Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  Reagan, foiled in his first try for the presidency in 1968 by Nixon’s unexpected political comeback, defied convention as well when he tried again in 1976 by running against the incumbent president of his own party, Gerald Ford, even though Reagan had popularized the so-called Eleventh Commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Fellow Republicans.” Because Ford had first been appointed vice president to succeed the disgraced Spiro Agnew and then became president only because Nixon resigned over Watergate, the conservative Reagan thought the politically moderate Ford had no legitimate claim to the presidency. The result was that Reagan’s primary challenge weakened Ford’s campaign, significantly factoring into Ford’s losing to Democrat Jimmy Carter in the general election.

  Far from making him a pariah within the party, the fratricidal challenge by Reagan made him, more than ever, the undisputed leader of the conservative cause. Still, many in the media questioned whether Reagan’s time as a viable presidential candidate had passed. By 1980 he had been out of public office for six years, though he had remained in the public eye and ear through his radio commentary, syndicated columns, and multiple speaking engagements. Salvatori had been right. Reagan’s appeal as a presidential candidate was not based upon his record as governor any more than Kennedy’s was based on his service in the Senate, nor was it diminished because it had been a half-dozen years since he held the office.

  Reagan became governor by defeating two-term incumbent Democrat Pat Brown, who had been among the most successful governors in California history but by 1966 seemed to be losing control of the state. The state budget was in bad shape, but more unsettling to Californians were the 1965 Watts riots that left thirty-four people dead and student militancy at the then-tuition-free University of California, Berkeley. Brown badly underestimated Reagan’s appeal, disparaging Reagan’s background as an actor in a state where film and television production was a major industry. “I’m running against an actor, and you know who shot Lincoln, don’t cha?” was one unfortunate Brown quip before a group of schoolchildren, a zinger that he foolishly included in a campaign film.

  Reagan was inaugurated as governor a few minutes after midnight on January 1, 1967, a time chosen based on advice from his wife’s astrologer. Five days later Reagan held his first staff meeting and famously asked, “What do we do now?”—a line later woven into the film The Candidate. As Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger joked, “We were not only amateurs, we were novice amateurs.”

  Reagan’s early problems as governor were exacerbated by the distraction of his campaign for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. Thwarted by Nixon’s unexpected political comeback and George Wallace’s independent presidential bid, Reagan’s first foray into presidential politics was so inept that he later pretended he had never been a “real” candidate, even though he had opened a national campaign office.

  His dismal initial showing in national politics led Reagan to refocus on the job of governor, and over eight years he compiled a very solid record, though it was a much different record than conservatives—or liberals—might have expected. State senator (and future Republican governor) George Deukmejian said, “A lot of people, including me, thought he would be ideological. We learned quickly that he was very practical.”

  While one of Reagan’s first acts as governor had been to order a 10 percent across-the-board budget reduction, he soon realized California’s budget deficit could not be addressed through spending cuts alone. So, just two months into office, Reagan proposed a tax package to generate $1 billion in new revenue. It was a tax bill four times larger than the largest tax increase ever sought by Brown, and the largest tax increase ever sought by any American governor to that time. It also, it should be noted, provided some modest property tax rebates for low-income citizens—an anticipation of the tax revolt that would sweep California and lead to passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. During Reagan’s tenure as governor, state spending had doubled although the state’s workforce remained roughly the same size as it had been when he was first elected.

  Reagan surprised in other policy areas too. Though he had once said, “A tree is a tree—how many more do you need to look at?”, Reagan compiled a commendable record on protecting the environment and state lands. He also signed into law legislation loosening restrictions on abortions, and in his second term worked with state Democratic House Speaker Bob Moretti to reform California’s welfare system in a way that both increased benefits but also tightened administration and accountability—though Moretti said Reagan never abandoned his belief that, as the House Speaker put it, “a handful of welfare cheats represented all the people on welfare.”

  Reagan’s major initiative to inject bedrock conservative ideology into state policy was a proposed ballot initiative that would have amended the state constitution to limit state tax rates, an idea championed by a task force that included economist Milton Friedman. It was soundly defeated by voters, but that did not dim Reagan’s personal popularity. Even one of his harshest editorial critics, the Sacramento Bee, said Reagan “had proved himself a capable administrator.” Many governors might have found such praise gratifying, but it hardly seemed the kind of accolades upon which to base a presidential campaign.

  But then Kennedy had not been an influential senator in terms of policy, either. In Congress, he did not seek problems to solve, he sought issues on which to forge an identity, and so as he began conceiving Profiles in Courage, Kennedy looked for issues upon which he could also establish his own reputation for political courage.

  One of his first efforts was to back development of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which he expected would be controversial in Massachusetts because it might take business away from the port of Boston. Later he took the lead in opposing proposed reforms to the Electoral College. Neither issue captured the public’s imagination.

  Kennedy’s most interesting thoughts were, unsurprisingly, on foreign affairs. He repeatedly spoke out against colonialism, and particularly urged the United States to oppose France’s efforts to retain Indochina and Algeria. In a 1957 speech he said, “The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile—it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent.”

  While this represented fresh thinking in foreign affairs, in assessing Kennedy and Reagan’s enduring appeal, it is worth remembering that neither launched new political movements. Others had paved the way so that their success was made possible. Each had his own John the Baptist.

  For Kennedy, the prototype was Adlai Stevenson, former governor of Illinois and the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in 1952 and 1956. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who worked as aide to both men, said Stevenson “made JFK possible.” In his two presidential campaigns, Stevenson had already articulated most of the themes that Kennedy would define as the “New Frontier,” and he had popularized among liberals the type of high-minded rhetoric and urbane wit for which Kennedy would also be known.

  Stevenson transformed the Democrats from a party that catered to the working class with the promise of benefits into a party that appealed to the young with calls for new ideas and personal sacrifice for the commonweal. Kennedy spoke “in the Stevenson idiom . . . stressing peril, uncertainty, sacrifice, purpose” to such a degree, Schlesinger said, that Kennedy became “the heir and executor of the Stevenson revolution.”

  Reagan’s pathfinder was Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who, in the words of M. Stanton Evans, “threw his body on the barbed wire” to prepare the way for Reagan. While his landslide loss in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson had seemed a complete debacle, Goldwater’s campaign was among the most consequential in American history.

  Goldwater’s nomination represented the capture of the GOP by its conservative wing, and the beginning of the end of Republican liberals (and many moderates). The conservative philosophy would increasingly dominate the party that had once had a substantial libera
l wing. Further, because Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legislation originally proposed by Kennedy, his nomination hastened the migration of white Southerners into the Republican Party. This shifted the geographic center of the GOP from the Northeast to the rapidly growing South and West, regions already disenchanted with the federal government, where first Goldwater and then Reagan’s conservative message had particular appeal. Without the Goldwater campaign, Evans said, “Ronald Reagan would never have become president.”

  While Goldwater’s plain speaking and unabashedly conservative platform of less government inspired a generation of conservatives, it also frightened a good many people. His policies and his personality seemed extreme when extremism, in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, was one of the most damaging charges that could be hurled at a politician. Goldwater had hardly helped his cause by arguing in his nomination acceptance speech, “Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.” In his speeches on behalf of GE, as governor, and as a presidential candidate, Reagan had articulated the same anti-Communist and small-government philosophies as Goldwater, but never seemed menacing or extreme. In preaching conservative doctrine, Goldwater’s jeremiads seemed to proclaim the end of the old world, while Reagan’s pep talks seemed to trumpet the beginning of a new one. The qualities that had kept him out of film noir and revisionist Westerns as an actor made him a political star in 1964. With his sunny, ever-optimistic personality, Reagan was, one admirer said, “Goldwater mutton, dressed up as lamb.”

  Despite their mutual debts—or perhaps because of them—neither Kennedy and Stevenson nor Reagan and Goldwater got along with each other.

  Stevenson considered Kennedy an “arrogant” and inexperienced upstart who needed more seasoning before he ran for president, which Stevenson thought should be in 1964 or even 1968. “What’s the rush?” Stevenson asked. Stevenson’s biggest complaint, however, was that Kennedy prevented Stevenson from possibly securing the Democratic Party presidential nomination a third time in 1960. “That young man!” Stevenson said of Kennedy. “He never says ‘please’ and he never says ‘I’m sorry.’”

  Kennedy, meanwhile, considered Stevenson “soft” and “a goddam weeper.” Unable to fathom the bald, middle-aged Stevenson’s considerable appeal with women, Kennedy privately called Stevenson a “switcher,” referencing false rumors that the divorced Stevenson was homosexual. Kennedy considered it a great compliment when columnist Joseph Alsop referred to Kennedy as “a Stevenson with balls.” While Reagan’s appeal was that he was a softer version of Goldwater, Kennedy’s appeal was that he was a harder version of Stevenson.

  Of course, what perturbed Kennedy the most about Stevenson was what had also perturbed Stevenson about Kennedy; each man wanted to be president, and neither wanted to defer to the other. Because Stevenson declined to endorse Kennedy prior to the 1960 Democratic National Convention, Kennedy later refused to offer Stevenson the only office he coveted besides the presidency: secretary of state. The best Stevenson would get from Kennedy was U.S. ambassador to the UN, where Kennedy delighted in keeping Stevenson in the dark on most foreign policy issues.

  The relationship between Reagan and Goldwater was hardly better. It rankled Reagan that Goldwater never expressed appreciation for how much Reagan had helped his 1964 campaign, most especially with the broadcast of The Speech, and Goldwater also certainly resented being pushed aside so quickly by conservative activists who now had eyes only for Reagan.

  The rift was especially unfortunate because Reagan and Goldwater had been personal friends. Reagan had met Goldwater in the early 1950s through his father-in-law, Dr. Loyal Davis, who frequently entertained Goldwater at his winter home in Arizona. Goldwater recalled that he and Reagan had gotten into such heated political arguments at a time when Reagan still considered himself a liberal that at one point he became so angry at Goldwater he called him “a black fascist bastard.”

  In 1968 Goldwater flatly told Reagan he was not ready to be president and should yield to Nixon. Goldwater then astonished and dismayed conservatives in 1976 when, putting party loyalty ahead of ideology, he decided to back Ford over Reagan’s unsuccessful insurgent conservative primary challenge. Goldwater shoved the knife in a little deeper when he said it was a “toss-up” as to whether Reagan was actually more conservative than Ford.

  Goldwater supported Reagan’s 1980 presidential bid but then ­alienated Reagan by criticizing the “ostentatious” nature of Reagan’s inaugural festivities. He received few social invitations to the White House after that. And while he supported Reagan’s robust defense policies, he was highly critical of the large federal budget deficits that accrued under Reagan, telling William F. Buckley Jr., “We used to say about the Democrats, ‘They spend and spend and elect and elect.’ Now, the Republicans—‘They borrow and borrow and elect and elect.’ So, there’s basically no difference.” A libertarian who disliked interjecting religion into politics, which Reagan was wont to do, Goldwater even said he doubted that history would “hold [Reagan] in the great position that he now occupies.”

  If Kennedy and Reagan seemed to admirers improvements over the prototypes—Stevenson and Goldwater—who came before them, their popularity is also due to the contrast they presented to the presidents they replaced.

  Historians now consistently rank Eisenhower as one of our ten greatest presidents, and when he left office he had a job approval rating of 59 percent. By the end of the Eisenhower presidency, historian William O’Neill noted, “Americans were materially better off than ever, and national security was greater than it ever would be again.” Yet there was a sense, picked up by Kennedy, who was an even better listener than he was a speaker, that the nation was adrift, that the national mood was less contentment than somnolence.

  When the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, it was clear that the complete American dominance in technology and innovation that had been taken for granted since the end of World War II was over. Kennedy charged that America under Eisenhower was falling behind the Soviets in economic growth and in nuclear capability—neither of which was true—but there were other critics who agreed with Kennedy that the country was “spiritless, complacent, apathetic, confused, and poorly led.”

  The concern about leadership was due to Eisenhower’s “hidden-hand” style of management. In truth, Eisenhower had accomplished a great deal, not the least of which was ensuring Republicans made an accommodation with the programs of the New Deal, such as Social Security. Had hard-line conservatives succeeded in their goal of repealing the New Deal, Eisenhower said the Republican Party would have become extinct.

  Eisenhower was intensely proud of his record, which is why during the 1960 election he declined to give Nixon any credit for it. But even Eisenhower felt compelled in February of that year to appoint a President’s Commission on National Goals to address those who demanded that America recapture a sense of “national purpose.” When the commission published its finding shortly after the 1960 election, they agreed with President-elect Kennedy that the nation needed a faster rate of economic growth and an increase in military spending. The latter was exactly counter to the message of Eisenhower’s farewell address, in which he warned that excessive spending on defense would turn America into a “garrison state,” concentrate too much political power in the “military-industrial complex,” and cost so much that it would rob future generations of “the precious resources of tomorrow.”

  Eisenhower was swiftly dismissed as a relic of the past, the “old America” that valued prudence and tradition and which was “suspicious of change.” Kennedy, meanwhile, offered the thrilling but risky promise that “there were no limits to what America could achieve.”

  The problem for Kennedy during the 1960 campaign was that Nixon had a nearly identical message, though it was more muted because, as Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon could not separate himself from Eisenhower’s policies, nor coul
d he risk alienating the still-popular Eisenhower with too much criticism. Had Eisenhower genuinely liked Nixon and campaigned for him with enthusiasm, Nixon would likely have won in 1960. Instead, Eisenhower undermined Nixon, most famously by saying, when asked to name a Nixon contribution to the Eisenhower administration, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

  Kennedy and Nixon were only three years apart in age, both were determined anti-Communists, and each was a self-described pragmatist—though “realists” would have been their preferred label. Ideological differences played almost no role in the 1960 campaign. If the candidates occasionally attached the labels “conservative” or “liberal” to themselves, it was a matter of political convenience, not belief or commitment. The conservative magazine National Review found so little difference between the two men’s political philosophies that they declined to endorse either man. It became a joke that perhaps their most heated exchange during their televised debates was over who supported the strongest military response should the People’s Republic of China assert sovereignty over two, small, rocky, and totally unremarkable islands known as Quemoy and Matsu. It was only on this tiny esoteric point of foreign policy that the battle was truly waged, with Nixon taking the more aggressive posture.

  Kennedy had worried that his religion would be an issue, but Nixon was probably correct that Kennedy’s Catholicism was more beneficial than detrimental in the election—an argument Kennedy himself had made in a memorandum to Stevenson in 1956 when he was trying to become Stevenson’s running mate. Thrilled by the chance to vote for one of their own, Catholics favored Kennedy by a better than 3 to 1 margin, while the church’s strong anti-Communist stance and the positive portrayal of Catholicism in popular culture (in films such as Boys Town and Going My Way) had substantially reduced anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States since 1928.