by Scott Farris
Like those advising Eisenhower, Joseph Kennedy understood television. As a man in public life himself, he had been a student of the newsreel for two decades. Just as Reagan’s parents, especially his mother, had made him comfortable performing in front of audiences from the time he was a small child, so Joseph Kennedy raised his children to be comfortable on camera from a very young age.
Immersing his children in the latest available technologies, he bought 8 mm home movie cameras for the children’s nurses and nannies so they could regularly film the children at play or on vacation. Later he gave the children their own cameras and urged them to film their siblings and their friends. Now he applied all he had learned about newsreels to television. Said Shriver, “He figured that television was going to be the greatest thing in the history of politics and he set out studying it and how Jack could utilize it most effectively. . . . He knew how Jack should be dressed and how his hair should be.”
It worked. In a big year for Republicans, where Eisenhower carried Massachusetts by 208,000 votes, Kennedy defeated Lodge by more than 70,000 votes. He was keeping to his accelerated timetable for winning the presidency before he died from an expected premature death.
Movie actors, like politicians, were also learning to adapt to the new medium of television. Reagan first appeared on television in 1950 opposite a young Cloris Leachman in the short-lived anthology program the Nash Airflyte Theater, but his real career in television began in 1952, not in front of the cameras but as far out of public view as possible.
That year, during a private session with board members, Reagan exercised the powers he had acquired in five years as SAG’s president and signed a “blanket waiver” that exclusively granted to his own talent agency, MCA, permission to operate as both agent and a television producer. This waiver, offered to no other agencies, violated SAG’s long-standing policy of keeping agents out of production because of potential conflicts of interest.
Reagan had been with MCA his entire career, and MCA had done well for Reagan. In 1942 MCA had negotiated a seven-year, $1 million contract for Reagan, and Reagan was more than happy to return the favor when the time came.
The waiver granted to MCA dramatically changed how Hollywood worked. Because MCA could now take actors who were already its clients and then independently produce vehicles for those clients, the power in Hollywood shifted away from the studios to a new breed of “packagers” led by super agents. MCA was soon making far more money from production than from its agency fees—so much money that it was able to purchase Universal Studios, Paramount’s film catalog, and Decca Records. The waiver signed by Reagan proved such a gold mine for MCA that just ten years after receiving the waiver, the company controlled 60 percent of the entertainment industry—a fact that caught the attention of Kennedy’s Justice Department.
As part of the Justice Department’s investigation, Reagan testified before a federal grand jury, but presaging his testimony during the Iran-Contra scandal, he repeatedly claimed a faulty memory of events “that took place for all those years way back.” He suggested that the waiver was routine (it wasn’t) and that he must have been absent during the most critical SAG meetings on the waiver request. Why he did not fully recuse himself, since he was MCA’s client, he never explained. Ultimately, no criminal charges were filed against Reagan or anyone else at SAG or MCA, although MCA did agree to eliminate the potential conflict of interest as a producer by divesting itself of its talent agency.
Reagan certainly had no desire to give the government ammunition against MCA. He owed his agency, which made him a wealthy man, a great deal. MCA had repaid the favor of the SAG waiver by replacing Reagan’s moribund film career with his new career on television as host of General Electric Theater, which began airing September 26, 1954. The job rescued Reagan from oblivion, for as he himself acknowledged, “They weren’t beating a path to my door, offering me parts.” In fact, when MCA secured him the job, Reagan was earning his living as master of ceremonies for a variety show in Las Vegas.
Reagan’s fortunes dramatically changed. General Electric Theater was a huge ratings success. The number-one show in its 9:00 p.m. time slot on Sunday night, General Electric Theater rose as high as the third-rated show in all of television during the 1956–1957 season. The half-hour anthology show featured not only some of the great stars of old Hollywood, such as Myrna Loy and Joseph Cotten, but also up-and-coming stars, such as Lee Marvin and Vera Miles. As host, Reagan introduced each episode’s stars and story, though he also acted in several episodes (as did Nancy Reagan) and was credited as a producer.
To Reagan’s future political benefit, General Electric Theater introduced him to a new generation unfamiliar with his film career in the 1930s and 1940s. There were also considerable financial benefits. Reagan was paid a salary of $125,000 per year, and his friends at MCA ensured he did better than that. When Reagan wanted to sell a 236-acre ranch he owned, for which he had paid $239 an acre fifteen years earlier, one of the agents at MCA arranged for Twentieth Century Fox to purchase the land for $8,000 an acre, meaning that Reagan pocketed nearly $2 million on the sale—a 3,000 percent profit. GE also completely renovated Reagan’s home so that it could be outfitted with the latest in all-electric appliances, and GE filmed several commercials there with the Reagans.
While Reagan often complained about being in the highest income tax bracket, which in the years after World War II meant paying an astonishing marginal rate of 91 percent, MCA also helped him structure his finances to reduce his tax liability. When Reagan was governor, a Sacramento Bee investigation discovered that, despite his considerable wealth, Reagan had paid an average of only $1,000 per year in state taxes from 1966 to 1969, and in 1970 he had paid no state taxes at all.
Reagan and MCA’s contract with General Electric required that, in addition to hosting General Electric Theater, he also represent GE as a corporate spokesman and employee morale officer touting the benefits of free enterprise and electric appliances. Beyond those two general guidelines, GE never told him what to say, but Reagan had little trouble now honing his political views so that they were in line with those of his corporate employers.
Reagan had come a long way since he had adopted the populist Democratic politics of a shoe salesman father who never owned his own home until his movie star son purchased one for him. Few had more ample reason to believe in the promise of the free enterprise system and the truth of the American dream than Ronald Reagan. Revising and refining a speech he gave literally thousands of times, Reagan developed such a concise and compelling case for low taxes, smaller government, and uncomplicated patriotism that it became known simply as “The Speech.” Reagan’s evolution from New Deal Democrat to conservative Republican was now complete.
Kennedy, meanwhile, would soon increase his fame with a speech of his own and also a book that some charged was not his own.
By 1954 McCarthy presented a great problem for Kennedy. While Kennedy occasionally criticized McCarthy’s “excesses,” he had continued to generally support the senator’s crusade even as growing numbers of Americans, particularly Democrats, were denouncing the tactics behind McCarthyism.
Beyond his personal friendship with McCarthy, Kennedy believed Communist subversion was a real issue. He had, after all, while a congressman, helped secure a perjury conviction during an investigation of Communist infiltration of labor unions, and he had routinely complained that the Truman administration had not done enough to ferret out subversives. Having already expressed his belief in Why England Slept that subversive ideas can undermine a nation’s ability to resist a foreign foe, he even said he would tolerate a suspension of certain civil liberties if it were in the national interest during a time of crisis.
Unlike Stevenson or even past Republican presidential candidate Tom Dewey, Kennedy had supported the McCarran Act, which required Communists to register with the government and which gave the president authority to arrest and detai
n suspected subversives without due process. He had lauded McCarthy for his “energy, intelligence, and political skills,” and when a speaker at a Harvard Spee Club dinner in 1952 rose to express relief that Harvard had produced neither McCarthy nor Alger Hiss (whom Nixon and Whittaker Chambers had accused of espionage), Kennedy indignantly replied, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!”*
* Hiss was convicted of perjury but maintained to his death that he had never been either a Communist or a spy.
By 1954, however, McCarthy’s increasingly erratic behavior, his wildly unsubstantiated claims, and his immense popularity with the public (two-thirds of Americans said Communist subversion was their single greatest public policy concern) led some of his legislative colleagues to believe it was time to take McCarthy down. Lyndon Johnson, then Senate minority leader, arranged for televised coverage of McCarthy’s hearings on alleged Communist subversion within the Army so the public could “see what the bastard was up to.”
McCarthy’s behavior during the nine days of televised hearings was so typically appalling that his popularity plummeted and a special Senate committee recommended he be censured for his behavior. The Senate then voted in favor of the censure motion by a 67–22 vote. Kennedy was the only Democratic senator who did not vote in favor of the motion. In fact, he did not vote at all.
Kennedy’s excuse was that he had been in the hospital, recovering from radical back surgery, which was true, but there were Senate procedures that would have allowed him to cast his vote—or at least make his position known. Kennedy’s real motivations for avoiding the vote or publicly stating his position were twofold. One was his personal loyalty to McCarthy, and traits such as loyalty meant far more to Kennedy than ideology. He was also afraid of political retribution.
Kennedy had not foreseen how fast McCarthy would fall. In Massachusetts, McCarthy remained so popular that ex-Governor Paul Dever, a Democrat, said McCarthy “is the only man I know who could beat Archbishop Cushing in a two-man election fight in South Boston.” Kennedy said he could not have voted to censure McCarthy without committing “hari-kiri.”
With McCarthy’s star dimmed (McCarthy would die of complications related to alcoholism in 1957), Kennedy began to realize that perhaps he had committed “hari-kiri” by failing to censure McCarthy. Liberals, whose support he would need when he would seek his party’s presidential nomination, were outraged. A few, like Eleanor Roosevelt, never fully forgave Kennedy for taking a pass on censuring McCarthy.
Kennedy had time to ruminate on the consequences of his vote, for he was hospitalized for almost eight months in 1954 and 1955. His fifth lumbar vertebra had collapsed, most likely from the cortico-steroids he was taking for his Addison’s disease. Following surgery on his back, Kennedy developed a urinary tract infection that put him into a coma. For the third time in his young life, Kennedy was given last rites, and even when he emerged from the coma there was concern he might never walk again.* In May 1955, he returned to Washington, on crutches, though instead of being seen as a sickly weakling, Kennedy came through the ordeal looking tough and courageous.
* Kennedy had also been given last rites in 1947, when he was first diagnosed with Addison’s disease, and again in 1951 during a trip to Japan when complications from Addison’s gave him a fever of 106 degrees.
Kennedy, troubled by his conundrum over McCarthy, had been spending a good deal of time thinking about courage. In early 1954, he initially conceived of drafting an article that defined political courage for publication in a magazine, but as he solicited ideas from more people, the idea grew into a book-length project that became Profiles in Courage, which would win the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957. The book profiled eight United States senators, the earliest being John Quincy Adams and the most recent being Robert Taft, who had demonstrated political courage by defying the wishes of their constituents to do what they believed was right.
While the McCarthy issue may have been the impetus for the idea, Profiles in Courage was a natural follow-up to Kennedy’s first book, Why England Slept. Each book addressed the same question of “how to reconcile the popular wills inherent in a democracy with the educated knowledge of its representatives?” Kennedy was building upon a philosophy in which he imagined that enlightened leaders told the people hard truths, and which defined patriotism as requiring personal sacrifice for the public good. This would be the theme of his inaugural address. But the controversy surrounding the book was less over its message than whether Kennedy actually wrote it.
In the book’s preface, Kennedy generously acknowledges the many prominent historians whom he consulted and who often offered substantial writing and editing assistance, and Kennedy conceded “the greatest debt” was owed to Ted Sorensen, whom Kennedy had hired in 1953 as part of his Senate staff. Kennedy, however, became furious at allegations and insinuations that he had not authored the book himself. When columnist Drew Pearson charged in a television interview that Profiles in Courage had been “ghostwritten,” Kennedy hired attorney Clark Clifford to threaten legal action until Pearson offered a retraction. Later, after Kennedy had inundated Pearson with notes and other materials, Pearson privately acknowledged that the book represented Kennedy’s thinking and that Kennedy had done enough of the work so “that basically it is his book.”
Review of Kennedy’s notes and other files associated with the book’s creation make it clear that Sorensen and a young Georgetown University professor named Jules David did the bulk of the research and writing. Beyond the opening and concluding chapters that introduce the book’s theme and conclude its findings, Kennedy wrote little of the prose present in the book. His notebooks are primarily filled with thoughts, suggestions, and notes from books he had read.
However, even though Kennedy did far less work than is typical for a person identified as the author of a book, historians seem in general agreement that his contributions were substantive enough that he was entitled to claim the role of primary author, though he was clearly not the sole author. Kennedy himself sincerely and deeply believed he had done enough work to claim authorship, and as biographer Herbert Parmet put it, “the choices, message, and tone of the volume are unmistakably Kennedy’s.”
Acknowledged authorship was important to Kennedy because the book was not a typical campaign autobiography that the public presumes is ghostwritten. Instead, the book was an ambitious work of history—the City of Boston mandated that it be added to the public schools’ curriculum—and Kennedy wanted his authorship of the book to establish that he was a different type of politician. Perhaps having reflected on the admiration Adlai Stevenson had received for elevating the level of discourse in his 1952 presidential campaign, Kennedy, too, wanted to be seen as a man of ideas, a friend of intellectuals if not as an intellectual himself.
As Kennedy told a Harvard audience after Profiles in Courage was published, “If more politicians used poetry and more poets knew politics, I am convinced that the world would be a little better place to live.” If the audience missed Kennedy’s point about his own dual role as poet and politician, he noted, “[The] nation’s first great politicians . . . included among their ranks most of the nation’s first great writers and scholars.”
The unfortunate result of the dispute over authorship of Profiles in Courage was that it obscured Kennedy’s very real talent with words and, perhaps more importantly, his understanding of how the words must fit the author’s or speaker’s persona if the message is to be effective.* During his 1952 Senate campaign, Kennedy declined to give a speech that he conceded was “fantastic” because “we have to give the speeches that conform to my personality. That speech would have been great for Franklin Roosevelt. But it’s no good for me.”
* In her memoir of her time as a speechwriter for Reagan, Peggy Noonan recounts her considerable irritation that when she was given a speechwriting assignment, White House staff, who had obviousl
y written few speeches themselves, would ask her to write it so that it was “like the Gettysburg Address.”
Kennedy, of course, as did Reagan from his time in movies and on television, also understood the importance of melding words with images to enhance their power. He cared deeply about his personal appearance. Journalist Hugh Sidey said Kennedy fussed so much over haircuts that it was a “painful experience” watching him get one, and he spent hours, as congressman, senator, candidate, and president, choosing which photos of himself would be released to the public. During the 1960 campaign, for example, in literature emphasizing their military service, Nixon chose to appear in his dress uniform; Kennedy, emphasizing that, unlike Nixon, he had been in combat, chose one where he is at the helm of his boat, shirtless and in sunglasses. Another time, Kennedy did three photo sessions with one of his few African-American campaign workers, Milwaukee City Councilwoman Vel Phillips, to ensure she appeared dark enough in the photos so that it was clear she was black.
One biographer said Kennedy “lived along a line where charm became power,” but Kennedy understood that his charm and good looks would have no more substance than cotton candy unless he was using that charm to articulate serious thoughts and ideas. Following Profiles in Courage, Kennedy and his staff began producing magazine articles, book reviews, and guest editorials in numbers unprecedented in modern politics, all designed to underscore Kennedy’s reputation as a writer and intellectual, albeit an unusually handsome one.
Kennedy could not have written this material by himself—certainly not while still attending to his duties as a U.S. Senator and prospective presidential candidate. However, to credit Sorensen or, in Reagan’s case, Noonan with authoring each and every memorable utterance of their employers is to distort the truth as much as the public relations fiction that Kennedy authored all these materials himself. Kennedy had been a congressman for six years and a U.S. Senate candidate before he hired Sorensen, and Noonan had been Reagan’s speechwriter for only two years, from 1984 to 1986, well after Reagan’s legendary communications skills had been established. As biographer Herbert Parmet notes in reference to Kennedy, minimizing his role while inflating the role of the speechwriters deprives Kennedy “of credit for at least spiritual and intellectual inspiration.”