by Scott Farris
The difficult balance required between national pride and chauvinism had been on display two decades earlier with Kennedy’s creation of the Peace Corps.
The Peace Corps was not Kennedy’s idea. Hubert Humphrey and others had introduced bills in 1960 to create what Humphrey already referred to as the Peace Corps. But Kennedy gave it national recognition during some impromptu remarks he made in the early morning hours of October 14, 1960, during a campaign stop at the University of Michigan. Why Kennedy chose to raise the Peace Corps idea at this event is not known, but aides speculated Kennedy had been irritated during his debate with Nixon the night before when Nixon charged that Democratic presidents “had led us” into war in World War I, World War II, and Korea.
Kennedy spoke for less than three minutes. When he asked the students present if they were willing to “contribute part of your life to this country,” the response was overwhelmingly positive. Kennedy told an aide that he felt like he had “hit the winning number.” But his brief remarks made at 2:00 a.m. attracted little notice outside Michigan, so Kennedy expanded on the Peace Corps idea three weeks later in San Francisco in what became known as “the peace speech.” Kennedy said, “The generation which I speak for has seen enough of warmongers. Let our great role in history be that of peacemongers.”
Kennedy particularly criticized how often the United States sent “ill-equipped” ambassadors abroad, and how so few Foreign Service workers spoke a foreign language; Kennedy claimed there wasn’t a single American diplomat in India who spoke a language other than English. To help overcome this deficiency, Kennedy said, “I therefore propose that our inadequate efforts in this area be supplemented by a peace corps of talented young men and women, willing and able to serve their country in this fashion for three years as an alternative or as a supplement to peacetime selective service, well-qualified through rigorous standards, well-trained in the languages, skills, and customs they will need to know.”
Nixon claimed that what Kennedy was really proposing was “a haven for draft dodgers,” but the idea had caught fire on college campuses across the country, with many students hoping to join the Peace Corps upon graduation in the spring of 1961. Having already received, within the first month of his administration, twenty-five thousand letters of inquiry from people wanting to join the Peace Corps, Kennedy directed his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver to get the program up and running with a small pilot project.
Shriver, who the Kennedy brothers teasingly called “the Boy Scout,” thought starting out small as an arm of the State Department would doom the project, so he disobeyed his presidential brother-in-law and began thinking of a project along the scope of the Marshall Plan. He and his fledgling staff spoke in terms of sending fifty thousand teachers to India alone. There was a problem, however; not a single nation had contacted the United States requesting that Peace Corps volunteers be sent to their country.
So Shriver traveled the globe, soliciting invitations for volunteers. He found little enthusiasm abroad. The president of Ghana said his nation could use some plumbers and electricians, and perhaps some teachers of math and science, but warned Shriver not to send any workers who might become “an instrument of subversion.” Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru finally reluctantly agreed to accept two dozen volunteers—legions short of the fifty thousand Shriver had once envisioned—but not because India needed the help. Rather, Nehru told Shriver, “I am sure young Americans would learn a good deal in this country and it could be an important experience for them.”
Nehru later repeated his observation that “privileged young Americans could learn a lot from Indian villagers,” a remark that Kennedy did not find amusing and which Nehru did not mean as a joke. Nehru had also offered a warning to Shriver and future Peace Corps volunteers, “I hope you and they will not be too disappointed if the Punjab, when they leave, is more or less the same as it was before they came.”
The Peace Corps remains in existence, of course, and the debate continues over how much good one of Kennedy’s most enduring legacies has done in the world. Some volunteers were disillusioned that they were often given only “make work” and were kept in compounds where they had little interaction with local residents, while others reported that it was a life-changing experience. Most Americans felt good about the Peace Corps—it was perhaps the most popular of all the New Frontier programs—yet for some volunteers its side effect was the rejection of American exceptionalism, one of the program’s founding principles. Nixon tried to abolish the Peace Corps, complaining that too many volunteers were participating in protests against the Vietnam War.
Many residents of nations served by the Peace Corps were grateful for things the Corps has left behind, such as portable water systems that serve fifty thousand Salvadorans or the beekeeping techniques that allowed Kenyan farmers to quadruple their annual income. But the Corps was always too small to make a significant impact anywhere. While more than two hundred thousand American men and women have served as Peace Corps volunteers, there have never been more than fifteen thousand in the field at any given time, and they were deployed across dozens of countries.
Ultimately, Nehru may have been right; the volunteers were the real beneficiaries. Among those who served in the Peace Corps, two became U.S. senators, two governors, nine congressmen, twenty ambassadors, and a dozen university presidents.
Despite its successes, there is an undeniable sense of regret around the Peace Corps that perhaps can be traced to Shriver, its guiding force. Shriver had a plaque on his desk that read, Bring me only bad news; good news weakens me. The expectations that attended the Peace Corps and Kennedy’s New Frontier were too high to have been reasonably met. As one observer said of American liberals in 1971, “Having failed to transform the human condition in a decade, they felt guilty and ashamed.” Even that reaction was peculiar to American exceptionalism, for as Nye noted, Americans “are no doubt the only people in the world who blame themselves for not having finally created the perfect society, and who submit themselves to persistent self-examination to determine why they have not.”
CHAPTER 15
CRISES AND CHARISMA
Charisma may seem an indefinable quality, but Max Weber, the German sociologist who secularized the term, did define it as a form of leadership characterized by an “extraordinary quality” that is thought to give the leader “a unique, magical power.” Unsurprisingly, the several attributes that Weber said typify charismatic leadership apply to Kennedy and Reagan.
Kennedy was the first president said to have charisma—because the word had not entered popular usage in the United States before he campaigned for president. Weber defined charisma in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (“Economy and Society”), his magnum opus published posthumously in 1922 but not translated into English until 1947. It was therefore still a new concept when intellectuals began using the term to describe their affinity for Kennedy during his 1960 presidential campaign. Journalists picked up and popularized the term.
Charisma comes from the Greek word “charism,” which in Christian doctrine is a “divine spiritual gift to individuals or groups for the good of the community.” Weber applied this religious word to political leadership, specifying that such leadership embodies an authority or power beyond that assigned to a specific office by law or tradition. Further, the charismatic leader derives his (or her) authority from “the demonstration of his power and from his disciples’ faith in that power.”
Like prophets or revivalists, charismatic leaders usually arrive “in times of trouble,” Weber said, and their leadership is associated with “a collective excitement through which masses of people respond to some extraordinary experience and by virtue of which they surrender themselves to a heroic leader.” The excitement and sense of anticipation created by the charismatic leader inspires people to turn away from the established order and think revolutionary thoughts. Old rules are jettisoned. A new order seems to arise.
But because the charismatic leader and the cause are one—“through his person a mission has become manifest,” said Weber—charismatic leadership is inherently transitory. The charismatic leader’s followers do their best to preserve the leader’s power, not only for themselves but also for their descendants. But it is a futile hope. Since the power of the charismatic leader is in the person, not the office—or even the cause—Weber said there can be no true successor to the charismatic leader.
Each of these things seemed to be true of Kennedy and Reagan.
Both men seemed undeniably gifted. They had challenges in their lives, but they also seemed to have a knack for success, much of it due to their own resolve to create a heroic sense of self. Kennedy was a best-selling writer at age twenty-three, a war hero, and a politician who never lost an election; his only defeat—his failure to win the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nomination in 1956—turned out to be an advantage to his career. He seemed charmed. So did Reagan. Here was a boy from a dysfunctional family in a small Illinois town who willed himself to become a renowned broadcaster and movie star, and was elected governor of California, the nation’s most populous state, in his first try for elected office. He, too, seemed blessed. On top of that, they were extremely handsome and charming.
Kennedy and Reagan each became president in times of trouble, but then every president does; this world is a troublesome place. What set them apart as charismatic leaders was their deliberate encouragement of what Weber called the “collective excitement.” They each seemed to thrive in a crisis, and if charismatic leadership required a crisis to reach its full flower, they seemed content to create one if one was not already readily available. They did so by using the terminology of crisis. What others might have labeled problems or routine challenges, Kennedy and Reagan chose to call crises—even existential crises. And their often-extravagant rhetoric around these crises ratcheted up the collective excitement even more.
By Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen’s count, Kennedy faced sixteen crises in his first eight months in office: Cuba, Berlin, Laos, the Freedom Riders, and a dozen more. This works out to the rather remarkable rate of a crisis every two weeks! Yet little in the world had actually changed since Eisenhower’s administration. As Eisenhower noted in his farewell address, America was “the strongest, the most influential, and most productive nation in the world,” and he encouraged Americans to resist the temptation to address challenges through “the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis.” Yet Kennedy seemed intent, with his talk of “missile gaps” and such, to create an atmosphere of crisis both as a candidate and upon assuming office.
Reagan, too, insisted he was taking office under dire conditions. Twice in his inaugural address, Reagan declared he had inherited an economy in “crisis” because of inflation, unemployment, government spending, and high taxes. He struck a tone of urgency. “We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow.” Yet the unemployment rate when Reagan took office was 7.1 percent—hardly the conditions of the Great Depression, when a quarter to a third of the nation’s workforce had been unemployed. Roosevelt, who did take office during the worst of the Great Depression, had reassured the nation that “there is nothing to fear but fear itself.”
But Kennedy and Reagan were agitators, not comforters, and this was especially apparent in their rhetoric.
In his first State of the Union address, Kennedy, referencing Lincoln at Gettysburg, said, “We shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed as ours can endure. The outcome is by no means certain.” Historian Richard Reeves characterized Kennedy’s remarks as “a wartime speech without a war.”
In June 1982, Reagan addressed the British Parliament in tones intended to evoke Churchill during the Blitz and called for a “crusade for freedom.” His remarks were so belligerent that British ambassador to the United States Peter Jay thought Reagan was “declaring non-military war on the Soviet Union,” adding, “If he does mean it, it is very frightening.” Reagan’s words added to the global anxiety over nuclear weapons that a few days later led some seven hundred thousand people to gather in New York City’s Central Park in the largest political demonstration in American history to call for an end to the arms race.
The following year Reagan again upset the apple cart in a speech before the National Association of Evangelicals in which he labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world.” The speech so unnerved the Soviets that they thought Reagan was contemplating launching a sneak attack against the USSR. Pundits criticized Reagan for his “primitive” remarks and for promoting “a holy war mentality.”
But no speech stirred the “collective excitement” quite like Kennedy’s inaugural address. The speech was justifiably praised in many quarters for its inspirational, even “revolutionary” tone, particularly the patriotic call, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” But others were dismayed by Kennedy’s dire warning to the American people that they must be prepared to “bear the burden of a long twilight struggle,” for they would be “defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.” And in perhaps the most controversial section of the speech, Kennedy declared, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”
Many found this portion of the speech “bellicose” and filled with “soaring hubris.” In hindsight, even Schlesinger agreed it was full of “extravagant rhetoric.” The tone of Kennedy’s inaugural address still rankled a half-century later. In 2011 New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that Kennedy’s inaugural address “did enormous damage to the country” because all subsequent presidents have felt the need to “live up to that grandiose image” of the president as “an elevated, heroic leader who issues clarion calls in the manner of Henry V at Agincourt.”
Kennedy and Reagan assumed the American people want their president to be a heroic leader. “They want to know what is needed—they want to be led by the commander in chief,” Kennedy said of the American public during his 1960 campaign. But, if Weber is to be believed, what Kennedy did not understand about the concept of charismatic leadership (which is not to suggest that Kennedy—or Reagan—ever consciously thought of himself as such or that either man even had much familiarity with the term) is that charismatic leadership can effect an “‘internal’ revolution of experience” in others, which leads them to “turn away from the established rules.” In other words, fiery rhetoric can stimulate unintended consequences.
The day after Kennedy’s inaugural, an inspired James Meredith requested the paperwork to enroll and become the first African-American student at the University of Mississippi, a decision that would lead to one of Kennedy’s future crises. Shortly after Meredith took action, James Farmer, the new leader of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) decided to organize what would become known as the “Freedom Riders” to challenge segregation in interstate travel, which, of course, was one of Kennedy’s earliest crises. Farmer said he had been motivated by Kennedy’s words “about change and freedom.”
Kennedy was disturbed by the new agitation of African Americans for civil rights. He thought it was distracting from more important issues around the Cold War. He asked James Martin, publisher of African-American newspapers and the deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, where blacks were getting these new ideas to dramatically confront segregation. “From you!” Martin replied. “You’re lifting the horizons of Negroes.”
The young, too, thought Kennedy was establishing a new order. A college student who became one of the first Peace Corps volunteers was asked why he was willing to give up two years of his life to serve in a foreign country and live in primitive conditions. “I’d never done anything political, patriotic, or unselfish because nobody ever asked me to. Kennedy asked.”
Kennedy and Reagan repeatedly demonstrated through their use of rhetoric that in leadership, as Richard Reeves noted, “words are usually more important than deeds.” Presidential scholar Richard Neustadt advised Kennedy, “Presidential power is the power to persuade,” and quoted Harry Truman’s lament, “I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them. . . . That’s all the power of the President amounts to.”
Since his Harvard days, Kennedy had been obsessed with the question of how to motivate citizens in a democracy to set aside self-interest and put their energies toward a common national purpose. In Why England Slept he wrote of his belief that occasionally a leader needed to “jolt the democracy.” He and Reagan both worried Americans were too complacent and sought new ways to grab their attention.
In April 1983, Reagan tried to drum up support for his policy of supporting anti-Communist insurgents in Latin America by insisting the struggle posed an immediate and present threat to the United States. “El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts,” Reagan said. “Nicaragua is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tucson as those cities are to Washington.” Fail to meet the Communist threat in Central America, Reagan warned, “and the safety of our homeland would be put in jeopardy.” The speech received a lukewarm response from Congress and the public, which could not imagine how a region with just twenty-five million people and an annual per capita income of $500 could pose much of a threat to the world’s greatest economic and military power.
Seemingly even less of a threat was the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada with its population of about 110,000. But after its prime minister was killed in a Marxist coup in October 1983, Reagan brushed aside objections from his Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that he was acting in too great a haste and agreed to send in a 1,900-man invasion force under the code name “Operation Urgent Fury.” The ostensible reason for the rushed invasion was to protect some six hundred American students studying at the island’s medical school, though the new government of Grenada, in the wake of the coup, had offered to evacuate any Americans who wished to leave.