Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  But at other times, Jack demonstrated genuine political insight. After the completion of the UN conference, Kennedy went to England to file additional dispatches for Hearst, and he also covered the Potsdam conference, where Truman, Stalin, and Churchill discussed the postwar world. Kennedy was one of the few American journalists to suggest what most Americans would have found inconceivable, that Churchill, Britain’s great wartime leader, and his Conservative Party would be voted out of power in elections then being held in Britain. “England is moving toward some form of socialism—if not in this election, then surely at the next,” Kennedy wrote.

  Despite promise as a political analyst, Kennedy concluded journalism was not the career for him. Having observed senior world statesmen in action, he deemed himself just as smart and capable as they were and decided that he could do as good a job—or better. Reporting was enjoyable, but it paled in comparison to the excitement of politics. “A reporter is reporting what happened,” Kennedy said. “He is not making it happen.”

  By now fully agreed that Jack would take up Joe Junior’s charge to work toward the presidency, Joe Senior thought Jack should run for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, but Kennedy had no interest in local issues. He found foreign affairs far more fascinating and so decided to run for Congress in 1946 as a “fighting conservative”—not a liberal.

  His father ensured that Kennedy would contest for an open seat when he convinced (with offers of campaign contributions) the current representative of Massachusetts’s Eleventh congressional district, James Michael Curley, to run for mayor rather than reelection to the House of Representatives. Kennedy had only the remotest connection to the Eleventh. He had not really lived in Massachusetts since he was a small boy, though the East Boston district included Cambridge, where Harvard is located. But his lack of local roots did not trouble him. He took the then-common English parliamentary view that aristocrats regularly represented constituencies where they did not live.

  Other aspiring politicians did not step aside for Kennedy. He was one of seven candidates for the Democratic nomination, and his opponents thought they might beat him by portraying him as a carpetbagger. A local paper parodied his campaign by printing a faux want ad: “Congress seat for sale—No experience necessary—Applicant must live in New York or Florida—Only millionaires need apply.”

  But the carpetbagger charge did not resonate with district voters, who were overwhelmingly Catholic and of Irish heritage. If Kennedy himself was a stranger to the district, his family roots in the community, particularly through his two grandfathers, ran deep. Further, many Irish Americans were proud of the status the Kennedys had achieved as a family. Jack, in particular, as a best-selling author and war hero, as the “first Irish Brahmin,” represented a certain coming of age for the entire community.

  This is not to say that Kennedy came in and swept the voters off their feet. Kennedy would later work diligently with a speech coach, but then, in his first foray into elective politics, he was far from a polished public speaker. “He spoke very fast, very rapidly, and seemed to be just a trifle embarrassed on the stage,” a Kennedy friend recalled. He was clearly nervous, his speeches lacked humor, and he was habitually late. Yet he had an undeniable appeal. Despite his wealth and fame, he was self-deprecating. At a debate when each of his six opponents spent time discussing how they had overcome crushing poverty to achieve success as an adult, Kennedy said, “I seem to be the only person here tonight who didn’t come up the hard way.”

  He had special appeal to women. He was handsome and winsome, but also so skinny he was gaunt. It was said that all the women who met him either wanted to mother him or marry him. He gave thousands of working-class women in his district a peek at the glamorous world of the rich and famous through a series of elegant teas hosted by his mother and sisters.

  But it was not all flash. He also displayed a natural touch for reaching an audience with an apparent natural sincerity and empathy. Addressing a group of Gold Star mothers (mothers who had lost sons in combat), Kennedy, without affectation said, “I think I know how all you mothers feel because my mother is a Gold Star mother too.” An aide who was there said Kennedy’s remarks generated “an outpouring of warmth and affection” unlike anything he had seen in politics.

  With the help of several hundred thousand dollars his father spent on the campaign, Kennedy won the Democratic primary with 40 percent of the vote—twice as much as the candidate who finished second. Given that the district was overwhelmingly Democratic, Kennedy was assured of victory in the general election, which he won by a nearly 3 to 1 margin.

  During the campaign, Kennedy’s pamphlets had stressed bread-and-butter issues such as addressing the postwar housing shortage, expanding Social Security benefits, and raising the minimum wage, but, unlike Reagan, Kennedy never considered himself a New Deal liberal. Kennedy occasionally called himself “a conservative liberal,” which was meant to imply that he was charting an independent path.

  So while Kennedy might work hard for federal support for affordable housing, he would then warn, as he did in a speech at the University of Notre Dame in 1950, against the “ever-expanding power of the federal government,” which he called “the great Leviathan.” He fought against the Taft-Hartley Act that limited the power of organized labor, but then scolded labor leaders for the alleged Communist infiltration of their ranks. He enthusiastically embraced the Marshall Plan of U.S. aid to rebuild war-torn Europe, but then opposed Democratic spending increases on social programs and Republican tax cuts because he worried about federal deficits. In fact, he proposed a 10 percent across-the-board cut in all federal spending, and did so, he told colleagues and constituents, because the United States might later need to tap those resources if another war came. He told his constituents that whatever other issues might be out there, the greatest challenge facing America in the postwar world was the Soviet Union.

  In sum, Kennedy viewed almost all legislation through the prism of foreign policy and the Cold War. He would do the same while president.

  Kennedy’s antipathy toward Communism was not the result of any personal confrontation, as would be true of Reagan and his clash with the Communists of Hollywood. Kennedy had briefly visited the Soviet Union in 1939 and had found it hopelessly backward, but he, like most Westerners at the time, was apparently unaware of Stalin’s Terror or the deliberately caused famine that killed millions. Instead, Kennedy’s anti-Communism sprang first from his family’s wealth and his own remoteness from the tribulations of the working class (Nigel Hamilton labeled Kennedy “an aristocrat for the masses”), and from his Catholic faith.

  While not a particularly devout Catholic, Kennedy would still have been weaned on the church’s intense and innate hostility toward atheistic Communism. The church’s slow response to the rise of National Socialism in Germany is partly explained by the church’s hope that fascism would act as a bulwark against Communism. Anti-Communism among postwar Catholics became both “a religious obligation . . . [and] also something of a status symbol, a mark of social respectability that demonstrated their superior patriotism in their competition with Jews and old-stock Protestants,” said Richard Gid Powers in his history of American anti-Communism. It is notable that Kennedy’s attitudes toward Communism as an ideology softened as the church’s attitude softened, when the vehement anti-Communist Pope Pius XII was replaced by Pope John XXIII, who asserted in his controversial 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra that colonialism, not Communism, was the cause of much of the world’s ills.

  There was one other reason why Kennedy opposed Communism; it offended his belief in how democracy should work. Always obsessed by the question of how to lead in a democracy, Kennedy asserted in a letter he wrote to Izvestia in 1961 that if a people freely chose a Communist system in a free and fair election, “the United States would accept that,” but the Communist philosophy seemed to dictate that its system always be “imposed by a small militant gr
oup by subversion.”

  This fear of subversion that undermines free choice is why when Kennedy came to Congress and served, along with Nixon, as a junior member of the House Education and Labor Committee, he made it his mission to expose alleged Communist infiltration of organized labor. While he boasted a generally pro-labor record in keeping with his constituents’ wishes, Kennedy was, in fact, troubled by the growing and concentrated power of organized labor that had occurred since passage of the Wagner Act, and he was deeply troubled by the multitude of strikes that spread across America following the war.

  He also believed that the Communist Party was not just another political party but was, in fact, controlled and directed by a foreign power, the Soviet Union. Therefore, Communist infiltration of labor meant foreign control of labor. Nixon shared an identical view on this subject.

  During hearings held early in 1947, Kennedy made national headlines by demanding perjury charges be filed against labor leaders he believed were not forthcoming in their testimony about the role of Communists in their unions. Fellow congressman Charles Kersten, a Republican from Wisconsin, said Kennedy’s grilling of witnesses and perjury motions were “like one of the shots fired at Concord Bridge. It was the opening skirmish between Congress and the American Communist Conspiracy.” And it is true that Kennedy’s actions preceded Nixon’s later investigations of Alger Hiss and occurred two years before McCarthy infamously claimed that Communists had infiltrated the State Department.

  And at least some of Kennedy’s charges proved to be true. One of the targets of Kennedy’s ire, an official with the local Milwaukee chapter of the United Auto Workers, was eventually convicted of perjury and served sixteen months in prison.

  Once McCarthy was discredited and Kennedy needed to win over liberals within his own party to secure a presidential nomination, he downplayed his anti-Communist credentials. But his concern about Communist subversion in America shortly after the war is demonstrated by a Cosmopolitan magazine poll that asked a variety of congressional members to identify the greatest problem facing America in 1947. Kennedy responded it was a lack of national unity and volunteered that subversives needed to be eradicated; by contrast, McCarthy, not yet the anti-Communist demagogue he became, answered that it was “the high cost of living.”

  One of the problems with Kennedy’s successful hunt for perjury charges against union leaders is that it fed the false notion that all militant unionism was Communist inspired. That was certainly Reagan’s belief back in Hollywood.

  “I am still being called a Red in certain Hollywood circles,” Reagan said after the war, and it is true that his advocacy of liberal causes had led the local FBI office to maintain a file on him. Reagan had signed on as a member with several groups whose aims included promoting the United Nations, peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union, and ensuring that business, labor, and government cooperated in a private enterprise system that provided full employment. Reagan was in good company; joining him on the Americans Veterans Committee (AVC) were Dwight Eisenhower and Medal of Honor–winner-turned-actor Audie Murphy, while one of FDR’s sons was a co-councilor with Reagan on the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP).

  Reagan, however, soon became disturbed to discover that there were also apparent Communists within these organizations, and they were pushing the groups to adopt what Reagan and others considered to be Communist principles. Reagan stayed with the AVC even though he lamented the group had eliminated the words “private enterprise” from the local chapter’s statement of principles, but he did resign from HICCASP, along with his friend Olivia de Havilland, when the group declined to adopt a resolution Reagan drafted at the request of James Roosevelt to endorse democratic principles and free enterprise.

  The labor strike that brought immense consternation to Reagan, and which permanently turned him against Communism, did not directly involve SAG. Rather, it was an attempt by one union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), to destroy a competitor, the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU). When the studios assigned IATSE workers to jobs that had been the purview of the CSU, the CSU went on strike. The producers sided with the IATSE because the organization represented the exhibitors, and it was in the theaters where the studios made their money.

  Reagan, who was first a board member in 1946 and elected SAG’s president in 1947, initially tried to keep SAG neutral in the dispute so its members could cross the picket line and continue working. But despite powerful opposing views, as the strike dragged on, Reagan began to side with the producers and mimicked their opinion that the work stoppage was the result of Communist agitation. The Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles commissioned a study on the strike and concluded it was not Communist inspired. Further, a University of California at Los Angeles study noted that it was not technically even a strike, but a lockout of CSU members by the producers.

  Reagan’s tightening alliance with the producers and his favoritism toward IATSE led to his receiving menacing phone calls, including one caller who threatened to throw acid in Reagan’s face. Reagan began to carry a gun for protection, advised to do so, he said, by law enforcement.

  He also began cooperating as an FBI informant and assumed the code identity “T-10.” His cooperation was enthusiastic enough that Reagan’s few past sins of belonging to left-wing groups were forgiven. FBI files show that Reagan never specifically alleged that anyone he knew was a Communist; he could not know for sure, he noted, because he had never been a Communist nor attended a Communist Party meeting. But he did provide names of those who had been involved in HICCASP and other organizations who seemed part of “cliques that always voted the Party line.”

  Reagan also volunteered how he, as SAG president, was working with the studio heads to “purge” the motion picture industry of Communists, and when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began focusing on Hollywood, Reagan agreed to testify as a friendly witness. The thrust of Reagan’s testimony was that the government did not need to bother with Hollywood because Hollywood was policing itself.

  Being a Communist was not yet illegal, Reagan reminded the committee, adding, “As a citizen I would hesitate, or not like, to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology.” His policy at SAG, Reagan said, was to ensure members were informed of the facts so they would not fall for Communist lies. “I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts they will never make a mistake,” Reagan said. The best way to defeat Communism, he said, echoing Kennedy, “is to make democracy work.” Since Reagan had not named names—whatever he knew, he had shared with the FBI privately—and had recanted no principles, many viewed his testimony before HUAC as “a fine statement of civil libertarian principles.” Reagan biographer Lou Cannon said it was a shame that Reagan later walked back from his “sensible and restrained” testimony when writing his memoirs, and instead exaggerated the danger Communists had posed to the film industry, while also denying the studios had a blacklist in place.

  That the blacklist was limited to ten screenwriters and a handful of actors, including Gale Sondergaard and Anne Revere, suggests that the Communist influence in Hollywood, like much of America, was quite small. But Reagan, certainly disturbed by the threats he had received, had no doubt that the strikes roiling Hollywood were the work of Communists and refused to accept the idea that the strikes were minor jurisdictional disputes.

  As Cannon noted, when it came time to write his memoirs, Reagan expressed the belief that he had stumbled onto something much bigger. Denied the opportunity to be a warrior in World War II, he now could relate how he became an important soldier in the war to save capitalism and democracy against a most cunning foe. “The Communist plan for Hollywood was remarkably simple,” Reagan later wrote. “It was merely to take over the motion picture industry. Not only for its profits, as the hoodlums had tried—but also
for a grand world-wide propaganda base.”

  And so his experience at SAG during the postwar strikes in Hollywood had turned Reagan into a vehement anti-Communist, a label also proudly worn by Kennedy. But Reagan remained a loyal Democrat for several more years, since there were just as many anti-Communist Democrats, such as Kennedy, as there were anti-Communist Republicans. Not until the 1950s, when he became an ardent advocate for and employee of big business, would he begin to vote Republican and develop a credo that would one day change the Republican Party. And while he was moving to the right across the political spectrum, Kennedy was moving to the left in his bid to become president.

  CHAPTER 10

  WIVES AND OTHER LOVERS

  As the 1950s began, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were single, good-looking, famous, and wealthy men, dating their choice of beautiful women. That lifestyle ended for Reagan in 1952, when he married actress Nancy Davis, who would remain his adoring partner for more than fifty years. Eighteen months later, Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier, a beautiful socialite and news photographer twelve years his junior. Marriage did not change Kennedy’s sexual behavior at all.

  Intruding into the bedrooms of famous people is a sordid activity, but in the case of Kennedy and Reagan, we take a peek because their sex appeal explains an essential part of their political appeal. They were two of the most handsome men ever to occupy the White House, and their wives were among the most beautiful and glamorous of first ladies. While Reagan was in Hollywood, a class of Los Angeles art students reportedly voted him “the most nearly perfect male body,” and “handsome” was so overused as an adjective for Kennedy that it seemed as if it were his given name.