Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  * Absent, however, was Sinatra chum Sammy Davis Jr., who was asked not to perform because he had scandalized the nation, including Kennedy, by marrying a white woman, the Swedish-born actress Mai Britt, a few weeks before. Kennedy, however, then became the first president to dance with a black woman at an inaugural ball the following evening.

  The gala seemed edgy, perhaps even a bit dangerous, but also full of the promise of excitement. Kennedy, as Norman Mailer rather floridly put it in an essay published a month before the election, had already tapped “a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires,” and America was now travelling a “long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.” Shortly after the election, Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen put it another way: “The Kennedy administration is going to do for sex what the Eisenhower administration did for golf.”

  It was all so new and thrilling that some have argued that the Kennedy gala “may have marked the moment when popular entertainment became an indispensable part of modern politics.” One of the gala’s performers, actress Bette Davis, proudly proclaimed, “The world of entertainment—show-biz, if you please—has become the Sixth Estate.”

  The atmosphere was less electric at the Reagan inaugural gala in 1981, but intentionally so. Sensing that the nation was exhausted by two decades of social experimentation, Reagan’s inaugural did not promote an image of change so much as the notion of restoration—a restoration of traditional American values and a restoration of American greatness that he believed had been in decline. So Reagan summoned the “old Hollywood” that used entertainment to preach traditional values and simple patriotism to help convey his message.

  Most of the stars—Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Jimmy Stewart—sported gray hair, and the few younger performers, such as Donny and Marie Osmond and Debby Boone, were far more clean than cool. No one was in an unbuttoned calypso shirt. All the men, including country singer Charley Pride, wore tuxedos; Stewart attached to his the military decorations he had earned during World War II.

  Reagan had always argued that the “old Hollywood” was the true Hollywood. In speeches before he entered politics, he argued that those in the movie industry were more patriotic, more anti-Communist, more monogamous, and more God-fearing than typical Americans—and he had the facts and figures to back it up. “Seventy percent of our people are married, more than seventy percent of those to their first husband or wife,” Reagan said “. . . We lead the nation in proportionate numbers in church membership and attendance, and we have the lowest crime rate of any industrial or professional group in the world, not excluding the clergy.”

  The sight of so many familiar faces at an inaugural gala was also comforting. After years of inflation, gas shortages, and American diplomats being taken hostage, comfort was what America yearned for. “The beautiful was the familiar,” journalist Sidney Blumenthal wrote, “ . . . the best entertainers were those who were familiar, whose period of greatest creativity and authenticity was in the past. As remnants of another era, they were reassuring, not only about the past, but about the future. Their presence was an indication that what lay ahead was already experienced.”

  Familiarity and comfort partially explained Sinatra’s presence, but Sinatra was also present to wreack his revenge upon the Kennedys. Sinatra had been a lifelong Democrat who had campaigned for FDR as far back as 1944, but he had had a bitter falling out with Kennedy a year after the Kennedy inaugural gala. Sinatra had introduced Kennedy to one of his own former mistresses, a striking Elizabeth Taylor look-alike named Judith Campbell, who was also sleeping with mob boss Sam Giancana—a fact J. Edgar Hoover was delighted to pass on to Kennedy. Reluctantly, Kennedy ceased all communications with Sinatra and never spoke to him again. An embittered Sinatra, seeking to regain political respectability, first backed Hubert Humphrey in 1968, but after Humphrey lost to Nixon, Sinatra struck up an unlikely friendship with Vice President Spiro Agnew that led to his conversion from Democrat to Republican and which included becoming a major fund-raiser for Reagan, who rewarded the aging crooner by making him chair of his inaugural committee.

  At the gala, Sinatra sang “Nancy (With the Laughing Face)” to the new first lady, who blew him a kiss. The image of Sinatra the swinger was long gone. It was all innocent fun.* And so it was that Sinatra, once considered too unsavory for the Kennedy White House, found himself welcomed in the Reagan White House. As Reagan biographer Garry Wills noted, “Rather than tarnishing the wholesome image of the Reagans, he had been scrubbed clean by it.”

  * The only sour note was black Tony Award–winning performer Ben Vereen’s decision to perform in blackface, which Vereen said he did to honor the pioneering African-American star of vaudeville, Bert Anderson, who had been required to wear blackface to perform. Whatever point Vereen was trying to make was overwhelmed by the jarring sight of a performer wearing blackface in 1981, and many African-American viewers and others worried it was an omen that Reagan would take a different approach on civil rights than his predecessors—even though Reagan had neither approved nor even known about Vereen’s plans.

  The galas, of course, were only the beginnings of Kennedy and Reagan’s use of the arts in their presidencies. Kennedy was a particularly vocal artistic booster, especially after he attended a state dinner at Versailles hosted by French President Charles de Gaulle where the Paris Opera Ballet performed. “Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” Kennedy told journalist Mary McGrory, who was also in attendance. “A little different than Fred Waring and Lawrence Welk at the White House”—a reference to the two easy-listening bandleaders who had frequently performed for Eisenhower.

  Kennedy vowed his administration would do something different with regard to the arts and, per his usual custom, justified it as part of his national self-improvement plan, a potential weapon in the Cold War. “I have called for a higher degree of physical fitness in our nation,” Kennedy said. “It is only natural that I should call for the kind of intellectual and spiritual fitness which underlies the flower of the arts.” He also told the New York Times, “I think it is tremendously important that we regard music not just as part of our arsenal in the Cold War, but as an integral part of a free society.”

  Kennedy’s interest in the arts was purely political, not personal. He had been forced to take piano lessons as a boy and hated it. August Heckscher, Kennedy’s cultural advisor (a first in any White House), said of Kennedy, “I really don’t think he liked music at all except a few things that he knew,” which would have been limited to Sinatra, show tunes, and a few sentimental Irish ballads. Kennedy was, in the words of biographer Richard Reeves, a “meat-and-potatoes guy, a middlebrow.” Fortunately for Kennedy, his wife had extraordinary taste in almost everything, including music, as she had once trained as a concert pianist.

  Lawrence Welk was nowhere on the bill when Mrs. Kennedy began planning a series of concerts at the White House that included such renowned artists and companies as Igor Stravinsky, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Robert Joffrey, the Metropolitan Opera, and the American Shakespeare Company. Mrs. Kennedy said, “My main concern was to present the best in the arts, not necessarily what was popular at the time.” This attitude fit in well with the overall theme of elitism in the Kennedy administration, which included recognition of elite military units, such as the Green Berets. Even if he may have been personally bored—Heckscher thought Kennedy found some of the music even painful to listen to—Kennedy insisted on being associated with the finest in all things, including music.

  The pinnacle performance was one of the first, by cellist Pablo Casals, who had originally performed at the White House in 1904 for Theodore Roosevelt. Casals ended his twenty-three-year boycott of America to play at the Kennedy White House on November 13, 1961. Since 1938, although he lived in Puerto Rico, Casals had refused to perform in the United States in protest of U.S. recognition of the Franco government in Spain. But Casals admi
red Kennedy, and his return was one of the most anticipated concerts in history; it was broadcast over both the NBC and CBS radio networks, while Columbia Records issued a live recording of the performance.

  Casals closed his hour-long performance with a simple folk song from his native Catalan, “The Song of the Birds,” a symbol of freedom from a region of Spain particularly hostile to Franco’s dictatorship, “but to me,” Casals said, “it’s the song of the exile.”

  Because of the unusual mix of politics and art, the Casals concert probably still remains the high-water mark for a cultural event at the White House. No subsequent White House performance by any artist has had the impact of the Casals concert, and it changed how following presidents have approached high culture.

  While no residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have had quite the success of the Kennedys, each family has tried in its own way, and the Reagans were also seen as passionate patrons of the arts. They arranged to have the concerts performed during their tenure broadcast on PBS as a series entitled Performance at the White House.

  Far more than the Kennedys, the Reagans mixed popular performers with jazz legends and classical greats. The White House billed Johnny Mathis, Perry Como, and even The Beach Boys (after Interior Secretary James Watt had banned them from the Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall), along with Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton, and Itzhak Perlman and Leontyne Price.

  After a performance by Price and several rising young opera stars, Reagan quipped, “For years I didn’t think you could give Il trovatore without the Marx Brothers,” referencing the comedians’ zany rendition in A Night at the Opera. It was a comment that would never have been made in the Kennedy White House. However painful Kennedy truly found music, he was happy to be seen as highbrow, even elite in his tastes. It fit the national mood in 1961. Reagan knew that his quip about Groucho, Harpo, and the gang would convey an appreciation for high culture but that deep down he was an everyman, and that was perhaps the biggest difference between Kennedy and Reagan, connoisseurs of the arts, students of popular culture, and masters of imagery.

  CHAPTER 14

  A CITY ON A HILL AND A MAN ON THE MOON

  Most Americans believe in “American exceptionalism,” which historian Russel B. Nye defined as a faith that the United States “has a particular mission in the world, and a unique contribution to make to it.” John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were strong believers in American exceptionalism, and while Reagan articulated the concept far more often, two of Kennedy’s most significant accomplishments—his commitment that the United States would land a man on the moon before 1970 and his creation of the Peace Corps—were, to a large degree, the result of his notion of American exceptionalism.

  American exceptionalism is embraced by most Americans. A 2011 Gallup poll found that 80 percent of all Americans, regardless of party identification, believe in the concept, and perhaps a key reason for Kennedy and Reagan’s enduring appeal is their strong identification with the idea. Gallup found that nearly 90 percent of Americans associate Reagan with American exceptionalism, the highest percentage of any recent president (though those surveyed were not asked about Kennedy).

  As Nye noted in his book This Almost Chosen People, “The search by Americans for a precise definition of their national purpose, and their absolute conviction that they have such a purpose, provide one of the most powerful threads in the development of an American ideology.” The argument among Americans has been and will likely always be over what, precisely, the nation’s purpose is.

  Kennedy was elected, in part, because of a 1950s’s sense that America was adrift (hence the pressure on Eisenhower to establish a President’s Commission on National Goals). His idea of American exceptionalism meant actively identifying a national purpose that would reinvigorate the nation. The whole concept behind Kennedy’s “New Frontier” agenda was to convince the nation that it was entering undiscovered territory, a self-conscious identification with the American frontier myth and manifest destiny that is central to the exceptionalism idea.

  Reagan, a foe of big government and government programs (except in the realm of national defense), would have blanched at the thought of the federal government seeking to identify and organize a national purpose. To him, American exceptionalism meant being an exemplar of liberty to the world and fomenting opposition to tyranny.

  Atheistic Communist tyranny was the particular villain, underscoring that American exceptionalism has strong religious overtones. As Reagan said in a commencement speech he gave in 1952, “I, in my own mind, have thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as a promised land.” He expounded on this belief during his 1980 campaign, saying, “I truly believe that to be an American is to be a part of a nation with a destiny[,] that God put this land here between the great oceans to be discovered by a special kind of people and that God intended America to be free.”

  Reagan’s favorite metaphor in reference to American exceptionalism was to declare that the United States was like “a city on a hill” (though he later added an adjective so that it became “a shining city on a hill”) that was constantly observed and admired by the other people of the world, particularly those who valued freedom and liberty. The phrase is found in the Gospel of St. Matthew but is most famously associated with the Puritan leader John Winthrop, a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who told his fellow colonists before they left England that their colony would be “as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us,” and it was Winthrop that Reagan would cite during the many times he used the phrase.

  Kennedy had cited Winthrop too, more than a dozen years before Reagan did so publicly, when he gave his farewell address to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1961. Kennedy, however, used Winthrop’s phrase to signal his awareness that the world was watching how he would form his new presidential administration and his call to appoint men of talent and integrity.

  Both Kennedy and Reagan’s interpretations would have likely befuddled Winthrop, had he heard them. When Winthrop used the phrase during a 1630 sermon—given either in a church in Southhampton, England, or aboard his flagship, the Arabella, as it still lay anchored off the English coast—he would have been speaking as an Englishman for “there was no distinctively American consciousness for at least a century after Winthrop’s sermon.” His use of the phrase was intended to remind his fellow colonists that they should be an example to other English colonies, not other nations.

  If Kennedy is less associated with American exceptionalism than Reagan, it is not only because he talked about it less but also because he was more candid in articulating the limits of American influence in the world. The calamities of the twentieth century, including two world wars, led Kennedy to temper American global ambitions. He said that “in a world of contradiction and confusion we must acknowledge . . . that we cannot always impose our will on the other 94 percent of mankind, that we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversity, and that there therefore cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”

  His apparent realism, a trait of which Kennedy was most proud, makes it all the more remarkable that he embarked upon one of the great quixotic adventures in American and world history, the moon program, one that may stand as Kennedy’s most enduring legacy and the reason he may be remembered after all other American presidents have been forgotten.

  In a charming book that seeks to rank the hundred most influential humans in history, Michael H. Hart ranks Kennedy the eightieth most influential person in human history (between Voltaire and Gregory Pincus)—a rather prominent placement for a man who served as president for less than three years. Hart’s rationale is that, while early twenty-first-century America seems to have lost its enthusiasm for space exploration, one day, humanity will again desire to travel to the stars, whether out of curiosity or necessity. When that happens, whether it is one hundred years from now or one thousand
years from now, human beings will recall the first time a man set foot on a celestial body other than Earth as “the start of an entire new era in human history,” and the name of John F. Kennedy will be remembered.

  While Kennedy deserves only his fair share of the honors that also belong to the man who actually first set foot on the moon, astronaut Neil Armstrong, not to mention the thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians, and others who made the mission successful, it is also true that his decision to have the United States send a man to the moon was one of those rare occasions in history when a momentous event can be attributed to the will of one man.

  As a senator, Kennedy had no interest in the American space program; he had agreed with Eisenhower that it was a waste of money. Shortly after becoming president, Kennedy might have cut the budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) were it not for Vice President Johnson’s advocacy for the space program—largely because it created a great number of jobs in his native Texas.

  A year and a half later, after he had already committed the United States to the moon program, named Project Apollo, Kennedy still admitted, “I’m not that interested in space,” and acknowledged that it made little sense to spend so much money traveling into outer space when there were so many other pressing needs on Earth. But Kennedy felt compelled to commit to a moon landing, and to insist that the United States would accomplish that goal before 1970.

  Many scholars place Project Apollo exclusively within the context of the competition inherent in the Cold War, or explain its genesis as Kennedy’s response to his mounting political problems. Certainly Kennedy wanted to change the focus of public discussion away from his disastrous first few months as president. As the May 5, 1961, edition of Time magazine said, “Last week as John F. Kennedy closed out the first 100 days of his administration, the U.S. suffered a month-long series of setbacks rare in the history of the Republic.”