Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  Nancy did not know that by marrying Reagan, in a simple ceremony attended only by Reagan’s pal William Holden and his wife on March 4, 1952, that she had signed on to be a political wife. Reagan was still trying to jump-start his movie career, which sputtered on for a few more years before he signed on with General Electric to host General Electric Theater on television and to act as a corporate spokesman. Nancy had thought she would continue acting too, and, after having appeared in eleven feature films, she did continue to act on television, appearing in three television dramas in 1962 before retiring.

  There is a myth that Nancy played an important role in converting her husband to the conservative cause. She did not. Her stepfather was an important contributor to conservative causes and, having a winter home in Arizona, introduced Reagan to Barry Goldwater. But Reagan had already begun moving to the right because of his disgust with what he believed were Communist-inspired strikes following the war, and it was his time immersed in the corporate culture at GE that convinced him he was also an economic conservative. Nancy may have “saved his soul,” but she did not change his politics.

  The Reagans’ marriage became famous for its intimacy and for Nancy’s adoring stare whenever her husband spoke. Reagan, the onetime idol of adolescent girls, said, “Sometimes I think my life really began when I met Nancy. From the start, our marriage was like an adolescent’s dream of what a marriage should be.” Daughter Patti Davis said, “Ronald and Nancy Reagan are two halves of a circle. Together, they are complete.”

  The Kennedy marriage was far less happy. While Reagan found satisfaction in Nancy Davis, marriage did nothing to tame Jack Kennedy’s philandering—Smathers said marriage actually seemed to increase Kennedy’s wandering libido—even though he had carefully selected his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier.

  Had Kennedy lost his 1952 Senate race to Henry Cabot Lodge, friends speculated that he would have stayed single. But having won the Senate seat and now being ready to start seeking the presidency, he knew he needed a wife. While several widowers had been president, Wilson being the last, there had been only one bachelor president, James Buchanan, who then faced insinuations about his sexuality throughout his term in office.

  Kennedy met Jackie at a dinner party given by his friend Charles Bartlett. At the time, Jackie was working at the same Times-Herald newspaper that had once employed Kathleen Kennedy and Inga Arvad. Jackie earned $42.50 per week to write and provide photographs for a regular society gossip column, and that was about all the money she had. Her once-doting father was near bankruptcy. Her mother, with whom she had a troubled relationship, had remarried into wealth, but Jackie’s stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss, intended to leave his millions to his own children.

  Kennedy would later claim it was love at first sight, but there was calculation in his choice of Jackie as his wife. He wanted a woman who was beautiful, of course, but also educated, even sophisticated, socially prominent, and, most of all, willing to tolerate his promiscuity. Jackie’s father, whom she adored, was John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier III, a member of the New York Stock Exchange, and himself a notorious womanizer whose affairs had led to Jackie’s parents’ divorce. Experience had taught Jackie that all men behaved that way. “I don’t think there are any men who are faithful to their wives,” she said. “Men are such a combination of good and evil.”

  Kennedy seemed to intuit that Jackie would tolerate his affairs in a way most women would not. As Garry Wills noted, “There is a coldbloodedness to this that seems less admirable in a person, no matter how useful it may be to a leader.” But Jackie, who did find Kennedy charming, had made the decision that she needed a wealthy husband to finance the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed during her father’s better days. “Essentially, she was motivated by a desire for money,” suggests historian Thomas C. Reeves.

  As those who marry for money usually discover, they must earn it. Billings and other friends had warned Jackie about how life with Jack would be, and there were warning signs during the courtship. Kennedy never sent a love letter; their correspondence during their engagement was limited to a postcard Jack had sent while on a senatorial fact-finding mission that said, “Wish you were here.” Kennedy even proposed by telegram.

  Despite these forewarnings, Jackie was caught unaware by Jack’s “violent” independence. While Jack pretended he had found marital bliss, sending his parents a note from the honeymoon that said, “At last I know the true meaning of rapture,” Jackie was miserable. She complained that Jack had left her “alone almost every weekend,” and even when he was home he was so preoccupied with work or his male friends that, “I might as well be in Alaska.” And despite the experience of life with her own father and the warnings from Jack’s friends, Jackie was still unprepared for “the humiliation she would suffer when she found herself stranded at parties while Jack would suddenly disappear with some pretty young girl.”

  Jackie’s married life was further made miserable by the fact that she and Rose Kennedy despised each other, and she did not get along with Jack’s sisters, though she was very fond of Robert and Joe Senior. Despite all these issues, there appears to have been only one time when Jackie seriously considered divorce. In 1956, while Jackie gave birth prematurely to a little girl she named Arabella, Jack was in the Mediterranean on a bacchanalian yachting cruise with a bevy of European beauties. Even when he heard about his daughter’s death, Jack was reluctant to abandon the party. “If I go back there, what the hell am I going to do?” Kennedy said. “I’m just going to sit there and wring my hands.” But Smathers, who was along on the cruise, told him that if he didn’t go back to be with Jackie at this time of crisis, he could forget becoming president “because every wife in the country will be against you.” Jack flew home, claiming he was delayed because the ship had had no contact with the shore, which was a lie, but Jackie decided she could not go through with her threats to divorce him.

  Jackie stayed and continued to bear Jack’s infidelities, his absences, and his frequent outbursts of temper. Her revenge was living well, which included spending sprees that drove her wealthy but tightfisted husband to fits. There were times when Kennedy seemed uninterested in Jackie as a person. When a reporter for Look magazine was doing a profile on Jackie shortly before the inauguration and asked Kennedy to describe his wife, he said, “Well, she has a splendid memory and she speaks many languages. My sisters are direct, energetic types, and she is more sensitive. You might even call her fey.” Stumped to describe his wife more fully, Kennedy then said, “I don’t see why you’re doing a story on Jackie. . . . Why not do a story on me?”

  As time went on, Jack began to better appreciate Jackie’s virtues, including her tastes in the arts and her own skills as a mother to their children. But it was not until Kennedy witnessed the reception his wife received on their trip to Paris in 1961 that he truly realized he had married the unique and politic wife he had sought. Ultimately, the marriage survived, though it was hardly the fairy-tale pairing portrayed in the press. As one biographer put it well, “Jack and Jackie were the most glamorous couple of their time, yet the romance of Jack and Jackie was about them, not between them.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE BOOK AND THE SPEECH

  Critics have suggested, because each man would later hire talented speechwriters such as Ted Sorensen and Peggy Noonan, that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan’s famed communications skills were no more than their natural abilities to smoothly read the elegant prose of others and look good while doing it. This suggestion is false. Kennedy and Reagan were themselves skilled writers—perhaps not in the same league as such presidents as Lincoln, Jefferson, or Theodore Roosevelt, but they were men who understood the power of words and took great care in choosing the right words to use. Such was the case whether they drafted the words themselves or edited words provided to them by others.

  Kennedy and Reagan’s ability to command and inspire an audience went far beyond g
ood looks and appealing voices. Far from being “naturals,” they developed skills first learned as children and then worked tirelessly to master public speaking and the new medium of television. Reagan had had extensive training and practice as an actor, while Kennedy was known to work in secret with a speech coach. Because they were two of the most in-demand public speakers in America long before they became president, they refined their skills in the process of giving thousands—literally thousands—of speeches to groups large and small.

  They saw themselves as men of ideas, and by the time they achieved national prominence, each had developed a coherent worldview. Reagan, claimed an advisor to his 1966 California gubernatorial campaign, “unquestionably has the most integrated political philosophy that I’ve seen in anyone.” A student of Kennedy’s inaugural address said Kennedy was also able to match Reagan’s sincerity and commitment because “unlike many politicians, he knew who he was and what he wanted to say.”

  The 1950s were a pivotal decade for each future president as he determined who he was politically and what he wanted to say in the political arena. During that decade, each man took a journey across the ideological spectrum, headed in opposite directions. Kennedy, who never stopped disparaging liberals as “honkers,” began the decade as a self-described conservative, declaring, “I am not a liberal at all. I am a realist.” By 1958, as he was preparing his presidential campaign in earnest, Kennedy was asked directly, “Do you count yourself as a liberal,” to which Kennedy replied simply, “I do.”

  In 1950, Reagan was still a New Deal Democrat. That year he campaigned against Richard Nixon, whom he considered “less than honest” and a tool of “a small clique of oil and real estate pirates,” while campaigning for Nixon’s U.S. Senate opponent, the actress-politician Helen Gahagan Douglas, whose politics were so liberal that Nixon labeled her “The Pink Lady.”* Ten years later, during the 1960 campaign, Reagan was a conservative soon-to-be Republican campaigning for Nixon in that year’s presidential election and against Kennedy, whose political agenda, Reagan told Nixon, was straight from “old Karl Marx.”

  * Douglas lost the election but got her revenge by attaching the nickname “Tricky Dick” to Nixon, a moniker he bore the rest of his life.

  The fact that their political evolutions occurred in such a compressed time frame underscores yet again that Kennedy and Reagan were men in a hurry.

  Kennedy had been plotting to run for the Senate from the day he arrived in the House. “We are just worms here,” Kennedy told a friend about life as a junior congressman. “You can’t get anywhere. You have to be here for twenty years.” Kennedy had no intention of waiting twenty years for anything. He was sure he would not live that long.

  On his first trip to Ireland in 1947, Kennedy fell seriously ill, was hospitalized, and was diagnosed as suffering from Addison’s disease, a rare disorder that prevents the adrenal glands from producing hormones, thereby damaging the body’s immune system. Before 1930, Addison’s disease had a 90 percent mortality rate, with patients often dying from an infection caused by something as simple as having a tooth extracted. The Kennedy family, therefore, told reporters that Kennedy was suffering from the far less onerous disease of malaria, which they said he contracted in the South Pacific. Since one side effect common to malaria and Addison’s disease is a yellowing of the skin, this lie was generally accepted.

  Addison’s disease remains incurable to this day, but fortunately for Kennedy, a synthetic replacement hormone had been developed by 1947, though the method of ingestion required the patient to cut open his skin with a knife several times per year so that a pellet could be inserted subcutaneously. At the time, doctors believed the treatment could extend the life of an Addison’s disease sufferer by up to ten years. “The prospect that he would almost certainly be dead by 1957 must have haunted Kennedy,” one biographer has noted, and this fear certainly helps explain his unwillingness to think long-term regarding his political career.

  To get out of the House and on a path to the presidency, Kennedy took a gamble in 1952 by challenging a member of one of the most distinguished political families in Massachusetts, incumbent Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Lodge was the archetypical Yankee. His grandfather had been a U.S. senator best known for defeating ratification of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and Lodge’s great-great-grandfather had also been a U.S senator. Lodge himself was so highly regarded that Kennedy himself would later appoint him to be U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam after Lodge had served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Eisenhower and as Nixon’s running mate in 1960.

  A loss to Lodge would have been a serious setback to Kennedy’s presidential ambitions, and he was aware that 1952 was shaping up to be a Republican year. Democrats had held the White House for twenty years, the Korean War was at a stalemate with no end in sight, the Truman administration seemed rife with corruption, and many Americans, including large numbers of Irish Catholics in Massachusetts, took charges of Communist subversion within the government very seriously.

  But Kennedy knew he could not be a credible candidate for president while still a lowly congressman. The Senate, meanwhile, was a plausible launching pad to the White House—especially if he got there by defeating such a formidable opponent as Lodge. Kennedy approached the 1952 Senate race in much the same way he had run his first congressional campaign in 1946. The Kennedy women hosted elegant teas for thousands of working-class women, reprints of the article on Kennedy’s heroism in the South Pacific were distributed by the tens of thousands, and Joseph Kennedy spent perhaps several million dollars (no one can know the exact amount) to ensure Kennedy flooded the state with billboards, handbills, and posters. Maybe the most important expenditure made by Joseph Kennedy, however, was the half-million-dollar loan he made to help keep afloat the financially troubled Boston Post newspaper, which then abruptly switched its editorial endorsement from Lodge to Kennedy just a few days before the election.

  Kennedy not only had no intention of running as a liberal Democrat in 1952, he actively courted conservative Republicans. Kennedy took advantage of a rift within the Republican Party that directly involved Lodge, who as a moderate to liberal Republican had played a key role in securing the GOP nomination that year for Dwight Eisenhower, outraging conservatives who had backed Ohio senator Robert Taft. Kennedy reminded Taft supporters that he had been a frequent critic of the Truman administration, had often voted to cut foreign aid, and was an unabashed admirer of Wisconsin Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, the anti-Communist demagogue. In other words, on a number of issues, Kennedy the Democrat intended to run to the right of Lodge the Republican.

  When Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee running against Eisenhower, brought his presidential campaign to Massachusetts and asked how he might help Kennedy in his race against Lodge, campaign aide and future Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver requested only that Stevenson refrain from attacking McCarthy. “Up here,” Shriver explained, “the anti-Communist business is a good thing to emphasize,” adding that Kennedy was intent on being seen as stronger than Lodge on “Communism and domestic subversives.”

  Remarkably, Kennedy was still able to win the endorsement of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), though one of the ADA leaders, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was active in Stevenson’s campaign, said the ADA did so reluctantly because of Kennedy’s “occasional tendency to vote to reduce foreign aid appropriations . . . and Jack’s inclination to stay out of the civil liberties fight.”

  It was not that Kennedy had stayed out of the civil liberties fight; it was that he had sided with McCarthy in that fight. McCarthy had come to national attention in 1949 (two years after Kennedy had investigated Communist infiltration of American labor unions) with wild and baseless charges that the Truman administration, especially the State Department, was filled with hundreds of Communists. Despite increasing revulsion at McCarthy’s tactics, whi
ch continued even after Eisenhower’s election, Kennedy declined to join the growing chorus condemning McCarthy.

  McCarthy, a fellow Irish Catholic, was a personal friend of the Kennedy family. He had dated two of Kennedy’s sisters. He would later hire Robert Kennedy, who was developing his reputation for “ruthless” efficiency as Jack’s campaign manager, to serve on his staff. And he was exceptionally popular in Massachusetts, where the large population of Roman Catholics hated Communism. Despite his popularity in Massachusetts, McCarthy declined to campaign on behalf of Lodge, a fellow Republican, because he said he would not say anything negative about Kennedy.

  While a neutralized McCarthy was of enormous help, Kennedy benefited even more from his shrewd use of television under the tutelage of his father. By 1952 television was a force all politicians had to reckon with. While in 1946 less than one-half of 1 percent of American households had a television set, by 1952 more than a third of all families owned one (that number would rise to 87 percent by 1960). Those politicians who adapted to the new medium did well; those who refused did not.

  In the presidential campaign, Stevenson was appalled by suggestions that he should be sold on television like “a box of corn flakes.” Stevenson’s campaign bought thirty-minute blocks of airtime, but even then Stevenson would not finish his speeches within the allotted time and was often cut off in mid-sentence. Guided by the new breed of television advertising consultants, Eisenhower, flashing his famous grin, happily starred in thirty-second spots where he appeared to field earnest questions from supposedly average citizens in a warm and familiar way with answers such as, “Yes, my Mamie gets after me about the high cost of living. It’s another reason why I say it’s time for a change.”