by Scott Farris
Given the times in which each man served as president, it is not a coincidence that the personas created by Kennedy and Reagan heavily emphasized their masculine qualities. Chronologically, the Kennedy administration may have kicked off the Sixties, but culturally it was really more the end of the Fifties, predating the feminist movement and the notion that men should get in touch with their sensitive sides.
When Kennedy took office, “the cult of Hemingway,” which praised dominant men and submissive women, was still in place. Although Kennedy loved golf, he ensured he was never photographed playing the game most associated with the elderly Eisenhower. Instead Kennedy preferred to be photographed while playing a rugged game of touch football, or sailing, often alone, in the great Atlantic. He was content to be photographed sitting in his stiff-backed rocking chair, to remind Americans how stoically he dealt with his chronic back pain, but he refused to be seen using crutches because that was a sign of weakness. (Reagan, too, admitted to being too vain to wear a needed hearing aid.)
The culture of the sensitive male, which reached its apex in the 1970s, had exhausted itself by the time Reagan ran for president. He represented the counterculture to the counterculture and was often accused of wanting to return America to the 1950s and the cult of Hemingway that Kennedy had so admired. If he was associated with that kind of regression, he was not alone. One phenomenon of the Reagan years was the so-called “men’s movement” that culminated in the publication of Robert Bly’s 1990 book Iron John: A Book About Men, whose thesis was that there is an intrinsic need in human culture for kings; therefore, men, especially fathers, needed to again be more masculine to fill this need for a kingly figure.
The masculine personas of Kennedy and Reagan were ideally suited to the popular cultures of their eras, adoring of manly heroes. Political science professor John Orman labeled Reagan “the quintessential macho president” based on seven qualities that also seem to apply equally to Kennedy:
1.Competitiveness in politics and life
2.Sports minded and athletic
3.Decisive, never wavering or uncertain
4.Unemotional, never revealing true emotions or feelings
5.Strong and aggressive, not weak or passive
6.Powerful
7.A “real man,” never “feminine”
While Kennedy had his football-loving war-hero image, Reagan had his own ideal masculine persona, the cowboy, which expressed Reagan’s thwarted desire to be a star of Westerns. When Time magazine named Reagan its “Man of the Year” in 1980, Reagan posed on the cover in jeans and a denim shirt, wearing a large belt buckle, and throughout his presidency he always preferred to be photographed riding horses, clearing brush, or doing other types of ranch work, usually alone. Reagan was being himself (or at least who he wanted to be), while also offering a deliberate contrast to his predecessor, Carter, a sweater-wearing peanut farmer who once famously kept an aggressive rabbit at bay with a canoe paddle—a story he told on himself, and which he no doubt forever regretted divulging.
To what degree Reagan reestablished a traditional masculine image in the public mind versus how much he simply benefited from public attitudes that made traditional masculinity once more in vogue is difficult to discern. Reagan’s first election, however, and particularly his overwhelming reelection in 1984, seemed to suggest to Hollywood that the public might have a taste for movies featuring hypermasculine heroes whose few female characters are generally in need of rescue. A sampling of titles from the Reagan era include Raiders of the Lost Ark, Top Gun, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Terminator, Robocop, and First Blood and its sequels Rambo: First Blood II and Rambo III.
A sign that these films were, at least in part, a response to Reagan’s presidency is that the hero is often pitted against “bureaucracies that have lost touch with the people they serve”—certainly a key theme of Reagan’s anti–big government philosophy. In Rambo: First Blood II, for example, John Rambo is punished for rescuing American POWs when his orders were simply to take reconnaissance photographs. In Die Hard, the criminals/terrorists almost get away because the FBI has ignored the hero’s advice and followed bureaucratic procedures—just as the villains hoped they would. The bad guys also derisively refer to the hero as “Mr. Cowboy,” just as many critics overseas complained about Reagan’s so-called “cowboy diplomacy.”
Other films that seemed to play off Reagan’s political agenda were Red Dawn, about a group of Colorado high-school kids bravely fighting off a Soviet invasion, and the television fifteen-hour miniseries Amerika, in which the Soviet Union occupies the United States without a struggle. Unfortunately, Amerika was shown late in the Reagan presidency, after Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet president and Cold War fears were diminished. Amerika’s ratings were so poor it was only shown on network television the one time. Even the Back to the Future films had a Reagan tint with the message that the future can be improved if we reimagine the past.
The Kennedy years, too, were filled with films of alienated masculine heroes and few women characters, such as Lawrence of Arabia, Ride the High Country, To Kill a Mockingbird, Spartacus, The Guns of Navarone, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Birdman of Alcatraz, Lonely Are the Brave, and, of course, the first James Bond film, Dr. No. Kennedy himself gave Dr. No a boost when he told Life magazine in 1961 that Ian Fleming’s novels were among his favorite books.
It is, as always, difficult to know the degree to which Kennedy and Reagan influenced how men were portrayed in films versus how the portrayals of men in films influenced what the public was looking for in a president. What is clear is that there was a remarkable and constant interplay between their presidencies and popular culture. Time magazine, for example, believed Kennedy had extraordinary influence over popular tastes: “Kennedy sets the style, tastes and temper of Washington more surely than Franklin Roosevelt did in twelve years, Dwight Eisenhower in eight, Harry Truman in seven. Cigar sales have soared. (Jack smokes them). Hat sales have fallen. (Jack does not wear them.)” The effect on apparel sales reminded many people that Kennedy was indeed like a movie star, for Clark Gable had similarly been credited with ruining the undershirt business when he appeared bare-chested in It Happened One Night.
Kennedy also inspired what was the fastest-selling pre-Beatles record in history, comedian and Kennedy impersonator Vaughn Meader’s The First Family. Kennedy disliked the record (he complained that Meader sounded more like his younger brother, Ted, than himself), but the record still sold 1.2 million copies in its first two weeks and 7.5 million copies overall, and it won the Grammy Award for “Album of the Year,” sure signs of the public’s fascination with the man.
The interplay between the presidency and popular culture was also underscored by Reagan’s regular references to movies during his presidency, using them to help make his points. Sometimes the allusions were playful asides, such as when Reagan dared Congress to, “Go ahead—make my day”—lifting a line from Sudden Impact, one of the films featuring rogue cop Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan, played by Clint Eastwood, in which he threatens to kill a robber holding a hostage. Another time, after American hostages held in Lebanon had been released, Reagan said, “Boy, I saw Rambo last night. Now I know what to do the next time this happens.”
At other times, Reagan seemed to see movies and their plots not as clever asides, but rather as sources of wisdom and real insight that could help guide American and global policy. He once baffled Gorbachev by noting that the Soviet Union and United States would almost certainly cooperate if Earth were ever invaded from outer space. If that were the case, then why couldn’t they cooperate now? Colin Powell, Reagan’s national security advisor, was sure Reagan had gotten the idea for this gambit from a recent showing of the 1951 science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which a man from outer space arrives on Earth and threatens our planet with annihilation if the world’s nations cannot peacefully resolve their difference
s.
At a meeting with congressional and military leaders to discuss arms control, Reagan seemed disengaged until he suddenly announced he had watched the 1983 film War Games the night before. He then recounted the plot about a teenage computer whiz who accidently hacked into the computers that controlled America’s nuclear launch codes. The congressmen later professed to be appalled that Reagan would use a movie as a starting point for a serious discussion on policy, but Reagan knew that the film would affect other Americans as it had affected him; it would take just one mistake, one miscalculation, one terrorist, and the world could be plunged into nuclear war unless something was done to eliminate or neutralize the world’s enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons. Reagan, in his own way, was restating Lincoln’s maxim, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”
With his background and expertise in film, Reagan knew that the movies provided reference points of belief that had a strong emotional pull for most Americans. If a politician could plausibly tap into the emotions and core values that were already present in the American subconscious by summoning a commonly understood icon from popular culture, then that illustration was a more effective tool in creating consensus than a dozen lengthy erudite speeches. Reagan acknowledged his persuasive technique of appropriating existing images when in his farewell address he said, “I was not a great communicator but I communicated great things.”
No one in popular culture was as successful in identifying and exploiting icons of the American unconscious as the man who might be called Reagan’s Hollywood soul mate: Walt Disney. Both men were Midwesterners, both were born in Illinois near the turn of the century (Disney was ten years older than Reagan), and each had come west to Hollywood and achieved success. Their levels of success, one is tempted to say, were beyond their wildest dreams, but since Reagan and Disney specialized in wild dreams, perhaps that would not be true.
Despite similar backgrounds and shared conservative politics, Reagan and Disney were only professional acquaintances. Yet they shared a sensibility that honored a mythic American past, filled with orderly, conflict-free small towns that in their memories were akin to paradise, and which also had faith that the blessings of technology would create an extraordinarily bright future for humanity.
On July 17, 1955, Reagan served as one of three masters of ceremonies, along with Art Linkletter and Robert Cummings, for the nationally televised grand opening of Disneyland, which drew an estimated seventy million viewers. Reagan praised Disney’s portrayal of American history, which through films such as Davy Crockett and Johnny Tremain, as one Disney biographer noted, “fashioned an American past of rugged heroes and bold accomplishment that for generations turned history into boyhood adventure”—an appealing prospect for Reagan, who read the great adventure stories as a boy.
Disney associate John Hench said that in constructing his theme park, Disney was “striving to make people feel better about themselves.” When Reagan left office, he listed as one accomplishment that America as a country was “happier than it was eight years ago. . . .” A Disney historian added that Disney had intuited—or perhaps discovered through practice and market research—how to develop the park attractions so that “one could take every feature . . . and explain its appeal in terms of some instinctive or emotional response common to almost all of us.” Again, Reagan delighted in backdrops such as the Statue of Liberty, which he knew would evoke a strong emotional response from a viewer even if they never heard a word he said.
A promotional brochure for Disneyland emphasized how the park was designed to take people into a dream world, because at Disneyland “you will find yourself in the land of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy. Nothing of the present exists in Disneyland.” Reviewing the opening of Disneyland back in 1955, the New York Times said in an editorial, “Mr. Disney has tastefully combined some of the pleasantest things of yesterday with the fantasy and dreams of tomorrow.” A more succinct summary of Reagan’s own worldview would be hard to find.
The parallels between Reagan’s presidency and Disney’s imagination were underscored by the Reagan Presidential Library itself. In 2012 the library’s leadership invited the Walt Disney Company to develop a twelve thousand–square-foot exhibit that featured five hundred items of Disney memorabilia. Explaining the rationale for including Disney in a presidential library, the organization stated, “Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan were two eternal optimists who shared a belief in the essential goodness of the American way of life.” Commentators suggested the library had simply hit upon a gimmick to increase attendance and gift store revenues, which it did, but Reagan and Disney do seem to go together like chocolate and peanut butter.
The argument being made is not that Reagan had a “Disneyfied” view of the world that was too childish or simplistic to grapple with real-world problems. The point is just the opposite. Reagan’s understanding of how Disney had permeated our vision and knowledge of Americana revealed a sophisticated understanding of the overarching power of popular culture, how it informs what we know about history, about other countries, and about government—a sophisticated understanding that Kennedy shared. Kennedy had visited Disneyland while a senator and arranged for Disney films to be shown for his children in the theater at the White House. Disney is also credited with building public support for Kennedy’s proposal to send a man to the moon. As a Disney biographer noted, “NASA acknowledged that Disney’s early drumbeating for its program was instrumental in generating public support for space exploration.” It was all part of Disney’s fundamentally optimistic view of the future that was also literally on exhibit through Disney’s and General Electric’s “Carousel of Progress” at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City.
Kennedy was less interested in Disney productions, however, than in politically oriented films from other sources that he thought supported his own political agenda. Perhaps because it costarred his brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, Kennedy made special arrangements to allow Otto Preminger to film Advice and Consent on location at the White House. Kennedy no doubt liked the fact that in the film (and the Alan Drury novel it was based on), the president is noble and the members of Congress are generally scoundrels. Lawford’s character of a womanizing senator was one such scamp and was allegedly based on Kennedy, which seems another sign that Kennedy did not think his reputation as a philanderer was a political handicap.
Kennedy also encouraged director John Frankenheimer to turn the novel Seven Days in May into a movie “as a service to the public.” The film, starring Kennedy’s favorite actor, Kirk Douglas, and Burt Lancaster, portrayed a planned coup by right-wing military officers against a liberal president accused of appeasing the Soviets. Kennedy had been deeply concerned that several high-ranking officers, such as Air Force General Curtis LeMay and Admiral Arleigh Burke, were intent on pushing the United States into war, including nuclear war, with the Soviets, and Kennedy wanted to expose their extreme politics to the nation. Kennedy told Frankenheimer that if he wanted to use the White House to film some location scenes, he would cooperate by traveling to Hyannis Port for the weekend.
But the movie that most attracted Kennedy’s interest was based on himself, specifically his war record in the Pacific. PT 109, released in 1963, made Kennedy the first president to have a feature film made about him while he was still in office. In return for his cooperation, Kennedy received script and casting approval, although Warren Beatty, his first choice to play himself, turned down the offer and Kennedy instead okayed Cliff Robertson. Unfortunately for Kennedy, the film’s producer, Bryan Foy, saw PT 109 not as a serious film biography or war story but as “an exploitation picture” designed to make a quick buck off the new president’s popularity. Made on a low budget, it received lukewarm critical reviews, though it did afford Kennedy critics an opportunity to add their own commentary; when the film was shown at a Georgia theater, the marquee read: See the Japs almost Get Kennedy!
That a
sitting president was able to influence the production of a film about himself, and then use that film for his own political purposes, shows how incestuous the worlds of Hollywood and Washington became in the Kennedy years. Many lamented this increased focus on image over the business of governance, but leaders of all generations have desired fame. As the cultural historian Leo Braudy noted, “Alexander the Great set out to make himself the best-known person on earth.” The difference today is that lasting fame is no longer a name carved on an obelisk; it is the image on film.
Kennedy and Reagan’s shared understanding of how images and figures from the entertainment world could help shape their own images in the public mind was vividly on display at the two inaugural galas held in honor of each man. For despite being held twenty years apart and in honor of president-elects from two different parties, both events were organized and hosted by the same man: crooner, movie star, and presidential chum Frank Sinatra.
Held January 19, 1961, the Kennedy gala was an “only-in-America blend of high culture and low comedy,” with such a giddy mixture of performers old and young, white and black, highbrow and hip, that it seemed the perfect symbol, as Kennedy would articulate the next day in his inaugural address, that a new generation was in charge and that things would be done differently from now on.
Featured were a still-young Leonard Bernstein, fresh from his triumph with West Side Story, adding syncopation to the tunes of John Phillip Sousa, and an even younger Harry Belafonte, just thirty-four, wearing a calypso shirt unbuttoned down his chest, one of five African-American performers among the two dozen acts in the racially integrated bill.* Sinatra himself was still only in his mid-forties and at the peak of his fame, his albums still soundtrack for a million seductions. That night he serenaded the president-elect with “You Make Me Feel So Young,” from his album Songs for Swingin’ Lovers.