Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  Nixon had hoped to make the election about experience, but ultimately it was about tactics and image. Had Kennedy not made Lyndon Johnson his vice-presidential nominee, he would have lost Texas and the election. Had Nixon made Nelson Rockefeller, rather than Henry Cabot Lodge, his running mate, he would have won New York and the election.

  But it is probably true that the deciding factor in the race was the effect of the televised debates between Kennedy and Nixon and the difference in their respective appearances. Television conveys more information nonverbally than verbally. It would be false to suggest it can detect personal integrity; we have learned through experience that sincerity can be faked. But the intimacy of television, coming into our homes, does tell us if we find someone a comfortable figure. Nixon was never that. As an Eisenhower secretary said, “The vice president sometimes seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.”

  Unlike Kennedy, Nixon was never comfortable with who he was. Adlai Stevenson said Nixon was “the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, and then mount the stump to make a speech for conservation.” Eisenhower marveled that Nixon seemed to have no friends at all. Nixon himself said, “Without enemies, my life would be dull as hell.”

  Even though Nixon had saved his career with his famous “Checkers” television speech in 1952, he was still uncomfortable with the new medium. Kennedy, meanwhile, ensured that he had a good tan for the debates. He wore fine-tailored clothes. He had spent hours preparing for the debates but also ensured he was well rested for them. He looked terrific.

  Nixon had been sick from an infection. His skin was gray, and he had lost so much weight that his clothes no longer fit. He had not bothered to buy new shirts. Anxious to hide his dark beard, he used a heavy makeup called Shavestick that gave the appearance of his having been embalmed. He had also refused to prepare for the debate, believing he would easily outshine Kennedy with his detailed knowledge of policy. But he was also exhausted, having had several large rallies immediately before the debate. He was so pale and haggard he might have appeared dead—except for the river of sweat that poured down his face under the hot television lights.

  On debating points, Nixon held his own—a result that was actually a Kennedy victory, since Nixon’s chief argument for election was his superior experience in elected office. On appearances, Nixon lost—badly. New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote many years later, “That night, image replaced the printed word as the natural language of politics.” Not all were pleased by the development. Dean Acheson, who had been Truman’s secretary of state, had watched the debate and found it hardly a debate at all, but rather an exchange of poll-tested talking points. “The ideas are too contrived,” he said, adding “. . . These two . . . bore the hell out of me.”

  While Kennedy had used his televised debates with Nixon to prove he was not too young and inexperienced to be president, in televised debates with Carter, Reagan’s goal was to prove he was not too old, addled, or extreme to be president.

  Reagan ought to have found Carter an easy mark. By the fall of 1980, after a string of domestic and foreign policy disasters, fewer than one in three Americans approved of the job Carter had done as president. While Carter had some successes, such as brokering the peace accords between Israel and Egypt, his primary accomplishment, it seemed, was to diminish the presidency itself. Carter had worked to undo the “imperial” presidency that began with Kennedy and reached its apex under Nixon, but his decisions to walk rather than ride in his inaugural parade and to wear sweaters instead of a suit during televised addresses to the American people had the effect of reducing confidence in his leadership.

  In a July 1979 speech that was reminiscent of Eisenhower’s appointment of a commission on national purpose, Carter warned of “a crisis of confidence” within the American psyche. While Carter never used the word, an aide suggested Carter was identifying a national “malaise,” and the speech would always be known as “the malaise speech.” Some praised Carter for raising the alarm that some aspects of the American lifestyle, such as energy consumption, were no longer sustainable, but others suggested that Carter was blaming the public for his own failings. His energy policy, for example, hardly extended beyond urging Americans to turn down the thermostat and to reduce their speed while driving.

  The energy crisis of 1979 drove up oil prices and thereby inflation to a rate of 13.5 percent in 1980. Interest rates on home and consumer loans topped 20 percent. In November 1979, Iranian radicals took fifty-two American diplomats hostage; they would not be released for 444 days, until January 20, 1981—after Reagan took the oath of office. In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter’s response was to cancel grain sales to the USSR, which hurt American farmers as much or more than the Soviets, and to order a U.S. boycott of the Olympic Games that were to be held in Moscow.

  Carter then had to fend off a significant primary challenge from Massachusetts Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, Jack’s youngest brother—an intraparty challenge perhaps inspired by how close Reagan had come to unseating Ford in 1976. Ted Kennedy, who later would develop an unlikely friendship with Reagan, gave a stirring speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention in which he pledged, “the dream shall never die.” Far from helping Carter, it was a glum reminder to Democrats how far in the past Camelot now seemed.

  Given all of Carter’s problems, Reagan should have been expected to win in a walk, but that is not how the election went. Even though Reagan had spent the better part of the previous six years continuing to hone his message through his radio commentaries, op-eds, and speeches, he continued to make gaffes that caused voters initially to question both whether his politics were in the mainstream and whether he might be too old for the job of president at age sixty-nine.

  The polls showed Carter and Reagan still fairly close until their first televised debate on October 28, 1980. Making the same mistake Pat Brown had made fourteen years earlier, Carter had tried to portray Reagan as a heartless extremist. It had not worked in 1966, and it would not work now.

  As he usually did, Reagan came across as warm, calm, and comfortable. When at one point in the debate, Carter thanked the American people for the sacrifices they had made during the previous four years, Reagan replied that there was no need “to go on sharing in sacrifice.” When Carter accused Reagan of wanting to abolish Medicare, Reagan just smiled and drew a laugh from the audience with the gentle retort, “there you go again.” Carter looked foolish when he talked about discussing nuclear arms policy with his thirteen-year-old daughter, Amy, and Reagan summarized his case by asking voters, “Are you happier today than when Mr. Carter became president of the United States?”

  The answer might have seemed an obvious no, and yet . . .

  Reagan won just 50.75 percent of the popular vote. Because of John Anderson’s third-party candidacy, which probably drew equally from Republicans and Democrats, Reagan’s victory seemed more decisive than it was, and Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time since 1954. But as Democrats and the media looked at the numbers, they questioned what type of mandate, if any, Reagan had earned. Surveys found only 11 percent of those who voted for Reagan said they did so because of his conservative values. Nearly 40 percent said they voted for Reagan just because he wasn’t Carter. And, most importantly, Democrats, despite losing a few seats, still held a clear majority in the House.

  Kennedy had faced a similar quandary in 1960. He had won a smaller percentage of the vote than Reagan would—just 49.7 percent—defeating Nixon by only 112,000 votes nationally. Had Kennedy lost either Illinois or Texas, states where there were rumors of voter fraud, he would have lost the presidency. Democrats had lost seats in the House and the Senate in 1960, and though Democrats still held a majority in both houses, it was a nearly unworkable coalition of Northeast liberals and Southern conservatives. The results hardly portended a new liberal era. Reagan was blessed w
ith a more simpatico marriage of Southern and Western conservatives.

  But if voters had not yet bought into Reagan’s conservative agenda, he did have an agenda and knew what he wanted to do. Kennedy was less sure—or at least less sure of what was possible. He believed he could unite the country around foreign policy; he had fewer ideas on domestic affairs, which really didn’t interest him very much.

  Kennedy had campaigned on a vague promise to “get the country moving again.” But how? And what did that even mean? The rhetoric was outpacing the program, and this would cause Kennedy no end of headaches, especially when he learned that African Americans took it to mean it was time for them to be much more aggressive in asserting their rights.

  Kennedy would remain painfully aware throughout his brief presidency of how narrow his margin of victory had been in 1960, and how the loss of any part of his coalition might mean no second term. He, therefore, acted with caution. Reagan in 1980 chose to ignore that his victory was only marginally greater than Kennedy’s and acted aggressively, as if he had a mandate.

  As we saw in chapter two, had Reagan not been shot, his agenda might have failed. But because he survived, he succeeded—but only because he had an agenda prepared and already before Congress. Kennedy’s agenda had been languishing in Congress, and only his assassination gave the impetus for passage. Separate approaches to similar dilemmas, more than any other single factor, differentiate the Kennedy presidency from the Reagan presidency.

  CHAPTER 13

  SINATRA, DISNEY, AND CASALS

  “Movie people and politicians spring from the same DNA,” said Jack Valenti, the aide to Lyndon Johnson who later became president of the Motion Pictures Association of America. “They are both unpredictable, sometimes glamorous, usually in crisis (imagined or otherwise), addicted to power, anxious to please, always on stage, hooked on applause, enticed by publicity, always reading from scripts written by someone else, constantly taking the public pulse, never really certain, except publicly. Indeed, it’s difficult to say which deserves more the description of ‘entertainment capital of the world,’ Hollywood or Washington, D.C.”

  Valenti wrote that assessment in 1997, well after the presidencies of John F. Kennedy—America’s first “movie-star president”—and Ronald Reagan—the first movie star to become president. Before Kennedy, the parallels between Hollywood and Washington were less noticeable. Then, celebrities had been entertaining diversions from the serious business of politics, a chance for a movie star and a president to get their photograph in Life magazine, little more. But first Kennedy and then Reagan, the two presidents most fully immersed in Hollywood, showed that being a celebrity is a serious business too.

  Most politicians simply want to be associated with celebrities in hopes that some of their glamour will rub off on them like wet paint; Kennedy and Reagan sought to imbue their presidencies with glamour, particularly the glamour of Hollywood. Politics, as Kennedy and Reagan understood, is more than a contest between ideologies or debates over policies; it also involves, in the words of historian Gil Troy, “a clash of symbols and a collective search for meaning.”

  Hollywood, as our “cultural dream factory,” creates the images that express the hopes, dreams, and fears of Americans. Because Kennedy and Reagan had immersed themselves in Hollywood more deeply than any other presidents—both were true students of the movie industry—they understood that by appropriating these images, a shrewd politician has a path to the American subconscious and has found a powerful tool to communicate a strong message and establish a cultural bond without saying a word.

  In return, Hollywood celebrates those presidents who give it the respectability it has always craved, and the interplay between the worlds of entertainment and politics soon makes a president not merely a political icon, but a cultural icon as well.

  “There have been times in this office,” Reagan quipped while he was president, “when I’ve wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.” Certainly, a U.S. president is a performer, and as Reagan once noted, theatrical training provides many practical advantages to a politician. An actor must be able to take direction, accept criticism, be comfortable in front of cameras, and know the best angle at which to be photographed. But there are also deeper lessons to be learned, Reagan said, such as how to prepare for a role and get into character, how to gauge an audience’s reaction to a performance, and how to “understand the feelings and motivations of others.”

  Reagan had a three-decade career as a professional film and television actor, but his interest, involvement, and understanding of the movie business went beyond onscreen turns. He was president of the Screen Actors Guild, had aspirations to be a screenwriter, and supervised production on a number of episodes of General Electric Theater. While Reagan was like most actors in making suggestions to try to improve a scene, what distinguished him, director Fred de Cordova said, was that Reagan’s suggestions “were helpful and not particularly self-serving. He was willing to give up a line not to help himself but to make the scene play better.” De Cordova said he never imagined Reagan would one day become president, but thought his deep knowledge of how movies were made would lead him into management, perhaps as the head of a studio.

  Kennedy, of course, never worked as an entertainer, but he was far more than just a fan of Hollywood; he was one of its most serious students. He would predate Reagan in understanding that one role a president plays is that of “the leading man” in the unfolding American narrative, “as a symbol,” as one scholar said, “of . . . national wish fulfillment.”

  If a key part of being president is serving as the nation’s leading man, then Kennedy was determined to learn from the best. He had been immersed in movies since his childhood, when his father was in the movie business. Kennedy had watched his father use his association with Hollywood and the public relations techniques he had learned from the studios to greatly enhance his own fame. Had Joseph Kennedy been only a banker or financier, he might have been just as rich, but he and his family would hardly have been as well known.

  More than any of his siblings, Kennedy “inherited his father’s consuming interest in the movies” and was likely delighted when his sister Patricia married movie actor Peter Lawford, who further opened the doors and the secrets of Hollywood to the young politician. Like Reagan, Kennedy loved watching movies—dozens of movies each year—but not solely for their entertainment value. He studied them as he watched, trying to discover what that elusive quality was that turned an actor into a star—because that same quality might turn a politician into a president.

  Shortly after the war, and just before he launched his first congressional campaign, Kennedy traveled to Hollywood and stayed for almost two months, rooming with a young Robert Stack. He spent time with several of the biggest male stars in Hollywood, including Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, and Clark Gable, trying to fathom the secret of their allure. At first Kennedy was “mystified.” He went to dinner with Cooper and found him “yawn-inducingly boring,” yet when they stepped outside the restaurant, Cooper was mobbed by adoring fans. “How does he do it?” Kennedy asked a friend in the movie business, following it up with the more important question, “Do you think I could learn how to do it?”

  What Kennedy learned, and which Reagan would have already known by then, is that the great stars always play themselves—or more accurately, they always play the persona they have developed for themselves. For example, a poor, young Cockney acrobat and juggler named Archibald Leach was able, with time and effort, to become the suave and sophisticated Cary Grant and thereafter always be Cary Grant, no matter what film role he might have. What began as illusion became reality.

  Kennedy and Reagan, who each began life as small, unathletic, reserved little boys, engaged in lifelong reinventions of themselves, working to form themselves into the men they wished to be, the masculine, rugged, charming presidents that they became.

 
Reagan, beginning from the time he read That Printer of Udell’s, created what he “wanted to truly be . . . an estimable individual who made his way through life as a positive force in the world, a man people would admire for all the right reasons.” And then he “played only [that] one role, ever, and he did so unconsciously, totally absorbed in its performance.” The performance and the performer became one.

  Viewing her son on screen for the first time, Mrs. Reagan said, “That’s just the way he is at home. He’s no Robert Taylor, he’s just himself.” Reagan’s persona of the good guy from next door was so clearly understood that when he announced he was running for governor of California, his old studio boss, Jack Warner, quipped, “All wrong. Jimmy Stewart for governor. Reagan for best friend.”

  Kennedy, too, spent most of his life working to become a character he had wanted to play from youth—his older brother. Much like Theodore Roosevelt, another sickly boy who later lived a rugged, active life, Kennedy wanted to be seen as tough and heroic, though he was never able to put his infirmities completely behind him as TR had. While writing Why England Slept provided Kennedy with the deep satisfaction of accomplishing something his brother had not been able to do, it was his experience in World War II that proved to Kennedy he could in fact be the stoic, decisive leader that was his definition of manliness.

  Kennedy never stopped working on this reinvention process until he, like Reagan, became the character he wanted to play in real life. His friend George Smathers recalled how Kennedy had evolved from “a shy, bashful, nonambitious, nice [man] . . . into a very, very motivated, well-spoken, good-looking, determined fellow. I never in my life have ever seen a transformation like that.” Or as a Soviet official who closely observed Kennedy during his 1961 summit with Khrushchev noted, “Kennedy was not playing the part. He was the part—unlike many [leaders] I have seen before and since.”