You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come.”

  Joe contacted his friend New York Times columnist Arthur Krock to review Jack’s work and advise whether it was publishable. “It was amateurish in many respects but not, certainly not, as much so as most writings in that category are,” Krock said. “ . . . I thought it would make a very welcome and useful book.” While Jack added updated material to reflect new developments overseas, it was Krock who now took charge of making revisions, beginning with a suggestion to change the title to Why England Slept, a deliberate play on the title of the book Churchill had published two years before, While England Slept, on the same theme of why Britain was not militarily prepared to face the growing threat from Nazi Germany. Substantially polishing the manuscript, Krock also found Jack an agent and helped secure a publisher, the small firm of Wilfred Funk, when large publishers took a pass.

  While Jack’s thesis would never have been published as a book without his father’s connections and Krock’s help, it was well reviewed and sold well: a total of eighty thousand copies in hardcover, which netted Jack $40,000 in royalties. Some of that total was from bulk purchases of thousands of copies made by Joe, but it also found an audience among the many Americans who watched the outbreak of war in Europe and wondered if the United States would be drawn into the conflict.

  A number of critics then and since have viewed the book as Jack’s defense of Joe’s isolationist and defeatist views. One Harvard professor privately remarked that the book should have been titled “While Daddy Slept.” Others, such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., insisted the book represented Kennedy’s break from the isolationism of his father. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book in looking ahead to Kennedy’s presidency is that it articulates a question that preoccupied Kennedy his entire political life: How do politicians lead in a democracy?

  Kennedy was an elitist, not a populist. He was enthralled by a certain British aristocratic view of politics in which an enlightened ruling class makes reasoned, rational decisions that are in the interests of the more emotional and easily manipulated masses. Two of Kennedy’s favorite books that he had read during this period before the war were Lord David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, who was Britain’s prime minister in the 1830s and 1840s, and Pilgrim’s Way, the memoir of John Buchan, later Lord Tweedsmuir, a politician and novelist who was a good friend of T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) and author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, which was made into one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films. Kennedy’s admiration was not for their policies, per se (Melbourne boasted no great accomplishments in his nearly seven years as prime minister) but rather for their worldview. Garry Wills suggests that Melbourne, as described by Cecil, was “all the things Kennedy wanted to be—secular, combining the bookish and the active life, supported by a family that defied outsiders.” Melbourne was also, like Kennedy, a hedonist.

  In politics, Kennedy might adopt labels like “conservative” or “liberal” for temporary convenience, but at heart he subscribed to no single ideology. For him, as he imagined of the British aristocracy, policies were less important in a politician than character traits such as dignity, courage, and honor. As Kennedy studied the English aristocrats that he knew personally, such as David Ormsby-Gore, who later became British ambassador to the United States, or William Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, who married Jack’s sister, Kathleen, he admired the fact that they did not pose as “angry young men” but brought an almost lighthearted approach to politics. As one student of England’s influence on Kennedy wrote, “this very idea of politics invigorating society rather than dominating society much appealed to Kennedy.”

  Professor Wild at Harvard noted that Kennedy had been obsessed with the question, “Why do people obey?” Now Kennedy was looking at it from a different angle: How do you convince people to obey? Why England Slept defended Chamberlain’s appeasement policies as the logical result when public opinion resisted rearmament. Without adequate men and arms, Chamberlain knew that he could not contest Hitler’s designs militarily. He was instead forced to barter for time and embrace the faint hope that the next Hitler demand would be the last as he sought to move British public opinion.

  But public opinion, which counts for little to nothing in a dictatorship, is difficult to move in a democracy, Kennedy wrote. He echoed the assertion by Stanley Baldwin, whose tenure as prime minister preceded Chamberlain’s, that “a democracy is always two years behind a dictator.”

  The problem in a democracy, Kennedy concluded, was that leaders are so attuned to public opinion that they cater to the voters’ present wants rather than future threats. Further, Kennedy warned that the pacifism that had become entrenched in England following the carnage of the First World War was rooted in unrealistic expectations about the power of the League of Nations. Public opinion had limited Chamberlain’s options in responding to Hitler, but Baldwin and Chamberlain each had failed prior to that, as members of an enlightened ruling class, by not guiding public opinion to where it should have been or, failing that, by not defying public opinion for the public’s own good.

  “Where else, in a non-totalitarian country, but in the political profession is the individual expected to sacrifice all—including his own career—for the national good?” Kennedy later wrote in Profiles in Courage, the book for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Setting aside that Kennedy was romantically elevating political courage higher than it perhaps deserves (certainly those in the military often sacrifice much more than a career for the national good), it is fascinating that Kennedy concludes that the highest level of courage displayed by a politician is not defying powerful interests, the politician’s colleagues, or the leaders of his or her own party, but defying the will of their constituents, who ultimately control the politician’s future. In his book, the question of whether the men taking these courageous stands were right or wrong is, in Kennedy’s view, essentially unimportant. The important thing is that they demonstrated the quality of courage, which almost alone makes them worthy of leadership.

  In Why England Slept, Kennedy, keen to the danger Nazi Germany posed to the democracies, goes so far as to suggest that certa
in democratic privileges may need to be set aside, and a “voluntary totalitarianism” adopted. Garry Wills, intensely critical of Why England Slept—and Kennedy generally—calls this passage “the earliest formulation of ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’” It also suggests that Kennedy was already justifying the right of enlightened leaders to keep secrets from those they govern, and Kennedy would be an advocate of clandestine activities while president.

  He was also exploring along with Reagan, albeit in a very different way, how he could use this facility for words and images to entertain, inspire, and move people. Already in their early twenties, Kennedy and Reagan had discovered they were masters at communication. But before they could more fully develop those skills, they were called upon to help fight a war.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE WAR STATESIDE AND OVERSEAS

  As it did for millions of Americans, World War II altered the trajectories of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan’s lives, even though they had dramatically different wartime experiences. Reagan’s poor eyesight kept him stateside throughout the global conflict. Kennedy’s poor health nearly kept him out of the service entirely, but his father pulled strings, first to get him into the Navy and then to get him into combat, and Kennedy left the war a nationally celebrated hero. Perhaps more life-changing was the death of Kennedy’s elder brother, Joe Junior, during the war while he undertook what turned out to be a suicidal bombing mission. Joe’s death meant that the weight of the Kennedy family’s ambition to produce a president now fell on Jack, and extolling his war record would figure prominently in every one of his political campaigns.

  Even though he never left Hollywood, Reagan’s life was changed by the war too. At the beginning of U.S. involvement, he was a rising star, seemingly poised to become an “A”-list actor, and happily married to Jane Wyman. While he starred in a few major films during the global conflict, most notably the Irving Berlin musical This Is the Army, the war sidetracked Reagan’s career. His primary work during the war had been making training films, and when the war ended, public tastes had changed. He landed far fewer roles afterward, contributing to the disintegration of his marriage. Friends who were combat veterans said Reagan was visibly embarrassed that he had not been in the fight, a fact he sometimes tried to obscure. A stalled career pushed Reagan into other ventures, most notably his presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, which led him directly into the world of politics and which changed his worldview from New Deal Democrat to anti-communist conservative.

  In the decades to follow, the differing experiences of Kennedy and Reagan during World War II had ramifications for their presidencies. As sometimes happens with men who wish to fight but do not or cannot, Reagan developed a romantic image of the military. As president, Reagan liked to emphasize his role as commander in chief. Sometimes he did so in substantial ways, such as the immense increases he added to the national defense budget, and sometimes in more subtle ways, which included his stirring controversy by initiating the practice of returning the salute of military personnel, which has since been emulated even by presidents with no military experience at all.

  Kennedy, on the other hand, like many men in the field who witnessed firsthand the near-inevitable foul-ups around wartime logistics (which gave the world the word acronym snafu—situation normal: all fucked up) had a more jaundiced view of the military, especially the top brass. In letters home during the war, Kennedy repeatedly belittled the skills and intelligence of senior officers—right up to General Douglas MacArthur—and expressed amazement that America could win the war given the incompetence he observed and experienced. During his administration, Kennedy, the former Navy lieutenant, junior grade, despite also initiating a massive defense buildup as Reagan would, repeatedly clashed with senior Pentagon officials over politics and policy to a degree that inspired concerns of an American military coup.

  While other factors were certainly involved, the two presidents’ differing attitudes toward the military, nurtured by their divergent experiences during World War II, led to a situation where members of the military, particularly senior officers, began to lean Republican in their political allegiance. Surveys indicate they still do, as of this writing.

  Reagan had joined the Army Reserves more than five years before Pearl Harbor, while working at WHO radio, mostly because he wanted the opportunity to ride the horses the military still stabled at Fort Des Moines.* An old cavalry post that by the 1930s was home to mechanized units, Fort Des Moines honored its roots, officers still playing polo and civilians welcomed to come ride the horses that were not in use. Reagan learned to ride there and developed the maxim he often expressed: “There is nothing better for the inside of a man than the backside of a horse.”

  * As a college student, Reagan had exhibited a pacifist streak not uncommon in the years after World War I. A number of the stories and essays he wrote during those years are antiwar stories modeled after Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and he once shocked his father by declaring he would never bear arms in defense of the United States.

  Reagan liked the military environment—“discipline, obedience, and dedication, and the cavalry seemed to offer those, with a bonus of romance.” By his own account, Reagan tricked his way through an eye exam to join the reserves, and before he left for Hollywood he ensured that he completed the requisite tests to be commissioned as a second lieutenant, scoring a 94 percent on his exam and earning “excellent” ratings for character and military efficiency.

  With his love of horses, Reagan hoped that Warner Brothers would make him a star of Westerns, but the company found from test audiences that Reagan was more appealing to women than men—the reverse of what would later be true in his political career. So Reagan was primarily featured in light comedies, usually in the second lead as best friend to the main character.

  Later critics would often deride Reagan as only a “B” movie actor who played second fiddle to a chimp in Bedtime for Bonzo. But that was near the end of his film career. Before the war, Reagan was a rising star. By 1940 Reagan was ranked as Warner Brothers’ top feature player. He had key parts in major productions, such as Dark Victory, which starred Bette Davis, and Sante Fe Trail with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. His breakthrough role was as George Gipp, the Notre Dame football player who died young in Knute Rockne, All American, and that was shortly followed by the performance Reagan considered his finest in Kings Row, in which he plays a local wastrel whose legs are needlessly amputated by a sadistic doctor. Awaking to discover his limbs missing, Reagan lets out the cry, “Where’s the rest of me?”— he would use that line as the title of his first autobiography.

  Reagan certainly appeared in his quota of schlock, including a series aimed at the younger Saturday matinee crowd. In those films, he played Secret Service Agent Brass Bancroft who, in Murder in the Air, uses a top-secret ray gun to subdue a saboteur by issuing the command, “All right, Hayden—focus that Inertia Projector on ’em and let ’em have it!” Knowing the impact his films had on Reagan’s memory of history, some commentators would later insist (probably incorrectly) that this scenario was where Reagan first got the idea for the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly dubbed “Star Wars.”

  Reagan was a true professional who always knew his lines, but he certainly considered acting more craft than art.* Still, the Los Angeles Times in January 1942 commended Reagan for “rapidly developing into a first-rate actor.” Reagan describes himself as a “star” in his autobiography, and he was. The combined receipts from King’s Row and This Is the Army made Reagan one of Hollywood’s top box-office draws in 1943, placing him that year ahead of such venerable stars as James Cagney and Clark Gable. He was also paid like a star. In 1946, Reagan’s salary was nearly $170,000—several million in today’s dollars—which was less than half what Humphrey Bogart made that year, but only $30,000 less than what Flynn made and $75,000 more than Rit
a Hayworth’s salary.

  * Unlike many actors, Reagan never expressed a desire to be a director, though he thought he could make a living in Hollywood as a writer, if need be. He sold one treatment for a Western, titled “The Cavalry Rides Again,” to Warner Brothers, but it has since disappeared, never made into a film, and even Reagan could no longer remember the plot late in life. “I’m sure the good guys won,” he said.

  Reagan’s career received a boost from two women. One was Hearst newspapers gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who could make or break any actor’s career. It was another example of “Ronald Reagan’s peculiar good luck” that Parsons happened to be from Dixon, Illinois, and so “the most powerful movie columnist in America” took an immediate liking to the handsome, wholesome young man from her hometown and actively promoted his career.

  The other woman was also a Midwest native, the talented and adorably button-nosed actress Jane Wyman, who reportedly squealed with delight when she first saw Reagan. They costarred in several movies together, beginning with Brother Rat in 1938, before she and Reagan wed on January 26, 1940. A year later their first child, daughter Maureen, was born, and four years after that they adopted a son, Michael. Reagan and Wyman were one of Hollywood’s most visible and promoted couples. When they divorced in 1948, Parsons called it the most stunning breakup in Hollywood since Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford split. “Jane and Ronnie have always stood for so much that is right in Hollywood,” she wrote.

  It was not physical distance that caused the marriage to deteriorate, for the war seldom separated Reagan from Wyman. He remained in California for the duration of the war, though Hollywood being Hollywood, the fantasy was promoted that he was just like any GI. Because of his status in the reserves, Reagan was called to active duty very shortly after Pearl Harbor, and Warner Brothers publicized that Reagan was the first Hollywood actor with a wife and child to be called up. While Reagan was punctual in reporting for duty at Fort Roach each day at 0900 military time, he was equally conscientious in departing for home at 1700. Reagan and Wyman’s longest separation occurred when she traveled through the South to appear at war bond rallies, meaning the war took her farther from Hollywood than it had her husband, the Army captain.